Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

March 1947 (Walt Kelly?) cover with “Barks” on the box.

- Imagine you’re a kid and while reading your comic book you hit on a page offering some freebees that you have to mail away for.

Back cover

(Click any image to enlarge.)

So you mail for your subscription to get the goodies, and eventually the envelope shows up at your door.

You slowly and excitedly remove the contents. Your great and brilliant gifts unfold:

And here’s a post script from Joakim Gunnarsson:

Bill, what a nice set of subscription posters ya got!
Have seen some of them before but not all I think.
You are right about Kelly doing some of these, but I’m not 100% sure wich he did and which Dan Noonan did.
I’d say the ones with Dopey are Kelly for sure!

The original art to the one where they are playing instruments has survived, BTW.

Joakim.

Here are more Dick Moores comic strips. These are, again, from the collection of Bll Peckcmann. Bill sent notes along with them; the comments with the strips are by him. Many great pieces.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Inside front cover gag. Lower left panel is all
Dick Moores, neat silhouette, wrap around tail on word balloon.

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Title page. Everything we loved about Gasoline Alley is already here.
Great spotting of blacks, wonderful feel for the weather and
he always moves the story along with well designed panels.

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Page 3 of story. Here we can see his love for entering hidden rooms,
basements, barns etc. Another nice touch, the diagrammatic silhouette.

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Page 4. Nice intro of the little robot character.

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First 3 pages of 2nd story in the book.
Dick Moores’ ease of story telling comes through, a portent of
things to come 20 years later with Gasoline Alley.

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I wonder if he wrote his own stories like Barks?

Two Cinderella Sunday strips.

Here’s a MM original that I think (could easily be wrong) was done by DM.
The time/year fits with the time he was doing Disney stuff, there’s also a nice silhouette in it
and that loose chicken scratching, cross hatching that I love. Whoever did it, it’s beautiful,
what neat brush and pen lines, not one dab of correction whiteout used on it.

- Probably my favorite comic strip artist, when I was a kid, was Dick Moores. He was the guy who’d taken over Gasoline Alley from Frank King in 1959. I didn’t know much about the man, but I cut out and saved almost every strip he did. I thought the guy drew comics like an artist – not a cartoonist.

Bill Peckmann recently wrote to me about his collection of Moores’ work – which included four original strips of Gasoline Alley as well as scans of some of his Disney comic work. I was a bit surprised to find out that he’d done so many Disney strips – including ones I enjoyed when I was younger, such as “Scamp”.

Bill Peckmann, in writing me, had a lot to say about Moores’ artwork: “Moores’ panel compositions are some of the best ever done in comic strips, they’re so good that when you make a page of dailies, that also turns into a beautiful design. I don’t think anyone can spot blacks better than the way DM did them. He probably got that from assisting Chester Gould.”

Here’s a first post of some of Dick Moores’ Gasoline Alley strips. We’ll follow soon with some of the Disney strips.

- John Canemaker has a new article about Milt Gross for his monthly piece at Print Magazine‘s website. Essentially, it’s a loving piece reviewing the new collection of The Complete Milt Gross which was edited by Craig Yoe.

I’ve long loved Milt Gross’ work and have closely studied the MGM shorts he did. They don’t quite capture the zaniness of the comic strip work, but he was obviously an inspiration for so much of the animation that was done in Hollywood back then.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if some people found inspiration in his work today and applied it to their animation artwork. Something other than the endlessly angular characters that we’re force-fed these days!

- Speaking of John Canemaker, he’s just loaned me a Ward Kimball scene from Peter and the Wolf. It’s about 500 drawings long, and will take me forever, but I’m going to start posting it next week. The walk cycle of all walk cycles. Something to look forward to (endless scanning and downloading), a great piece of animation to study.

The image above is a good sample.

Mars: SXSW will be playing tonight at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Cinemafest in NYC at 9:30 PM. There will be one show only. Filmmaker, Geoff Marslett will be there along with several cast and crew!

The film is a completely rotoscoped space adventure done by the guy who gave us Monkey vs. Robot and Bubblecraft.

For a trailer go here.

- I’m not familiar with the work of Russell Brockbank, a British cartoonist, but Bill Peckmann sent me this note, along with six pages of his cartoons. I thought I’d share:

Here are 6 pages of “Punch” cartoonist Russell Brockbank. Fortunately he also showed up in our “Road & Track” magazine from which these pages are taken.

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(Clicka any page to enlarge.)

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- Last week I posted Alex Toth‘s Jesse Marsh piece from the magazine Panels. Bill Peckmann who was the Associate Editor of the mag, answered my request and sent the article I noticed about Carl Barks. In fact, he sent me additional Barks material he’s saved.

