Adam Norwood: Tumblr

joshreads:

Several years ago, in one of the most fanboy-awesome moments of my life, Alison Bechdel commissioned Tony Millionaire to draw my portrait. Now it’s made it into his book! The original still sits at the corner of my desk, always watching (and judging).

Holy smokes, the Comics Curmudgeon himself rendered by Tony Millionaire! (PS: my list of books that I need to buy this holiday season keeps getting longer)

Life is a circus, Zippy! It can be a circus of pain or a circus of delight!

As the Bil Keane RIP notices started flooding across the net yesterday, my friend Julien reminded me of the bizarre phenomenon of Zippy the Pinhead making a crossover appearance in Family Circus back in 1994 (go look at it, it’s weird!). It wasn’t a single-panel affair: that out-of-context Family Circus strip was a followup to a week in which Bil Keane literally drew his characters into the surreal world of Zippy as a sort of exchange project. From a speech by Zippy artist Bill Griffith:

Here’s an example of something that kind of blew my mind, and a number of readers. I did a number of comic strips in 1994 in which the idea was that Zippy and Griffy were going to, at least Zippy, enter, literally, the world of The Family Circus, a single panel comic. Into the strip a few days I thought, “What the hell, I’ll call Bill Keene. I’ll get his phone number, and I’ll see if he wants to literally jam this strip with me.” I figured the chances were zero, but why not? I called him up; he was incredibly friendly. He lives in Phoenix, where Zippy is published in the local paper. Loves the strip; reads it every day. Y’know, at the end of the phone call I thought, “He’s my blood brother. We’re like the two surreal comic strip artists.”

Behind the sticky-sweet facade of everyone’s favorite round newspaper comic, it’s good to know there was an artist of subversive humor and warmth for his fellow cartoonists, appreciative of both parody and collaboration.

Dave Fleischer of Fleischer Studios demos the distorted-architecture-on-a-turntable that his studio pioneered for creating compelling 3D backgrounds in their animated shorts. You can see it in motion in a number of their Popeye cartoons (like Popeye Meets Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves) or in their originals like Mr. Bug Goes to Town (PS: check out that awesome title card typography!)

If you happen to be in L.A. this week, you can catch some classic Fleischer shorts in pristine 35mm prints as part of Jerry Beck’s animation series at the Cinefamily. Do it!

(Via Cartoon Brew)

Actually, he does. Donald Duck accidentally (and somewhat accurately) described the chemical compound methylene nearly two decades before real-world scientists:

In 1963, the Disney Studio learned just how wide and faithful a readership [Carl] Barks had. A letter arrived from Joseph B. Lambert of the California Institute of Technology, pointing out a curious reference in “The Spin States of Carbenes,” a technical article soon to be published by P.P. Gaspar and G.S. Hammond (in Carbene Chemistry, edited by Wolfgang Kirmse, New York: Academic Press, 1964). “Despite the recent extensive interest in methylene chemistry,” read the article’s last paragraph, “much additional study is required…. Among experiments which have not, to our knowledge, been carried out as yet is one of a most intriguing nature suggested in the literature of no less than 19 years ago (91).” Footnote 91, in turn, directed readers to issue 44 of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. … A year later, the Studio received a letter from Richard Greenwald, a scientist at Harvard. “Recent developments in chemistry have focused much attention to species of this sort,” Greenwald commented. “Without getting technical let me say that carbenes can be made but not isolated; i.e. they cannot be put into a jar and kept on a shell. They can, however, be made to react with other substances. Donald was using carbene in just such a manner, many years before ‘real chemists’ thought to do so.”

(Via Cracked’s 5 Amazing Things Invented by Donald Duck [Seriously])

jimforce:

this looks freaky. but i want them to come to my birthday party

WOW. Is that Devo’s Booji Boy over there? Oh, wait, no, it’s just a nightmarishly supersized Bobby Hill.

(via superhappy)

Legendary Disney animator Ward Kimball also drew on the side for antique-auto-enthusiast magazine the Horseless Carriage Gazette (and he contributed a lot over nearly 30 years: his name comes up frequently if you search for him in this index of the magazine). He also worked on custom ads for Mobil that ran in the Gazette, like the nice tattooed guy above, or this fun one with the Mobil Pegasus.

According to an interview cited by Cartoon Brew, an angry Walt Disney made Kimball stop contributing to the magazine, even though it was on his own time and for gratis. Thankfully these scans are cropping up on the Ward Kimball Facebook page, along with lots of other great stuff!

Awesome thing that I didn’t realize I had on my bookshelf: the Tom Lehrer sheet music songbook I’ve had since I was a kid was illustrated by cartoonist Ronald Searle. I must have been unfamiliar with Searle the last time I looked through this book — his scratchy style complements Lehrer’s acerbic wit nicely.

The whole book, “Too Many Songs By Tom Lehrer with not enough drawings by Ronald Searle”, is available for perusal on Scribd, in case you’re the sort that enjoys songs about masochism, the periodic table, bull fighting, nuclear annihilation, and Ivy League snobbery…

(Source: adamnorwood.com)

Via letterheady, a blog archiving lots of incredible vintage letterhead, many of which are from the desks of cartoon and film folks.

Jay Ward, 1962 | Source

Letterhead used by the late-Jay Ward, creator of Rocky & Bullwinkle. 

(Via Cartoon Brew)

Awesome full sets of sprites and backgrounds ripped from Konami’s 1991 Simpsons arcade game are available over at The Spriters Resource. I could have bought one of those machines with all of the quarters I lost playing it at the bowling alley or pizza parlor or wherever else grubby kids hung out in 1990s suburbia.

I’ve trimmed down Marge’s action sprites here because I’m fascinated by one detail that I’m pretty sure is otherwise depicted nowhere else in the rest of Simpsons canon: Marge’s Life in Hell rabbit ears hidden inside her hair!

(Via The Spriters Resource: Simpsons. I owe someone source attribution, but I can’t remember where I saw this link recently…help!)

More things I did not know: on the right is Jack Mercer, the famed voice of Popeye from 1935–1984, and on the left is Margie Hines, who voiced Olive Oyl from 1938–1943. The two were married in 1939. How romantical!

(Via Cartoon Brew)