Virgil (VIP) Partch: How an Animated Film Is Made

From Animation Magazine's Spring 1988 issue, here's "How an Animated Film Is Made" by Jerome K. Muller and with drawings by Virgil (VIP) Partch. Hat tip to Antonio Marques for this!

Winter Is Coming

 

It got below freezing here in New Hampshire and, according to the live Mt. Katahdin cam, it's even colder up there. Mt. Washington already has had its first snowfall, and the other day, plows were out on the Kancamagus Highway that traverses the White Mountains. I live in the foothills. No snow here yet but am I glad I brought in a couple of outdoor plants into the house last night. Phew!

The Garden As of Mid-October

Between the fall colors and the aurora Thursday night, it’s been a beautiful week. Technically, the only pic of the garden is this first one below, where you can see the zinnias and the trees. Everything that was planted this year - the tomatoes, cucumbers, basil - everything is gone now. Temperatures are in the upper 30s the last couple of nights. The zinnias will hang on until the first hard freeze.

 

 

Remembering Kay's Bookstore in Cleveland, Ohio

 

It's a rainy day and on a rainy day it sure is nice read a book while you're feeling snug and warm and it's all wet and cold outside. Here's the exterior of Kay's Books, a Cleveland landmark bookstore for many years -- now gone. I remember taking the old Rapid Transit train from the East Side, getting off at the last stop, Terminal Tower, walking along Euclid Avenue, past the May Co. and Higbee's and entering the Colonial Arcade. Inside the Arcade, after a stop into to Tony Isabella's Cosmic Comics, I would walk out of the other side, on shady Superior Avenue, cross the street and into Kay's. Kay's had floors of books and magazines. So much to look at and ponder about. I still have some books I bought there as a teenager, in particular some Harlan Ellison paperbacks and some early Winsor McCay collections. This mammoth bookstore has, by now, been gone for a while. It still exists in my memory as a place to browse and discover. There is nothing better than a leisurely bookstore browse session on a rainy day.

Restoring the Silent Film Version of Sherlock Holmes

 

The BFI National Archive’s major new project – the restoration of a series of films starring Eille Norwood, Conan-Doyle’s favourite screen Sherlock – will be presented with a live score at Alexandra Palace as part of the BFI London Film Festival. -- BFI 

 

New to me and over 100 years after the fact: there is a series of silent movies (45 two reelers and two features) that adapt Sherlock Holmes stories. Conan Doyle himself was approached for the rights by a British film company in the early 1920s. 

From the BFI YouTube page:

"How is the BFI National Archive bringing Conan Doyle's favourite screen Sherlock back to cinemas? The BFI's Curator of Silent Film, Bryony Dixon, dusts of the casebook and reveals all in our latest 'Inside the Archive' video."

 

Small Press Expo 2024: Single Panel Gag Cartoon Panel

From the SPX YouTube Channel, here's video of a panel of gag cartoonists talking about what they do.

The surreal world of single-panel gags is one that’s easy to enjoy and difficult to conceive on one’s own. Moderator Sofia Warren leads a panel of fellow New Yorker cartoonists consisting of Lonnie Millsap, Sara Lautman, Amy Kurzweill, and Hilary Campbell on the art and science of perfecting an art form with a deep and venerated sense of history and tradition. 

Panelists: Lonnie Millsap, Sara Lautman, Amy Kurzweill, Hilary Campbell 

Special Guests: Lonnie Millsap and Sara Lautman

 

 

Michael de Adder Let Go by Postmedia

 Via Daily Cartoonist:

"Earlier today Michael de Adder let us know via X/Twitter that the remnants of Atlantic Canada’s Saltwire network would no longer be using his editorial cartoons:

"'I just got let go from the Halifax Chronicle Herald after almost 30 years.'

"Michael explains that he isn’t sure his last cartoon for them will be published:

"'I sent this in and got the call. My last cartoon [below], I think, in the Chronicle Herald. It’s not published yet.'

">update edit: the cartoon was published<

"This has all happened just days after the Association of Canadian Cartoonists’ convention. Was it timed so?

