Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- It’s nice to know that there’s some playing at the top.
In designing an Underoos commercial for Phil Kimmelman and Associates, Alex Toth sent funny cards to Bill Peckmann, he responded with paintings of his own. Thanks to Bill, I have some of that material, and will post it here.

First this short note from Bill about what follows:

“. . . about 30 years ago PK&A was lucky enough to do a TV “Under-Roos” spot with Alex Toth (since I was and am a HUGH Toth fan, I probably badgered Phil and the Ad agency into using Alex to do the super hero character designs and LO’s of the spot) and with that, I also became the lucky recipient Alex’s many missives. These came in the form of letters and postcards, which were wonderfully illustrated with doodles and sketches. One doodle that he used quite a bit was his cigarette smoking, signature alter ego “Grumpy Duck” (see attached).

And with that, I did some riffs on his Duck character showing the history of aviation (we were both airplane buffs) and photography (we both appreciated good photos). These were done with xerox and cel paint. Happy to say, Alex seemed to get a kick out of these.”

An example of one of Alex Toth’s mailings to Bill.

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Here’s the series of ducks that Bill painted for Alex.

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

“Here are some setups that Alex Toth did for the ‘Underoos’ spot for us. Since Superman and Spiderman came from rival companies, very seldom or never did they appear together. You might have a Toth fan or two in your audience, mebbe we’ll make you one. At end of s’heros is a doodle, one of his many.”

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A sample of one of Alex Toth’s many doodles.

Finally, a thank you note (the original was in color) that Alex did for Rowland Wilson, they were big mutual fans. The two were friends:

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Enlarge to read the panel bottom center.

- Usually, I’m linking to articles I’ve found in the NYTimes. It’s strange to have the NY Times link to articles in my blog! That’s what happened yesterday when the Times Artsbeat column picked up my reprint of John Canemaker‘s Print magazine article about Finian’s Rainbow and wrote about it. Now that’s a kick for the day.

Speaking of something sorta grandish, I forgot to mention that my studio passed its 30th Anniversary on February 15th. No wonder some of the paint is peeling; we’re getting grander by the day. We’ve done a lot of films in that time, though I wish there were a lot more.

Tom Hachtman recently sent me a couple of brilliant drawings. You’ll remember that he and I were involved in trying to jump start an animated feature version of his comic strip Gertrude’s Follies. Either it was too daring for backers or I didn’t locate the right backers for an animated film about artists and their lesbian supporters.

At any rate, Tom had sent a drawing to the New Yorker (which has published some of his cartoons in the past) which ultimately rejected it. Their tough luck, my fortune.

Than there’s the image he sent a couple of weeks ago in the middle of the media’s scourge of Tiger Woods.

This was originally posted on NowWhatMedia.com where blog owner Martin Kozlowski colored the original B&W image after Tom made a couple of small alterations in cleaning up this drawing. It ended up looking like this:

I love the loose quality of the original picture, so I had to post it.

- As you may have read, Sylvan Chomet‘s The Illusionist has been racking up glorious film reviews since it’s recent premiere in Berlin at the Berlinale. The Hollywood Reporter, though, wasn’t so kind in its review yesterday.

“. . . theatrical exposure outside Europe might be scant. Chomet’s name alone assures some level of distribution on several platforms, but buyers might be wary this time.”

“Tati never committed this downhearted tale to film, choosing instead to end his career with light, satirical fun.”

It does say of the film, “The real beauty of ‘Illusionist’ lies in its drawings. Chomet is a traditionalist here, insisting on hand drawings where 3D computer animation is all the rage in the animation world. The story moves from Paris to London to Scotland, and its cityscapes and landscapes are gorgeous. A final swirling crane shot of Edinburgh, where the camera seems to fly up and over the city, is sheer magic.”

It sounds glorious and beautiful, and I can’t wait. The one animated film worth following.

- The recent comments on Michael Barrier‘s post about the Dumbo Roll-a-book prompted Milt Gray to tell of his creating a homemade version of the device, which is well described in Barrier’s article.

Of course, any kid of the ’50s knows this device well. I’d made them hundreds of times, and, in fact, found that by drawing the pictures I could make my own “films” for the homemade Roll-A-Book. Getting an opaque projector meant that these rolls of picture stories could be projected, and that’s just what we, my brothers and sisters, did daily. Every night one or more of us always had some kind of funny home-drawn cartoon story to project – one image at a time. And they went on for hours – large rolls of pictures.

When I went to work for the Hubleys, I became the Letterman guy. After working on a couple of seasons of Letterman animated cartoons, John got a gig to draw comic strips for The Electric Company Magazine. That meant I was doing the strips which were adapted from the shorts as they aired in the series.

I designed these strips as mini-movies advising kids to create home-theaters essentially Roll-A-Book devices. (See sample illustration above.)

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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- Here, courtesy of Bill Peckmann, and his great collection of work, are more of Rowland B. Wilson‘s great cartoons for various sources.
for TV Guide:

A cover and a spot ad.

A rough sketch for this spot ad.

A couple of ads he illustrated:

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Rowland did many ads for Equitable Life.

And of course more playboy cartoons:

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This is a multipage piece he did.

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Bill Peckmann sent these additional comments
after seeing these images on the site:

Here are some personal notes/sidebars if you’re interested:

#17, Rowland & Suzanne gave us the original as a wedding gift 10 years ago, of course it’s one of our prized possessions and I have tell to you that the printed version just does not do the original justice, too bad it’s so hard to get out of the frame otherwise I’d let you post it.

