The New York Times has a feature on Al Jaffee with a really nice interactive collection of MAD Fold-Ins.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Al Jaffee and his MAD Fold-Ins at The New York Times.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Great Garloo
Sorry for another Youtube post. This commercial is just amazing. With features that walk the fine line between cute and horrible, Garloo looks like something that might have inspired Charles Burns' work. Nice control unit too. A steering wheel and rocker switches. Pretty neat.
Seen on the Watchismo Times.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Lydia
If you are, I have an essay on Lydia Sigourney (the woman pictured above), in the current issue of "Children's Literature Association Quarterly." Here's a summary of the essay by the journal's editor:
If you are not interested in children's literature or nineteenth-century America, then you might want to stop reading.
--Ken Parille's "'What Our Boys Are Reading'" reveals the limitations of our received view of boys' reading as reinforcing "notions of male authority and privilege," in contrast to the disciplinary function of girls' reading. By examining Lydia Sigourney's writings about boyhood literacy alongside her biography of her son, Andrew, who died at the age of nineteen, Parille investigates Sigourney's critique of the "harmful norms" of "boyhood masculinity" perpetuated by the idea of "heroic imitation" in antebellum literary culture. Parille demonstrates that Sigourney's insistence that reading should cultivate boys' "domestic virtues" is echoed in later fiction for boys, such as Francis Forrester's Dick Duncan. Modern critics' tendency to divide nineteenth-century children's literature into "boys' books" (Twain) and "girls' books" (Alcott) obscures the complexity of both boys' reading and authors' attitudes toward the young. By questioning our reliance on "familiar classification of authors . . . by gender or perceived literary seriousness," Parille asks us to re-examine our "long-held beliefs" about boyhood. --This link to a PDF likely only works if you are on a computer at a university with a subscription:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/childrens_literature_association_quarterly/v033/33.1parille.pdf
Monday, March 17, 2008
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Peur(s) du Noir - [Fear(s) of the Dark]
I was lucky enough to see a premier of Peur(s) du Noir, a feature length film comprised of short B&W animated films by Blutch, Charles Burns, Marie Caillou, Pierre di Sciullo, Lorenzo Mattotti, and Richard McGuire while in Angouleme earlier this year (thanks Richard and Charles). All of the segments are based on fears of the night and the cartoonists worked very closely with production teams at all stages in Angouleme and Paris for the past few years. My French is pretty rough so I'm eager to see it again with subtitles and I'm envious of those of you in New York that have a chance to see it. It played at Sundance at the begining of the year and is being screened again tonight and tomorrow at a french film festival in New York. You can buy tickets here
Frank Wing
First printed in 1910, Yesterdays [Frank Wing: 1873-1956] collects cartoons originally published in the Minneapolis Journal. Wing was an influence on a young Charles Schulz, who later studied with Wing and then joined him on the faculty of the Art Instruction School; the elder cartoonist encouraged Schulz to submit his work (Li’l Folks) to the Saint Paul Pioneer Press.
In Yesterdays, each single-panel cartoon is printed on the right-hand page and is preceded by a short paragraph of commentary on the left, in which a friendly and knowing narrator often speaks in a tone of gentle condescension and ironic understatement about the characters and their lapses. He identifies himself as a part of the community that he satirizes (referring to "our town"), and speaks in a refined English peppered with colloquialisms, while most of the characters -- many of whom have pretensions to urbanity -- converse in a kind of rustic dialect. It’s a familiar class/language formula in the tradition of Southwestern humor, but it works well here. Wing has a real talent for drawing lanky yokels with distinct facial expressions in a visual style familiar from late 19th-century magazine and book illustration. And the writing, too, is great; each paragragh of narration or word balloon has words or phrases that I have never read before. I think that part of the reason I enjoy stuff like this so much is the sense of surprise and newness that, ironically, new comics don't often give me.
Wing has a very stylish signature: note the bird he placed on it above, which seems to be reacting to Artemisia's singing in the same way that the dog is.
Here's one that Charles Schulz and Charlie Brown likely would have identified with:
Friday, March 7, 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
