Tuesday, April 22, 2025

Video: Walt Kelly's "We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us"

 


On Earth Day, which was first established on April 22, 1970, Walt Kelly drew this famous drawing, which became a print, above. 

 


He also made a short movie about the topic. Nancy Beiman, who met and became friends with Walt Kelly's wife, Selby, posted this on her Facebook page on April 22, 2021. Here's Nancy and then a link to the short film: 


"In 1970, for the first Earth Day, Walt Kelly released a 12 minute animated short film with his wife Selby Kelly called WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US. I saw it in our Environmental Science class in high school. Kelly's animation is stunning. He was one of the all time greats. Selby was art director and her son Scott Daley wrote the final music.
 
"In 1979 I started working for Zander's Animation Parlour in New York. I was 21 years old. One day our production manager told me that one of the assistants wanted to speak to me. I figured that they wanted to complain. No. The assistant was Selby Kelly, and she wanted to know who this young female animator was.
 
"We became friends. One day Selby said casually, 'Kelly and I made a film together. Would you like to see it?' (She always called him Kelly).
 
"Of course I would love to see the film again, I replied. I had a 16mm projector in my apartment and invited Selby for dinner and the screening. I saw something odd about the reel immediately. WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY was only 12 minutes long, yet this reel was a full 30 minutes (Before digital media we could measure the length of film by how much space it took up on a reel.) 
 
"I checked the first 30 feet for bad splices (another quaint custom.) 'There seem to be a lot of them,' I remarked.
 
"'Oh, this is the work picture. There are no copies,' Selby replied. My guts turned to ice. I checked the entire reel. I had to make one new splice.
 
Then I threaded up the projector and worried...but I had nothing to worry about. But I sure had something to look at.
 
"This was not the same film. Not at all. It was a Leica reel or story reel with filmed storyboards and Kelly reading the script, and a 'needle drop' track. (canned temp music) And it was twice as long because it had a horrific dream sequence and decidedly downbeat ending.
 
"Walt Kelly could not get anyone to produce this version. No TV studio in the USA, then or now, would have produced it. He got backing from a NGO for a 12 minute version, cut out the horror sequence and gave it an upbeat ending. The 12 minute version still exists, but not on YouTube.
In 1991 I was working for Warner Brothers New York. Selby was planning to move West and leave the city.
 
"I contacted producer Greg Ford and said 'We have to transfer this to tape before it disappears forever.'
 
"Greg did this and gave the Kelly family the Beta tape. 
 
"They released the film on VHS in 1992. Here it is.
 
"A word about the soundtrack: Kelly couldn't afford a session director. So the soundman in the booth never told him when to cut or do a retake. 'He read the script cold, and was getting madder and madder, because he wanted the man to tell him when he made a mistake,' Selby told me. (Kelly was a big bear of a man who took absolutely no crap from anyone and he obviously terrified the sound man). Kelly read the entire script in one take. He did indeed make mistakes, but kept on going. This is what a good animation story pitch man does. I was amazed by how effortlessly Kelly switches between character voices.
 
"And this is the only recorded example of a Golden Age Disney Studio Story man doing a pitch.
Watch it. The shorter film has some dialogue cuts that help it, and Kelly made some lovely layouts that 'plus' the visuals. But this film is the more powerful version. It pulls no punches.
 
"There is no happy ending."
 
 
EDIT: The YouTube version, which I previously posted, has been pulled, but here's a 13 minute version from Archive.org


 
 Link to the longer "Leica Version" here.


- This is an edited version of a blog entry from April 22, 2021.

Monday, April 21, 2025

Mark Zingarelli 1952 - 2025

 



Mark Zingarelli has passed away. No further information is available at this time.

His career spans over five decades, and includes work in indy comic books, graphic novels; as well as The New Yorker, Scholastic, Nintendo, AT&T and many other clients.

Born in Pennsylvania, he attended The Ivy School of Professional Art, then transferred to the University of Pittsburgh, majoring in art and film production. He moved from Pennsylvania to San Diego upon graduation in 1975. He soon became a full-time freelance illustrator. Five years later, he moved to Seattle where he created a comic strip review column "Eatin' Out with Eddie" for The Rocket newspaper. He began contributing to the Robert Crumb-edited Weirdo Magazine. Crumb introduced him to Harvey Pekar and Art Spiegelman. Zingarelli's art began appearing in American Splendor and The New Yorker. In the 1990s, Mark and his family moved back to Irwin, Pennsylvania, where he had grown up. 

 



From his David Wasting Paper interview in 2011:


"If you could give one piece of advice to someone who wants to pursue drawing as a career what would it be?
"Make sure you really, really love it and be prepared to never stop learning from the experience. A lifetime isn’t enough time to do all of it so enjoy the time you have and make the most of every second you are able to draw."


 


2015: Mark Zingarelli in his studio. Photo by Danielle Fox for the Pittsburgh Paper


Related:

House of Zing website

Lambiek profile 

Friday, April 18, 2025

The Garden As of Mid-April

 

 

Mid-April garden looks the same as it did two weeks back. Still asleep. The daffodils are coming up, buds on the trees, and Fergus, inside, “helping.”

