Quadrotriticale for Real

Quadrotriticale , as featured in "The Trouble With Tribbles" episode is a futuristic version of the grain triticale, which is now, in today's real world, getting attention according to this article by Simon Ostler.

"Richard Gibson, the head of bio-fibers at the Alberta Research Council says Triticale, a combination of wheat and rye together, has been sitting on the back burner for 40 years mainly used as cattle feed. 'But what we're looking for nowadays actually is renewable resources. Bioplastics, different kinds of green or organic type fibers or whatnot for materials. Triticale's fits the bill perfectly for that.'"

iNews880 has more here.

H/t to Trekmovie.

Related: an LOLCats version of the episode is here.

Realted: OH HAI! YOU HAZ KWESTION? What is/are LOLCats? It's all here.

Video: Alison Bechdel: Thinking Visually

Alison Bechdel talks about her working process on FUN HOME in this video from MiND TV:



She cuts no corners!

Rhodes International & STAR TREK

Video below: a CGI tour of the Enterprise. Just stunning. Alan Rhodes keeps going back and tweaking it. If you're a TOS fan, it's catnip, baby.

Star Trek Renewal - A Tour of the Enterprise



And here's a TOS style mash up of the latest STAR TREK movie trailer. Again, expertly and quickly done by Mr. Rhodes:

Star Trek 2009 trailer 3 - The Original Series version

Rube Goldberg Solution to Our Economy

David Friend, writing for Vanity Fair, introduces us to

" ... Reuben Goldberg IV, the newest member of the Obama economic team, reporting directly to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Goldberg—whose title is deputy undersecretary for fiscal clarity—is the great-grandson of Rube Goldberg, the inventor and illustrator whose whimsical mechanical contraptions, some dating back to World War I, have delighted and confounded Americans for almost a century."

More here.

Big hat tip to Sean Kelly.

Dateline: Silver Age

For your perusal: a blog with "headlines ripped from the pages of comics' great metropolitan newspapers" titled Dateline: Silver Age.

Big hat tip to Brian Moore!

John Stanley's WHAM-O COMICS Page

Here's a wonderful John Stanley one-pager from Wham-O Comics. Wham-O Comics was a GIANT book; an oversized comic book experiment of the 1960s, measuring 14" by 21."

Stanley's writing was always very heavy on ideas and grounded in the real world. They really read like small budget comedies. Here we have 3 characters, one interior set and one exterior set. Simple, and with some great cause & effect happenings. I laughed out loud at this 1967 stand-along comic book book filler page.

Thanks to Tom Devlin for sharing this. The whole page scan is over at the D&Q blog.

Big hat tip to Journalista!

Mike Lynch Cartoons: Out of the Comfort Zone

Above: a very fat & bulbous headed Tony Soprano is not happy to find The Daily News in place of his Star Ledger. if you know the show, you know he always walks out of his McMansion in NJ to get his Star Ledger in the first show of every season.

Here are a few from a series of unpublished sketches and cartoons I drew for the NY Daily News way back when they were looking for an editorial cartoonist. these are various tryouts. with me trying to stretch myself out of my cartoon comfort zone to become a caricaturist. There are many wonderful caricaturists out there and I am no mean competition, you betcha!





I liked doodling some of the people. Keeping it loose and messy seemed to assist in getting the looks right.


Film director Peter Jackson is really just a pile of hair with large-ish glasses. I like his wee smile.

Martha Stewart is less successful.



Above: 5 doodles of Mayor Bloomberg. I drew some cat's paws in there for no good reason. He's a difficult guy to pin down. I finally decided to go for an elf with a hyperactive thyroid look.


Above: the mayor, after insulting Mr. Atkins and his diet, then tried to reverse his position. Again, at the time, this was a big tabloid story.




Above: Bring me the heads of Sam Waksal. Some really good (I think) caricatures of Sam Waksal (not that anyone recalls what Sam Waksal looks like), a guy who is currently serving time in Otisville for income tax evasion. The trial (a big deal in NYC) was going on when I was developing these. He may be better known for dating Martha Stewart's daughter, Alexis.



