How many of these opening night attendees can you name? There I am! No, wait. That’s Ron Howard. Never mind.
Category: Cartooning
The New Words & Pictures Museum
Kevin Eastman’s defunct Words & Pictures Museum in Northamption, MA, was funded with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles money. Now, George Lucas has his vastly more ambitious Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, funded with Star Wars money.
Great stuff, but I think it should be noted that the market for comic book original art became greatly inflated with the entry of movie star money. There were stories of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg bidding against each other through proxies. While it can be said that people are now paying what formerly throwaway art is worth, far fewer fans can afford it.
Dancing Fools
I continue to watch my way through the replacement Popeye DVD set. Morning, Noon and Night Club features superb character animation by Willard Bowsky and George Germanetti. The cartoon is from 1937, when there was a strike at the Fleischer studio.
Something I hope that Mark Evanier will be able to provide in his upcoming, greatly expanded, biography of Jack Kirby, is a fuller understanding of Kirby’s time working at Fleischer. Kirby worked as an inbetweener, most likely between 1935-37. Did he leave before the strike? Because of the strike? These are the questions I hope Mark will be able to answer.
Late Night Agents of SHIELD
Stephen Colbert, no longer a late night show host, has bequeathed his Captain America shield to Jimmy Kimmel. But don’t believe the claim that the artifact was first on display at the Marvel Comics offices in 1960. For one thing, in 1960 Marvel wasn’t Marvel, it was Atlas Comics.*
NCS@80
A video history of, and introduction to, the National Cartoonists Society.
Two of a Kind From ’35
This is something I meant to do years — and years! — ago. Early in 1935, Walt Disney Studios released a Mickey Mouse cartoon, his first in color, called ‘The Band Concert.’
At the end of 1935, the Fleischer Brothers Studio released Popeye’s (much funnier) cartoon “answer” to Mickey, ‘The Spinach Overture’.
I’m making the comparison while QC-ing the replacement Popeye DVD set. There has been some cost-cutting, with DVD+R discs and basic packaging, but it plays without messing up, unlike the now-rotting 2007 box set.