Joe Kubert Art Auction

From the NY Times:

Joe Kubert, a comic book artist since 1938, has little interest in the accumulated work of his last seven decades; his focus is on new projects, he said recently. But comic book fans who feel differently about this celebrated illustrator will have a chance to peruse and even own some of that older work this week, when 18 covers and interior pages, published from the 1940s to 1990, are put up for sale.

Mr. Kubert, 83, has turned over a large trove of his original work to Heritage Auctions in Dallas, which will hold the first of several auctions, live and online, on Friday.

Sideshow here.

Video: Ray Alma

My friend Ray Alma, a humorous illustrator whose work has appeared in Mad Magazine fame, talks to My Latino Voice about his cartooning career.

KING AROO by Jack Kent

Above: the cover of the new KING AROO collection from IDW.

KING AROO by Jack Kent is a gentle, well drawn strip which ran for 15 years beginning in 1950. And, well, it's not so well remembered.

As Don Markstein says in his Toonpedia entry:

Some comics, like Nancy and The Family Circus, enjoy widespread support among the general public but don't do much for the intellectual crowd. Others, like Barnaby and Krazy Kat, are adored by the intelligentsia but bomb in popularity polls. Jack Kent's King Aroo is one of the latter.

King Aroo was the monarch of Myopia, a pocket kingdom that doesn't seem to appear on most maps. His prime minister, grand vizier, chief advisor, or whatever, was named Yupyop. The two were about equally out of touch with reality and common sense, but Aroo's child-like unconcern for the duties and dignities of a king contrasted with Yupyop's more business-like attitude. Other frequently-seen characters included the mailman, Mr. Pennipost (a kangaroo with an a near-infinite capacity for producing things out of his pouch); and Professor Yorgle, an expert on everything. The strip specialized in an inspired surreality, reminiscent of George Carlson's Pie-face Prince of Pretzelburg but really not quite like anything else in the world.

IDW has a KING AROO collection coming out in January, 2010.

To whet your appetite, Ger Apeldoorn has many scans and information here.

Above: A 1956 Sunday strip.

James B. Sikking on Getting Paid for STAR TREK III

I've heard a lot of STAR TREK behind the scenes stories. One thing about the TREK movies is that they were shot on tight budgets. For instance, STAR TREK II reuses a Klingon control panel set from STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE as a transporter control. (From the McCoy/Kirk scene: "Where are we going?" "Where they went." "Suppose they went nowhere?" "Then this'll be your big chance to get away from it all.")

In STAR TREK VI there was a "Kirk rounds up the crew" beginning where Kirk finds each retired member of the crew, enlisting them in one last mission. It was written but scrapped as too expensive to shoot.

Here is a story I never heard before. It's a telephone conversation via YouTube with the seasoned actor James B. Sikking about his brief (It was shot in a day.) though memorable scene in STAR TREK III. As interviewer Roger Crow observes, not all actors get paid cash for their work.



The interview seems to end abruptly after about 2 minutes.

BBC America: A DOCTOR WHO December

BBC America has a Holiday present for us DOCTOR WHO fans.

Looks like all of the DOCTOR WHO specials, the final batch of the Tennant/Russell run, will appear on BBC America next month according to an advertisement I saw. The last 3 lines are:

3 Part Television Event
THE DOCTOR WHO SPECIALS
Coming in December

This would be a first: US audiences seeing DOCTOR WHO so close its UK premiere. I was able to pull up on YouTube all 3 of their commercials.

• First, a spot for all 3 of the specials;
  
  
• second: a "Waters of Mars" preview for its US premiere Saturday, December 19;
  
  
• third: Russell T. Davies, producer Julie Gardner and David Tennant on the appeal of the series.
  

This takes some of the sing out the fact that I have to wait a month to watch what Britons are seeing right now.

Video: Hilary Price

via Mike Peterson's Nellie Blog.

Pat Oliphant Recreates "The Most Controversial Cartoon I've Ever Done"

There's video of Pat Oliphant drawing onstage courtesy of the globe-trotting Tom Richmond's blog.

Video: Jules Feiffer at Dartmouth

The Kenneth and Harle Montomery Endowment at Dartmouth College presents Montgomery Fellow Jules Feiffer in a presentation dated July 15, 2009. This runs an hour and 18 minutes.

THE PRISONER Motion Comic

Above: Kirby's mothballed version, pencilled in 1976. Charles Hatfield has more about it here.

AMC has retooled the great 1960s Patrick McGoohan series THE PRISONER. The new program will begin its run of a half dozen episodes this Sunday night.