Above: A wardrobe malfunction for then-campaigning John Kerry. The gag (best that I can recall) was that Justin Timberlake was his campaign manager. Kerry needed more media attention. Something like that.

So there you go, my friends, an interesting exercise. Now they all finally go in the shredder ....

Unmasked: The Ariella Dadon Story

Inbal Freund-Novick and Chari Pere create a 3 page cautionary true story of Ariella Dadon and her struggle to get a "get" from her abusive husband:

This past June, following a struggle spanning several years, 28 year old Ariella Dadon managed to receive a get (a Jewish divorce) from her violent, abusive husband. "Unmasked: The Ariella Dadon Story" is her poignant story.

Hat tip to Chari.

Dave Astor at HuffPo

Last year, I saw news stories ripped from Editor & Publisher's site and placed on The Daily Cartoonist site.

This year, it's reversed; stories are ripped from Daily Cartoonist's site and placed on The E&P site.

It's not the same. What's missing is the knowledgeable voice and insight of E&P's Dave Astor.

When Senior Editor Dave Astor was let go from E&P after 26 years, everyone was surprised. I'm not the only one who misses his commentary on the syndicated comics world. The guy knew EVERYONE in the syndication biz, and pretty much all the pro cartoonists know him.

I'm glad to see Dave is writing a column for The Huffington Post. This week's column isn't about syndication, but he offers up a great idea in his article titled Layoffs for Leaders.

Thanks to Dave for the heads up on this!

Steve Brodner: World Press Cartoon Week in Lisbon

Steve Brodner went to the beautiful city of Lisbon to help judge the World Press Cartoon Week. Go to Steve Brodner's Drawger blog. Many cartoons are there. I want to go next year just for the food!

Raina Telgemeier Interview

Cartoonist Raina Telgemeier is interviewed by Alex Dueben over at ComicBookResources.com.

They talks about her influences, her BABYSITTERS CLUB series of graphic novels, X-MEN, her new graphic novel SMILE and other things going on in her career.

"The first comics I read were in the newspaper. I was in third or fourth grade when I started reading them daily. Before that, I was big into animated cartoons and movies, and I read tons of illustrated books as a kid. Comics were a natural extension of those interests. I bought the bound collections of all my favorite strips as they came out, and read and re-read them, studying the language and the timing and the format. 'Calvin and Hobbes' is funny when you’re nine, but gets even better as you learn what all those words mean."

THE ORIGIN OF MAN by Kate Beaton

Here's Kate Beaton over at the MySpace Dark Horse Presents page giving us a 2 page tale of Mr. Darwin and his theory ... gone wrong. Dan Jackson did the coloring.

I like her work a lot and am seeing it around more and more.

Kate Beaton Web site.

Hat tip to Journalista!

Introducing The New York Times Graphic Books Best Seller Lists

George Gene Gustines gives us the first of what what will be a regular series of "graphic books" bookseller lists in the News York Times. Not graphic novels, these are graphic books, categorized into hardcover, softcover and manga categories. They break down into these categories:

• Indy comic book reprints (BEANWORLD)
  
  
• Superhero comic book reprints (WATCHMEN)
  
  
• Comic strip reprint books (THE COMPLETE TERRY AND THE PIRATES)
  
  
• Manga (NARUTO)
  
  
• There are no literary graphic novels on the list as of this week

This is a better-late-than-never idea for the Times. "Comics have finally joined the mainstream" may seem like a trite observation, but the list is welcome. It joins Publisher's Weekly's list, which has been ongoing since 2007.

Anthropomorphic Cartoons by Mike Lynch

Anthropomorphic cartoons, or to put it in simpler terms, cartoons where things that don't talk & behave like people actually talk and behave like people. Above: from Wall Street Journal.



I just noticed that these slugs do not sit in chairs. What a live. Slimy and chairless. And suicidal.


From a series of snowman cartoons.


One of my favorite cartoons. I don't think the kid is gonna make it.



