It’s amazing that both Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four are major motion pictures in release at the same time, just as they were cartoons on TV at the same time 40 years ago. Stan Lee believed in the mainstream acceptance of this material, but it sure seemed unlikely it would ever materialize.
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer seems to be doing all right at the box office. I haven’t seen it yet, and there’s no need for you to rush out either, because you can watch the 1967 cartoon version of the story.
It’s funny how the movie title makes no mention of Galactus, and the cartoon title from 40 years ago makes no mention of the Silver Surfer. This was on TV only a year after the original Fantastic Four comic books were out, featuring these bizarre, but now classic, Jack Kirby characters. Hey, the Surfer is wearing BVD briefs!
The recording has a few seconds missing where the DVR jumped between time slots. The animation in this cartoon sure is minimal! Many of the still frames reveal some rather amateurish drawing, including the video preview frame above, but at least the show is colorful. Still, the quality is quite a comedown from the days of Jonny Quest, featured previously.
Just up the road from my town lives cartoonist Paul Ryan. His steady gig is drawing The Phantom comic strip. The Phantom is considered by many cartooning buffs to be the first super hero character. The Boston Globe had a feature article about Ryan this past Sunday. [Link] Ryan’s Web site is Second Star Graphics. [Link]
I see some striking parallels between Ryan’s childhood and my own, but our lives now are quite different, with Ryan living a life that I once coveted. What kept me from it is revealed in this paragraph.
A few years later, Ryan learned that a company in Connecticut was offering opportunities to amateur comic artists. By then, he was pushing 30 and had a low-paying job.
The company in Connecticut was undoubtedly the now-defunct Charlton Comics. At 30 I just didn’t have the stomach to live with such uncertainty. I’d already had my gigs in radio announcing and newspaper graphics, and both were low-paying jobs. I admire Ryan for having the talent and determination to make a living drawing pictures.
There’s a Web site called Movavi that provides free video format conversion. Sounds great, but I have no use for it, because the original file must be no more than 100 MB. That Popeye cartoon in my last post was converted to FLV from AVI. The original file is 1.5 GB. To convert to Flash Video I use Riva FLV Encoder. [Link]