The AMC PRISONER site has all of the episodes of the old show online, ready to be perused all over again. The enigmatic show has a lot of fans and I can't see how something new would add to it.

Anyway, let's talk comics.


There is something called a PRISONER stop-motion comic that AMC has put up on its Web site. While I don't see any credits. I've been told that the art is by Mitch Breitweiser. It's good looking and interesting. Well, actually, I couldn't tell what was going on in the 11 panels they put up. I kept waiting for Number Six to appear and he didn't. Eleven panels isn't a whole lot for a story. It's not even a teaser, really. I missed being able to read it at my own pace. The downloading of the moving/twinkling/panning effects tended to be a bit poky. Your results may vary.

Rich Johnston, at Bleeding Cool, shows us the new comic and reminds us that there was an unpublished PRISONER comic by Jack Kirby.

Regardless, it's nice to see a comic done for this. I am seeing comics in conjunction with other media, like the TV series HEROES and a Turner Classic Movie project.

Bit hat tip to my pal Rod McKie for this.

Rob Rogers Retrospective Book

NO CARTOON LEFT BEHIND THE BEST OF ROB ROGERS is now available from Carnegie Mellon University Press (via Cornell University Press Services).

It's a big 25 year retrospective from Rob Rogers, editorial cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and has a foreword by Dave Barry.

Jeff Keane FAMILY CIRCUS Interview

ICV2.com interviews Jeff Keane about THE FAMILY CIRCUS newspaper panel, the future of newspapers, the new FAMILY CIRCUS hardcover book from IDW, and coming up with gags.

"My dad has a whole file of gags and things that he had saved from when we were growing up. I’ve got a whole file that I was doing when my kids were growing up. So I use those and you play off them, see how you can, maybe this character can be saying this or that. The main thing is to maintain the family feel. It’s not necessarily a ‘ha ha,’ joke. My dad always said it’s a tug at the heart or a lump in the throat. Sometimes that’s a more effective cartoon and that I think is the unique quality of Family Circus."

Jeff now draws THE FAMILY CIRCUS panel and he's in his second term as National Cartoonists Society President.

Video: Cartoonist Sandy Plunkett

Sandy Plunkett has drawn comic books (for Marvel, DC, Gold Key) as well as CDs, logos, posters, and other projects. Here is a 6 minute profile of him, in his own words, along copious video of his gorgeous sketchbook

Like Sandy, I remember being a youngster and being very influenced by comic strips and comic books. I liked drawing since I was little. And there was an absolute thrill in my heart when I was able to create a good drawing.

This is worth taking a look at even if you are not a comic book person.



Coming in 2010 from Ohio University Press: THE WORLD OF A WAYWARD COMIC BOOK ARTIST by S. Plunkett.

NEW Ray Billingsley Site

Above: a prescient gag cartoon by Ray Billingsley for Ebony Magazine.

Ray Billingsley has a new site, Ray Billingsley Art, which has all kinds of great cartoon art in it. Not only is there information on his long running CURTIS newspaper comic strip, but his bio -- titled Life on a Deadline -- detailing his work and how he got to where he is today -- is fascinating reading.

Rat became successful as a teenager by working hard, cartooning all of the time.

"Art jobs began to take up a lot of my time. In fact, most of it. It wasn’t uncommon for me to work on several projects at the same time, all highly different and commanding different styles. My mother says I used to draw “in the air”. Trying to have just a normal life, and do what my buddies did was becoming impossible. No one around was into art, as I was, and interested only in things that led to jail, or worse. Playing basketball, fathering children they had no intention on rising, and getting high was the rule. They thought I was weird because I was creative. I thought they were weird because they weren’t. Drawing had become second nature to me and was as easy as breathing. It was all I did. All I knew."

B.C. by Johnny Hart

Ger Apeldoorn shares some early B.C. comic strips by Johnny Hart. The Sunday strip from 1961 (detail above) is a particular joy. Just look at that toothy mean grin of hubris in the above second panel. Love it.

Much more B.C. at Ger's Fabuleous Fifties blog here.

Related: Comicrazys scans in the Johnny Hart section of Nick Meglin's MUMOROUS ILLUSTRATION book.

Military Cartoons

Some military cartoons from me, Mike Lynch.

Jamie Tanner's Business Plan

Above: The Night Watch by Rembrandt and The Squid by Jamie Tanner.

I was told this story about Rembrandt and his famous painting, The Night Watch, by a guide at Amsterdam's Rijkmuseum. I find no corroboration for this on the Web. It's a good example of raising money -- more and more money -- as one works on their art.