 





 

Thursday, April 17, 2025

Paul Revere's Ride Comic Book Art by Alex Toth


 

This Friday, April the 18th, is the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere's ride.  

Here's some great Alex Toth art from Dell's Four Color #822 "Paul Revere's Ride" (1957). Toth was a master. There is always a lot to learn from Toth. Look at the angles and black spotting here and you'll see what I mean.

 






Thanks to the Alex Toth Archives for these scans. The rest of the story is all at that site. Go and look! 

 

Related:


Alex Toth Critiques Steve Rude's Pencils on Jonny Quest Comic Book Art
Alex Toth: Letters to Irwin Hasen

Wednesday, April 16, 2025

Metropolitan Museum of Art Book: "Help! A Record Book for Household Names, Notes and Numbers" Illustrations by W. Heath Robinson

 

Back in the pre-cell phone days, data had to be written down and this book, Help! A Record Book for Household Names, Notes and Numbers (1985) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was just the kind of handy reference to buy when it was published. I got it from a humane society thrift shop in Fryeburg, Maine this past weekend because of all the W. Heath Robinson drawings. It was also the one-year anniversary of us adopting our cat Cheddar from there. 


W. Heath Robinson (1972-1944) illustrated more than sixty books.

"During the 1930s he was dubbed 'the gadget king,' his name synonymous with fantastic machinery, elaborate gadgets, and ludicrous contraptions." -- from the introduction

He's been called the British Rube Goldberg. The work you see here is from a series of "how to" books: How To Be a Motorist, How to Be a Perfect Husband, etc. that were first published between 1936 and 1943.

















Tuesday, April 15, 2025

Monday, April 14, 2025

We Are All Equal Before the Law

One of the first news stories I read this morning was about Nicole Micheroni, a Boston lawyer, a citizen, who was told by the Department of Homeland Security to leave the country.

If she doesn't, "We will find you," the email threatened. Ms. Micheroni, an immigration lawyer, was born in the United States and is a citizen. The DHS has said it was a mistake.

And then I read Heather Cox Richardson's Letter From an American today. It's about the administration snatching people off the street and sending them to a for-profit prison without due process. The Supreme Court ruled that they cannot do that

Here's Heather Cox Richardson. I will be calling my reps today, like I did last week. On my day off, I will protest.

---

This evening, lawyers for the Department of Justice told a federal court that the administration does not believe it has a legal obligation to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the United States, despite a court order to do so.

The 29-year-old Abrego Garcia came to the U.S. about 2011 when he was 16 to escape threats from a gang that was terrorizing his family. He settled in Maryland with his older brother, a U.S. citizen, and lived there until in 2019 he was picked up by police as he waited at a Home Depot to be picked up for work as a day laborer. Police transferred him to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). After a hearing, an immigration judge rejected his claim for asylum but said he could not be sent back to El Salvador, finding it credible that the Barrio 18 gang had been “targeting him and threatening him with death because of his family’s pupusa business.”

Ever since, Abrego Garcia has checked in annually with ICE as directed. He lives with his wife and their three children, and has never been charged with any crime. The Department of Homeland Security issued him a work permit, and he joined a union, working full time as a sheet metal apprentice.

On March 12, ICE agents pulled his car over, told his wife to come pick up their disabled son, and incarcerated Abrego Garcia, pressing him to say he was a member of MS-13. On March 15 the government rendered Abrego Garcia to the infamous CECOT prison for terrorists in El Salvador, alleged to be the site of human rights abuses, torture, extrajudicial killings. The U.S. government is paying El Salvador $6 million a year to incarcerate the individuals it sends there.

On March 24, Abrego Garcia’s family sued the administration over his removal.

On March 31 the government admitted that its arrest and rendition of Abrego Garcia happened because of “administrative error” but said he couldn’t be brought back because, in El Salvador, he is outside the jurisdiction of the United States. It also accused him of being a member of the MS-13 gang and said that bringing him back to the U.S. would threaten the public.

On April 4, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. no later than 11:59 pm on April 7.

In her opinion, filed April 6, Judge Xinis wrote that “[a]lthough the legal basis for the mass removal of hundreds of individuals to El Salvador remains disturbingly unclear, Abrego Garcia’s case is categorically different—there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention, or removal.…. [H]is detention appears wholly lawless.” It is “a clear constitutional violation.” And yet administration officials “cling to the stunning proposition that they can forcibly remove any person—migrant and U.S. citizen alike—to prisons outside the United States, and then baldly assert they have no way to effectuate return because they are no longer the 'custodian,' and the Court thus lacks jurisdiction.”

The administration had already appealed her April 4 order to the Supreme Court, which handed down a 9–0 decision on Thursday, April 10, requiring the Trump administration “to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador,” but asking the district court to clarify what it meant by “effectuate,” that release, noting that it must give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”

The Supreme Court also ordered that “the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.” Judge Xinis ordered the government to file an update by 9:30 a.m. on April 11 explaining where Abrego Garcia is, what the government is doing to get him back, and what more it will do. She planned an in-person hearing at 1:00 p.m.

