A daily almanac of events and people I admire and appreciate. All things, and the people who did things, that were WORTH DOING! Songs and Cartoons and near-insane ramblings by me, too.
Over the past weeks of doing my "Comic-Con Countdown" cartoons, I've had myself draw a lot of other people's characters and I've found that my take on them wasn't half bad.
Then I thought, why not do a mash up of a few and make a new interim-intermediary-interstitial-intermezzo...oh hell, make a new in-between cartoons-cartoon.
A carload of unlike characters on a trip down Route 66 came to mind.
Some wonderful loose, cartoony Wally Wood in today's "Mad Monday". The closing story of Mad THE COMIC BOOK #16 from October 1954 has Wally illustrating Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Wreck of the Hesperus!".
Wood sneaks in nods to his comic strip influences with Popeye and Maggie (from "Bringing Up Father"). And one cannot help wondering how much the sparse page toward the end are comic genius in action, or time-saving budget-crunching necessity. Probably one born of the other.
Happy Sunday, kiddoes! And more Sunday supplement 4 color treasures to feast over with your oatmenl.
To start off our 2 week exam of the Chicago Daily News from My 14, 1949, it's that front page perennial, Al Capp's "Li'l Abner". That Dogpatch gang must have sold a lot of newspapers in it's day.
More "Dotty Dripple" by Buford Tune bringing up page 2. As discussed in past posts, the "poor man's 'Blondie' from the poor man's Chic Young. Still with it's own charm though.
More Al Capp along with Raeburn Ban Buren with the soap opera strip that put other soap opera strips to shame, "Abbie and Slats".
And the gorgeous and informative "Mark Trail" by Ed Dodd finishes up this weeks 4 color collection.
This is another in a batch of Sunday pages I bought off of ebay a few years back. This one seems to be missing about half (or more) of the pages. It's still nice to finally have them scaned before they completely crumble though.
See ya next Sunday for the second half. Auto-loaded, as that will be my last "away day" and "travel day" from the San Diego Comic-Con...which I will for sure report on for y'all.
As a medium purist (I believe in a very real difference between comic BOOKS and comic STRIPS, animation produced for THEATRICAL release differs grandly from animation produced for TELEVISION release) there is a weird generational crossover that I can get behind.
You see kiddoes, in the early days of television, it was still believed it was far too expensive to produce cartoons for TV. They hadn't yet learned that all they need do is strip quality and costs and quality (I repeated myself there on purpose all you proofreaders out there) and so whatever cartoons were broadcast on television, were simply theatrical cartoons sold into he market.
Taking these, once thought to be "throw-away" films and giving them new life into perpetuity for whole new generations to enjoy.
You see, they didn't need hundreds of thousands of programming, kiddoes. This was back in the days before entire networks devoted to cartoons and kids/family programming. Cartoons were (for the most part) reserved for airing on Saturday mornings, not 24/7. They were something special and bright and colorful (even in black and white) and a time when the kid of the household was in charge of the living room.
I digress here, because nowadays the kids have control of the entire house no matter the time of day or night...back on track Jeffy.
My point is, Saturday morning should be for watching cartoons.
Good cartoons.
Cartoons that were once theatrically released, then housed on television and now we find right here on the Internet.
Give yourself over for a lousy 20 minutes. Forget about that mortgage. Forget about that fight with your wife/husband. Forget about the home-pregnancy test you found in your daughter/wife/mothers bathroom trash. Watch a few good cartoons. THEN take on the week refreshed and replenished like when we were younguns.
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