The story goes that when Rembrandt was commissioned to paint The Night Watch, he took his sweet time.

The Night Watch was commissioned by Captain Barining Cocq and 17 members of his civic guards .... Doubtless the guardsmen expected a group portrait in which each member would be clearly recognizable, although perhaps not of equal prominence; it was often the practice for less affluent or junior members of a group to be represented only by heads or partial figures, for which they paid less than did those who were portrayed full length.

- "The Legend and the Man," in The World of Rembrandt: 1606-1669 (Time-Life Library of Art), Walter Wallace, New York, 1968, pp. 107-111 via and © RembrandtPainting.net

One of the reasons Rembrandt took his sweet time was so that those guardsmen would have the opportunity to drop by and check in on the progress of the painting. The painting's composition was a new thing.

The group would not be shown in a standard, static row, but depicted in action. This was, at the time, a revolutionary idea. This meant that some figures would be more prominent than others.

So, as I was saying, the guardsmen would come around to the Rembrandt studio to see how things were going on the massive canvas (363 x 437 cm ~ 11ft 10in x 14ft 4in) -- and possibly sweeten their original payment of 100 guilders with even more guilders to encourage the painter to make them more prominent -- and maybe put in their favorite dog in the portrait.

The longer he waited, the more men and more guilders trickled in.

In the end, the painting swelled to 34 figures.

I was reminded of this story when I read about Jamie Tanner's business plan for his new graphic novel.

It's simple: you give Jamie money now, and he will promise you

• an autographed book,
  
  
• original art,
  
  
• or a cameo,
  
  
• or even a full speaking part in his new graphic novel.

Drawn called it an "unusual plan," but it sure reminded me of Rembrandt.

Mick Stevens: The Gods of Humor

Over at the Mick Stevens blog, meet The Gods of Humor.

Hat tip to Michael Maslin!

Pirate attack leaves phone system plundered

When you get the advice to change your password, you better do it. One guy in Chicago did not and he was billed $17,381.94:

"Some pirates hijack ships. The swashbucklers who attacked Mark Swimmer were more technologically savvy.

"In mid-August, someone hacked into the phone system at Swimmer's Prospect Heights computer design business and began charging calls to Somalia.

"Within days, the phone pirates had racked up hundreds of calls to the African nation, for an eye-popping total of $17,381.94."

The rest of the "What's Your Problem" article by Jon Yates for the Chicago Tribune is here.

Mark Swimmer bought a phone system for his office. After installation, he left the default passwords that the system came with (like "0000" and "1234") intact, instead of changing them. Hackers, then, were able to get into his system.

To take a small businessman for all or half of the money (depends on who you are talking to at all of the phone companies involved), is usury. Don't these companies, like AT&T, have insurance?

I was surprised to see in the comments section that a lot of people took the phone companies' side. So much for the customer being right.

This Weekend: The Center for Cartoon Studies Portfolio Review Day

It's this weekend, at their White River Junction, VT location.

Here's the press release:

PORTFOLIO DAY
AT CCS

AN EVENT FOR PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2009
10am-1pm

• Bring your sketchbook!
• Show your portfolio for an admissions review
• Learn more about the program and courses
• Meet faculty and students
• Tour the campus
• R.S.V.P. Space is limited!

Who Should Attend?
Prospective students, applicants, college students, high school seniors and graduates, family and friends welcome!

Location
The Center for Cartoon Studies
94 South Main Street
White River Junction, Vermont
Driving directions, transportation options, and local accommodations at cartoonstudies.org

Questions?
admissions@cartoonstudies.org
(802) 295-3319

Video: Saul Steinberg UPDATED

A selection of Saul Steinberg's drawings, paired with music via shivabel. All Saul Steinberg images © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

A selection of Saul Steinberg's drawings, paired with music via shivabel.



UPDATE: I received the email below from Sheila Schwartz, Executive Director of The Saul Steinberg Foundation:

Although The Saul Steinberg Foundation appreciates your interest in the artist’s work, please be advised that the Foundation holds the copyright to all Steinberg images and texts, and the works cannot appear without our permission and the copyright. We would appreciate it therefore if you would add to the sentence above the screen the following (in red)

A selection of Saul Steinberg's drawings, paired with music via shivabel. All Saul Steinberg images © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

One of the drawings in the film is not, to my knowledge, by Saul Steinberg and should be removed. I attach it here for your reference.

I'm glad to post this information, however I am not the creator of the video content. If shivabel is out there, please respond.