I found out that it's really hard to draw anthropomorphic rock, paper and scissors. At least for me. Originally published in Reader's Digest.


I should have drawn even more destruction.


"Humminah" is a funny word. I should use it more often.




Above: I gave the original of this one to my realtor. It's hard to see in the scan, but it says "real Estate" on the briefcase.



Above: how cold the human heart can be. We never consider the plight of the dusty, plastic plant now, do we?




Above: I know a lot of people who have this lifestyle.

More cartoons for presentations and magazine and so on at my site heykidscomics.com!

Dave Perillo's Ten Doctor Whos

Starting the morning off with a great illustration.

I just love Dave's design for all the Doctor Whos through the decades.

Hat tip to Forbidden Planet.

Peter Arno

Harry Lee Green presents another grand sampling of that epitome of gag cartoonists, The New Yorker's Peter Arno.

Like Harry, I have that giant COMPLETE CARTOON OF THE NEW YORKER book/CD-ROM set and, also like Harry, I've never looked at the CD-ROMs. I had heard that they are not indexed properly, as he states. That seems to defy common sense.

Anyway, above is the seminal Arno cartoon, the one along with the man in the shower cartoon, that gets reprinted over and over.

I wrote about Arno before (Peter Arno's Favorite Part) but would like to add that his composition and gray-spotting is wonderful to look at. The whole story (above) is there: we are on an airfield; plane just crashed -- we know this because men in foreground are running toward it; the pilot is safe. What tips the scales from a "good" to a "great" cartoon is the drawing of the designer, who dominates the foreground. The problem, that Arno solves here, is this: How do you draw a character who looks like the scientist behind the plane's construction? Arno's drawn him as a bookish, skinny, bespectacled sort with a blueprint.

That's a lot to take in in the requisite 4-5 seconds it takes to look at a gag cartoon. And Arno does it so well that it looks easy.

"That Kind of Language" Cartoons

Some cartoons where people are not speaking down to you, drawn in some different mediums.

"On the downstairs freezer, you can view some of my earlier work."

A kid cartoon. I'm not so sure about this gag. Here's my back story:

I remember that half-way through a school year, the family fridge actually had layers of art project strata on it by me and my sister. We had no downstairs freezer where art could migrate to, sadly. Some friends down the street did have a freezer in their basement. It was the same basement where we had Cub Scout meetings and I saw thei art, dusty and curling, on that freezer, for years. Even today, to have a cartoon of mine clipped and put on a fridge is the ultimate. Published in First for Women magazine. Drawn in a breezy style with a micron.

"Not now. Daddy's got this whole burden of desire thing going on"

Part of a series of cartoons I did about urban families.

I wanted to show that "Daddy" was a bit of a poser, so I drew him with a ponytail, jams & flip-flops. I have no idea what he's up to at that double-screened computer, but, hey, the Internets is an amazing place here in 2009 and you don't get these years to surf back. Orginally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Conte crayon & wash.

"You're confusing my arch tone with my wry tone."

A sour married couple, reading their Sunday Times. I showed this to Bob Mankoff at The New Yorker. He said, and I agree, that "arch" and "wry" are about the same thing. The cartoon was "pulled," but then returned (not bought). Charcoal on typing paper. I should have drawn this on Arch paper, huh? Note characterful items like a knitting thingy, a display case for some fancy plates and the French style chair against the wall.

"He's quite a man of letters -- lower case ones."

More kids talking like older people. The phrase "a man of letters" isn't used very much and so would be a dubious way to impress a schoolmate. Ink, crayon & wash. The letters on the blackboard are a Photoshop effect.

"I've got to hang up. It's la sacre du printemps time."

Above: one of my favorite cartoons I drew for BBC Music Magazine. Obviously, this thing falls flat if you don't know what la sacre du printemps means. If you feel it's a burden not to know, try the Internet. You're soaking in it now. Ink & wash on paper.

"I had an unexpressed thought yesterday."