"The Halifax Chronicle-Herald was part of the Saltwire Network. Saltwire applied for bankruptcy protection earlier this year and then major parts of the group was bought by Postmedia a month ago. Postmedia is Canada’s largest newspaper publisher but is majority owned by the U.S. hedge fund Chatham Asset Management. Chatham is also the majority owner of US-based McClatchy newspapers which last year fired their three staff editorial cartoonists and has given up on political cartoons on their papers’ opinion pages.

"Michael de Adder, who less than two months ago won a Silver Reuben for Editorial Cartoons from the National Cartoonists Society and has won Canada”s National Newspaper Award multiple times, began 2024 by losing his freelance gig with The Washington Post and is ending 2024 by being left out of The Chronicle-Herald.

"As far as we know Michael still has the occasional Toronto Star and Hill Times sales, but The Post and The Chronicle were his major sources of income. Michael’s Deep State Substack is an alternative revenue stream.

"The status of Saltwire’s staff editorial cartoonist Bruce MacKinnon is unknown at this time.

"This is a developing story."

 

GREETINGS, DEARIE! Paul Coker, Jr. and Greeting Cards

Here's an odd 1962 paperback titled GREETINGS, DEARIE! (A CONNOISSEUR'S COLLECTION OF HUMOR FROM HALLMARK CONTEMPORARY CARDS). It's a paperback collection Hallmark cards, produced and edited by Hallmark, and copyright that same year by Hallmark.

The juxtaposition of the red cover and black ink makes it look crummy so far as my Canon scanner is concerned. In real life, the cover is very readable. The drawing in the upper right is of a nebbishy fellow in a top hat in a bubble bath perusing what looks like a greeting card. The column of text reads:

"This being an [sic] truly timeless eternal utterly unforgettable (yes) collection of more that 100 and fifty of the absolutely funniest Hallmark Contemporary Cards, many of which have never been seen before (or since)" 

and, then, in small print in the bottom, right-hand corner is the word "Yes!"

Dean Norman, in his book STUDIO CARDS: FUNNY GREETING CARDS AND PEOPLE WHO CREATED THEM, is the only reference book I know of about this subject.

Me? All I knew about Hallmark's Contemporary Card line is that Paul Coker, Jr. was the Art Director. Mr. Norman's book concurs.

Above: a card by Paul Coker, Jr. 

I knew Coker's work from MAD Magazine, and I was always fascinated by his distinctive clean yet jerky coffee-nerves pen line.

Greeting cards that were funny was a new idea back then. Before these post-war funny cards, Hallmark's all-time best selling card was this:

"Pansies always stand for thoughts
At least that's what folks say,
So this just comes to show my thoughts
Are there with you today" 

Uh ... yeah. Squaresville, daddio.

Here's a snippet from a 2006 interview with Dean Norman by Pamela Zoslov from the Cleveland Free Times (and that's also where I snagged the pansies poem above):

"I never dreamed of doing greeting cards," says Norman, now 70 and retired from a 30-year career working for the two greeting-card giants, Hallmark and American Greetings. By the time he graduated from the University of Iowa in 1956, general-interest magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, Look and Collier's were folding, and the once-lucrative market for freelance cartoons was drying up. Fortunately, executives at Hallmark spotted a cartoon series Norman drew for his college newspaper, and offered him a job. "I kept thinking someday I'd break into newspapers. I never did," he says, laughing. 

Norman came into the industry at an interesting time. Greeting cards, once limited to sentiments like "Pansies always stand for thoughts/At least that's what folks say,/So this just comes to show my thoughts/Are there with you today" (one of Hallmark's all-time best-sellers) were beginning to reflect the subversive Cold War humor of the 1950s. Comedians like Mort Sahl, Bob Newhart, Ernie Kovacs and Lenny Bruce, and publications like Mad Magazine, were lampooning the uptight post-Sputnik culture with irreverent, sardonic humor. Hallmark, the very traditional Kansas City company that practically invented the greeting card, created its Studio department to tap into the emerging zeitgeist. They hired creative, offbeat artists and writers to produce funny cards with a modern twist.