These include a the following letter Carl Barks had sent him as well as a couple of images.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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Here’s the article from Panels, an interview between Ed Summers and Carl Barks.

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As ever, many thanks to Bill Peckmann.

Here’s a recap of a post I did back in November 2006.

- Back in the late ’70s, there was a local newspaper that competed with the Village Voice for the alternative audience. The Soho News was smaller and thinner, but had its own treasures. Some good writing and listings, and many excellent alternative comic strips. (Bill Plympton had a weekly strip in this paper before he started animating.)

I fell in love with one comic strip called Gertrude’s Follies to the point where I waited each week for the new issue and the new strip to hit to market. It was about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and all the crazies that came into their lives – particularly Picasso, Hemingway and other iconic art types. It didn’t matter that Matisse and Capote didn’t meet; they were both available for the strip – as was everyone else.

Finally, after enjoying it for so long, I decided to locate the cartoonist behind it, and see whether he was interested in developing a storyboard and script for a feature. Maybe we could get some low-budget financing.

Tom Hachtman was the cartoonist, and he was a brilliant artist. His wife, Joey Epstein, was another fine artist. The two entered my life at this point, and some interesting things developed.

Gertrude’s Follies was an ongoing project. Tom worked with Maxine Fisher, who has been my writing partner through all the years of my studio. The two of them developed a couple of themes from the mass of strips that had been done and started to weave a storyboard. Tom left 4 or 5 panels of each 6 panel page empty, and I constructed and reconstructed story around them. Sometimes I would draw more material, sometimes I would take some away. It was real fun.

The Soho News folded, and no one really picked up the strip. It ran for a short time in The Advocate. Tom was able to publish a collected book (see the cover above.) You can still locate a rare copy on line.

Some newer, color copies of the strip can be found on line here.
Tom also does some political cartoons for the site here.

The movie never went into production. I couldn’t raise the funds – my inexperience. We did make one short segment – a two minute piece that was the most hilarious strip. Sheldon Cohen, an animator I met at the Ottawa 76 festival, came to NY when I offered him a job on Raggedy Ann. Sheldon, ultimately, did a number of films for the National Film Board which you can watch on-line if you click on his name.

Sheldon animated this particularly funny strip. It took a while for him to animate it, and by the time he was finished, the feature had died and I had lost some interest. Years later I inked and painted it and had it shot. The short piece was never finished, though I still think about doing that.

Tom also recently gave me a funny strip about Pablo Picasso sculpture for which I’ve finished a storyboard and animatic. Hopefully, I’ll get the energy to animate it.

Aside from Gertrude, both Tom & Joey worked on a number of my films and still infrequently do. The two have painted many murals on the Jersey Coast, where they currently live. Tom has been a political cartoonist for the NY Daily News, has done lots of airbrush work for Bob Blechman when the Ink Tank was in operation. He also has done quite a few cartoons for The New Yorker magazine.

Here are a few of the strips to give you the flavor. Perhaps next week I’ll give a sample of our storyboard, comparing it with some of the actual strips. Enjoy.

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(Click on any image to enlarge so that you can read the strips.)

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- For a whilie Bill Peckmann was the Associate Editor, with John Benson editing, of a magazine called PANELS. Needless to say this was dedicated to comic strip and animation art. Here from Vol 2 of the magazine is an article by Alex Toth on Jesse Marsh.

This was the cover of that second issue.

This is the contents page.
(I’d love to see the Carl Barks article.)

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This cover is inset int0 #8 in B&W.
This is it in color from Bill’s collection.

The back cover of the issue.

Needless to say, many thanks to Bill Peckmann for this piece.

- This just in from Bill Peckmann, an excellent piece from the great cartoonist, Jack Davis. In Bill’s words:

This . . . “is a page from Hank Harrison’s ‘the Art Of Jack Davis’ which explains Jack’s strip, and the next three are tear sheets that Jack had made up at that time. Hope the scan isn’t destroying Jack’s fine pen line.”

(Click any image to enlarge to a readable size.)

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- When I was young I read the Carl Barks’ Donald Duck comics and the Uncle Scrooge comics and anything else the man turned out. I was religious about it and had to combat a parent who didn’t understand the importance of comic books in a young person’s life. To which end, I was on the receiving end of many a punishment when a rare Donald Duck or somesuch other comic would be found.

Oddly enough, this didn’t transfer to my adulthood where I find myself not at all interested in the oil paintings Barks did of Donald and the gang. Bill Peckmann sent me a few of these paintings, and immediately upon seeing them again, I turned my nose away but knew, just the same, that I’d be posting them. There are too many people that love these things.

So for you, the folk who love Carl Barks’ lame attempt at “art”, I surrender this post. I thank Bill Peckmann and hope you enjoy the four following paintings.

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(Click any image you’d like to enlarge.)

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