Category: Cartooning

Blankety Blanc

A 20-minute podcast about Mel Blanc’s recovery from a coma, following his near-fatal auto accident.

A one-hour documentary about Blanc I haven’t watched yet. Glancing through it I see Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Stan Freberg, and Terry Gilliam, so it’s definitely worth watching.

Blanc was known to stretch a yarn or two about himself by more than a yard. Mark Evanier is the go-to guy for the most balanced take on the most versatile voice actor who ever worked in classic cartoons and old-time radio.

https://www.newsfromme.com/?s=mel+blanc

And here are eleven-and-a-half hours of old radio shows, featuring Blanc. This’ll fill up the day!

Swimming in India Ink

The new Black Panther movie brings Sub-Mariner to the MCU screen. He apparently now has some sort of an Aztec connection. Or maybe it’s Mayan. Whatever it is, he’s nothing like the character created by Bill Everett in 1939.

Sub-Mariner #57, on sale 50 years ago, October 1972, with art by Bill Everett

By 1972 Everett had stopped drinking, and he was helping other alcoholics through his work with AA. His art was better than ever, but then tragically he died only a few months after issue #57 was published. There is some more information at this link:

https://www.cbr.com/marvel-namor-bill-everett-final-days/

A glaring oversight is there’s no mention that Everett illustrated Daredevil #1. Although he had trouble meeting the deadline, Everett’s art is as fine as anything he ever drew. He was a master of inking with a brush, as was my dear old friend Joe Sinnott.

Toth’s Angel and Ghost

My first exposure to “comic book art” wasn’t in comics, but from the syndicated Space Angel cartoon series on TV.

Alex Toth (pronounced with “toe”) was the artist behind Space Angel. Toth hired Doug Wildey to help produce the series, and Wildey in turn hired Toth to help him with Hanna-Barbera’s Jonny Quest. After Quest, Toth designed H-B’s less ambitious animated series, Space Ghost.

I loved this stuff when I was a kid, and I still love it. Space Angel had a 6-page promotion in the children’s magazine Jack and Jill.

I borrowed those scans from a Facebook post by author Ken Quattro, who wrote Invisible Men, a history of Black comic book creators.

https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Men-Artists-Golden-Comics/dp/1684055865