The kid speaking has the only bit of black-spotting in the drawing, which focuses the viewer's eyes. I drew this just before the first Hellboy movie came out, hence the poster. My Brooklyn neighborhood was changing and it was suddenly full of precocious children who gave, loudly and clearly, an earful of opinions and observations as they went in and out of the shops with Mummy. The cartoon was one of those that "just happened." Originally published in Barron's. Pen on paper.

"It's the Liebermans. Quick -- are they air kissers or full contact?"

And is there going to be back slapping and pinching of cheeks? More social concerns from the big city, where everyone walks everywhere and you never know who you'll bump into. Orginally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Ink and wash on paper.

"Harold, have you ever heard the term 'Jump the Shark?'"

If he does not know, Harold will always remember this educational moment. And publicans will make a tidy sum on his thinking/drinking it over. Ink on paper. Another very simple, liney drawing with some black-spotting in the hair for a focal point.

"I printed my aphorisms on wallet cards."

A legend in his own mind. Based on a fellow I know who looked like this at the time. Soft charcoal on paper.

"Stop demonizing my french fries."

My first of two "Stop ..." cartoons, where we can imagine what the woman has said to the man. Conte crayon & wash on paper.

"Stop ending every sentence with 'as is my wont.'"

The above cartoon sold quickly to a UK magazine. I think these people live in the same building as the "wry tone" people do. Pen on paper; coloring in PhotoShop.

As always, more cartoon at my Web site.

Jerry Robinson Interview

The Palisadean-Post's Michael Aushenker interviews comic book legend Jerry Robinson:

PP: You were 18 when you drew 'Batman' # 1 and introduced The Joker.

ROBINSON: I also drew the first Penguin. I worked in tandem with Bob and Bill. Bob was 24, Bill, 25, the best writer of the time. Bill was crucial in the creation of the Riddler, Cat Woman, Penguin. We all lived in the Bronx. We ate, slept and dreamt Batman 24 hours a day. I was supposed to go to Columbia University's journalism school. While taking classes, I volunteered to write one of the stories for 'Batman' # 1. I thought, fiendishly, that I would get paid for a story and also get credit in my creative writing class. Well, I knew from my studies that all great heroes had great antagonists. We had some reservations. Some thought it might overpower the villain. I felt differently. The stronger the villain, the stronger the hero. Don't forget, we didn't have the word 'supervillain' at the time.

The whole thing is here.

Thanks to Journalista! for the link.

Newspaper Death March

"As cartoonists feel their own effects of newspaper cuts, the frequent dire news and trends as posted on [the Poynter Institute's popular online Romenesko column] can make for compelling reading -- or in some cases, compelling rubbernecking, especially if your newspaper or client newspaper is doing the cutting."

- more at Michael Cavna's Comic Riffs blog

Hat tip to Journalista!

Snow Snow Snow

March roars in like a lion with a lotta snow. I'm out doing the same thing I did last week: clearing the snow. Blogging to commence soon.

Urban Cartoons

Some mean cartoons about mean city people.


Above: this is the epitome: a selfish, me-oriented couple, casually -- maybe even cruelly -- just not that into traditional family values (unless the New York Times and New York Magazine say otherwise).

A good gag cartoon does its job in a few seconds. And sometimes a good gag cartoon can leave you scratching your head. If you don't get it, that's OK. If you do get it, then you recognize these people.


Above: one of my urban couple cartoons. This one was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I wanted to show a couple coming on to each other in, well, in a higher education sorta way. I like the fact that the guy's in his socks here and the sleeping cat is oblivious.


The subways in NYC have it all: musical groups perform, people begging for change, and there are religious people passing out pamphlets. There was a group at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station that would only target black people, never Hispanics, Asians or whites. Well, that's discrimination! And how arrogant to presume people need a new religion.




Being happy is not a New York thing to be. This drawn a while ago, during my conte crayon and wash phase, as is the "new God" cartoon above.



I drew this up the same week that New York Magazine had an article about people spending lots of money to have fancy kitchens in their apartments, yet never used them.

More cartoons at my site heykidscomics.com.