These silly, raucous cards may have reflected a bit of the non-mainstream, pointed humor of Mort Sahl or Lenny Bruce, but the fact is that they were being offered to the great Wonderbread heartland of America. And the heartland voted with its wallet.

Here's Mr. Norman from the introduction to his STUDIO CARDS book:

There were few funny greeting cards before 1946. OK, if you were born after 1946, that's ancient history. But, consider this -- in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, there were lots of funny radio shows, funny movies, funny books and funny cartoons in magazines and newspapers. So why was there so little good cartooning in greeting cards? 

A drawing by Mr. Coker, again, with another reminder of the time is how funny drinking was! Would these would sell today?!

Coker and Norman were both Midwestern boys. Maybe they knew, somewhere deep down, that middle class America was grown up and ready for antisocial, hostile and shocking humor in its greeting cards.

From the GREETINGS, DEARIE! introduction:

Sentimentality is absent in these cards and in this humor. But sentiment is always present. Strong feelings about certain things -- including the right way to express one's feelings in greeting cards -- have made this style of humor almost as popular in some quarters as the funnies and cartoons are in others. 

The introduction to GREETINGS, DEARIE! is credited to "The Editors of Hallmark Cards." Unfortunately, the editors do not give page by page credits to the writer(s) and artists(s) of the contents.

Above: another by Paul Coker, Jr. I love that pile of beer cans, all at different angles.

Coker graduated from the University of Kansas in 1951. He drew advertising cartoons for the paper, but never drew cartoons or comic strips for them. He didn't believe in doing free work. Advertisers paid, the student paper did not.

Above: Coker again, with a groaner. But I like this groaner. And it's funny if you never heard it.

I like the little puff of a zoom cloud below right as the patron zips away from the barstool, and the teary expression and waving of the dainty dish rag from the bartender just makes this one a terrific, characterful drawing!

There are a lot of cards reproduced in GREETINGS, DEARIE! and this is a small sample from one section that dealt with drinking as a funny topic, as if you didn't know by this point in the blog entry.

There's so much material in the book, and so much information that I didn't know, that I think I'll revisit the topic in future. I never considered the history of greeting cards.

Mr. Norman's book, without which I would have no context for these scans, is self-published. From the Amazon page:

Unable to find a publisher willing to even look at his manuscript, Norman decided to go the self-publishing route, investing his own money to have the book printed. "I figured even if I didn't sell any books, I can afford it; I'm retired now. I may lose [money], but no one else is going to write this book. And the people I write about are so pleased to have the stories told."

And there is a book titled COLLEGE CARTOONS that has more great self published cartoons by Dean Norman, Frank Interlandi and Richard A. Watson -- BUT that book seems to have disappeared from its publisher's site.

-- Edited from a blog entry dated July 8, 2008.

Superman (1978) Opening Titles

The original Superman movie (1978) was the most expensive film ever made to that point in time and had a five minute-long main title sequence. Five minutes is a long time. At least it is now.

I mean who has the time? Heck, some TV series don’t even have a title sequence and music, they're so afraid people will switch away. The most popular movie ever just shows you the title, a short crawl, and then on to spaceships and explosions. No more titles is the way things are going. No more, “It’s a story about a man named Brady….”

Like Fred Allen says to the audience as the titles in his picture “It’s In the Bag" roll, — “Who ARE these people? Who CARES?!”

The Superman movie, when it was released, was a big deal. But would today's audiences really stay in their seats for THIS?

It's the five minute opening title sequence. FIVE MINUTES. Sure, sure, it won a Clio Award just for the Robert Greenberg-designed slitscan motion control process.

Give it a whirl. Click the play button and force yourself to watch every name on there. Sure, these laser titles were a cool thing back then and were specially developed for the feature, but FIVE FRIKKIN' MINUTES of John Williams music telling you "this is exciting" while looking at name after name. "No, John, this isn't exciting. Get to the damn plot already." Try to force yourself to be in the 1978 mall multiplex movie theatre and watch. Pretend you are captive to them. It's a long time. And I bet today's moviegoers would walk out.

But to me it's still pretty and pretty exciting.