But the administration evidently does not intend to comply. On April 11, the lawyer representing the government, Drew Ensign, said he did not have information about where Abrego Garcia is and ignored her order to provide information about what the government was doing to bring him back. Saturday, it said Abrego Garcia is “alive and secure” in CECOT. Today, it said it had no new information about him, but said that Abrego Garcia is no longer eligible for the immigration judge’s order not to send him to El Salvador “because of his membership in MS-13 which is now a designated foreign terrorist organization.”

There is still no evidence that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13.

Today, administration lawyers used the Supreme Court’s warning that the court must give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs” to lay out a chilling argument. They ignored the Supreme Court’s agreement that the government must get Abrego Garcia out of El Salvador, as well as the court’s requirement that the administration explain what it’s doing to make that happen.

Instead, the lawyers argued that because Abrego Garcia is now outside the country, any attempt to get him back would intrude on the president’s power to conduct foreign affairs. Similarly, they argue that the president cannot be ordered to do anything but remove domestic obstacles from Abrego Garcia’s return. Because Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, is currently in the U.S. for a visit with Trump, they suggest they will not share any more updates about Abrego Garcia and the court should not ask for them because it would intrude on “sensitive” foreign policy issues.

Let’s be very clear about exactly what’s happening here: President Donald J. Trump is claiming the power to ignore the due process of the law guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, declare someone is a criminal, kidnap them, send them to prison in a third country, and then claim that there is no way to get that person back.

All people in the United States are entitled to due process, but Trump and his officers have tried to convince Americans that noncitizens are not. They have also pushed the idea that those they are offshoring are criminals, but a Bloomberg investigation showed that of the 238 men sent to CECOT in the first group, only five of them had been charged with or convicted of felony assault or gun violations. Three had been charged with misdemeanors like petty theft. Two were charged with human smuggling. In any case, in the U.S., criminals are entitled to due process.

Make no mistake: as Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson recently warned, if the administration can take noncitizens off the streets, render them to prison in another country, and then claim it is helpless to correct the error either because the person is out of reach of U.S. jurisdiction, it could do the same thing to citizens.

Trump has said he would “love” to do exactly that, and would even be “honored” to, and Bukele has been offering to hold U.S. citizens. Dasha Burns and Myah Ward of Politico reported Friday that former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince is pitching a plan to expand renditions to El Salvador to at least 100,000 criminal offenders from U.S. prisons and to avoid legal challenges by making part of CECOT American territory, then leasing it back to El Salvador to run.

When White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says, “The president's idea for American citizens to potentially be deported, these would be heinous violent criminals who have broken our nation's laws repeatedly," remember that just days ago, Trump suggested that a former government employee was guilty of treason for writing a book about his time in the first Trump administration that Trump claimed was “designed to sow chaos and distrust” in the government.

Here’s the thing: Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that some people have more rights than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality before the law with the idea that some people have no rights, you have granted your approval to the idea of an authoritarian government. At that point, all you can do is to hope that the dictator and his henchmen overlook you.

At least some people understand this. The president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, Sean McGarvey, received a standing ovation when he said to a room full of his fellow union workers: “We need to make our voices heard. We’re not red, we’re not blue. We’re the building trades, the backbone of America. You want to build a $5 billion data center? Want more six-figure careers with health care, retirement, and no college debt? You don’t call Elon Musk, you call us!... And yeah, that means all of us. All of us. Including our brother [International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers] apprentice Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who we demand to be returned to us and his family now! Bring him home!”

Notes:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.31.0.pdf

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.65.0.pdf

https://apnews.com/article/who-is-abrego-garcia-e1b2af6528f915a1f0ec60f9a1c73cdd

Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance
Late this afternoon, the Supreme Court issued a 9-0 response to the government’s application to vacate federal District Judge Paula Xinis’ order that the Trump administration return Kilmar Abrego Garcia from prison in El Salvador to the United States. Xinis had ordered him returned by the end of the day on Monday. The Supreme Court let him sit for an ad…
3 days ago · 3264 likes · 348 comments · Joyce Vance

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.64.0.pdf

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-records-show-about-migrants-sent-to-salvadoran-prison-60-minutes-transcript/

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-04-10/about-90-of-migrants-sent-to-el-salvador-lacked-u-s-criminal-record

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-09/about-90-of-migrants-sent-to-salvador-lacked-us-criminal-record

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/will-the-trump-administration-try-to-deport-u-s-citizens-trump-has-floated-the-idea/3890350/

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/addressing-risks-associated-with-an-egregious-leaker-and-disseminator-of-falsehoods/

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/el-salvador-prisons-warning-americans-trump-1235309721/

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/11/military-contractors-prison-plan-detained-immigrants-erik-prince-00287208

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-el-salvador-us-citizens-denaturalization-1235315975/

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/10/nx-s1-5358421/supreme-court-abrego-garcia-deportation-decision

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf

Youtube:

watch?v=K31tuX1JnE0

Bluesky:

rgoodlaw.bsky.social/post/3lmpyntbijk2v