- Back in the innocent years, the joke was that one read Playboy for the articles, not the pictures. In my case (and I’m sure it was true for many others), that wasn’t much of a joke. I did thumb through Playboy and it was for the pictures – the pictures by Rowland B. Wilson, Gahan Wilson and a couple of other of the great cartoonists of that magazine.

Bill Peckmann has saved a number of Rowland Wilson’s cartoons, and I’m eager to post them. It’s my pleasure that Bill has a small archive of Rowland’s material. He was an enormous source of inspiration for me, and it’s my joy to see a lot of these again. It’s amazing how many I still remember after all these years.

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- Last week I posted the first part of this display of comic book covers (front and back) drawn by the inimitable Walt Kelly in his pre-Pogo days.

As he completed the series of Fairy Tale covers, he moved into Mother Goose and then The Brownies. There’s a charge I get looking at the brilliant draftsmanship on display here. The man could draw. We knew this from the quality of the art in Pogo, but these covers give us a different light in which to view this artist. It’s a great trip to waltz through the years 1942 – 1948 with Walt Kelly seeing the progression of his comic art.

As I mentioned last week, these covers were copied in the 1980′s by Bill Peckmann from the great collection of John Benson. Bill has loaned them to me, and I’m sharing.

Front cover__________________________ Back cover
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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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Mother Goose develops after the Fairy Tale comics.

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Mother Goose becomes a holiday item.

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An Easter version of Mother Goose

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The Brownies debuts

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- Like all would-be child animators of the 50/60′s, I was obsessed with cartoons and cartooning. Naturally, enough one of the great heroes for all of us, during this period, was Walt Kelly.

Here was an artist of sublime dimensions. He’d animated for the best of the Disney films and then moved onto his own comic strip, Pogo, for generations of us kid (and adults). Let me tell you, Pogo was the be-all and end-all of comic strips. I clipped a lot of these strips out of the newspaper and saved them, until I realized I could buy the bound volumes of Pogo comics. I got rid of the clipped-strips and started collecting those collections of his strips – organized by him into subject matter. There were lots of them, so I went back to find some of those on the market that I had missed. Then there was the collected hard-cover volume of the books – Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo. I bought that, too.

Funny, that they did a couple of animated programs adapting Pogo – a couple with the help of Kelly – but all these shows didn’t cut it. Not even the Chuck Jones show, The Pogo Special Birthday Special. It, naturally, was more Chuck Jones than Walt Kelly. It didn’t work.

Between animation and strip, Walt Kelly had had a foray drawing comic book art. These comics are rare today and pretty hard to find. One person who seems to have all of these is comic collector, John Benson. Years ago, he’d sent color copies of all the covers – front & backs – to Bill Peckmann. Bill sent me these copies, and I’m sharing them here. (Michael Barrier wrote about and posted one of these stories.) These comic pages date from June, 1942 onward.

If you’re a Walt Kelly fan, this should be a treat. Thanks, of course, to Bill Peckmann and John Benson for the viewing.

I repeat my thanks to John Henson and Bill Peckmann
for the chance to see these gems.

- I’ve been rereading Pogo lately. It’s always a good well to return to when you’re looking for a light. This is a small passage – a couple of pages of Walt Kelly strips dating back to 1955. This book, Deck Us All with Boston Charlie was published in 1963.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

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Font color=”blue”>_____________________

- Jeff Scher has the perfect Yule Log for you this Christmas. It was posted by the NYTimes and only takes a minute. More great work from Jeff and composer, Shay Lynch.

- Back to the book. Here’s the next chapter in Tanya Usvayskaya‘s wonderful book. She kept a drawn diary while working for Yuri Norshtein at his studio. This book compiles the drawings of the small family within the studio and Norshtein’s environs during that period.

A copy of this book was a gift from Richard O’connor, whose Asterisk Productions does wonderful animation of their own. What a treasure!

Note that the translation by the Japanese publisher isn’t always the best, but it does capture the gist of the original Russian. I’m transcribing the book without alterations.

The first three parts of the book can be found here:
Norshtein Comics – 1
Norshtein Comics – 2
Norshtein Comics – 3

This chapter, Norshtein and Tanya, is one of the shortest.

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“Norstein and Tanya”
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“Don’t Hesitate to use them.”
Norshtein, leaving to give lectures, gave us a
certain amount of money for the management of the studio.
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“Pirat, please buy one covered with chocolate.”
While someone is “living luxuriously” on overseas master classes,
Tanya and Pirat “economized” on every kopeck.
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“Now – you calculate quickly!
20 watermelon stones plus 3 bits? and . . .”
Because we bookkeepers failed to report to the master,
he recommended to us that we learn mathematics.
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“Have this hat for just a moment.”
Work in the animation film studio provides us all
with a variety of returns.
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“Ladies, please buy my flowers.”
As a result of squandering by Tanya and Pirat,
Yuri has become a flower seller on the street.
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“Please pay for potatoes, sour cream and sugar!”
Tanya screams in front of a mountain of food to pay.
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“Well, we all are ready to go to sleep.”
In the studio, taking of scene for “Good Night, Children!”
went all night. Tanya, Natasha and Pirat left this note.

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Here’s the video of the title scene mentioned in the last cartoon, “Good Night, Children!”. Thanks to Niffiwan for adding it to YouTube.

- Sunday, and here are more of Tom Hachtman‘s strip, The Renaissance Masters. It makes me sad to say that this is the last of four parts. The little green book has run out of pages. Perhaps Tom can be encouraged to draw up some more for us; after all, don’t artists owe their non-paying public anything!

Here’re the links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 if you want to read previously posted cartoons.

Enjoy:

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(Click any image to enlarge it and better enjoy the artwork.)

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The inner cover and back cover of the booklet.