Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

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- Mike Lynch has a great post about Bobby London‘s short stint writing and drawing the Popeye comic strip. There was a controversy in the last weeks of Londond’s tenure in doing the strip. Mike Lynch posts these strips and makes you long to see more of London’s work. There is a collection of his strips, Mondo Popeye, from St. Martin’s Press; it’s out of print and a bit pricey on the market.

Take a look at Mike Lynch‘s post.

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- Tonight Ralph Bakshi will be at the Anthology Film Archives where two of his features will be screened. Heavy Traffic, which made it to many of the year’s top ten lists will show at 7pm and Coonskin,
which you can’t even find on NetFlix, will follow at 9pm.

Bakshi will be there to sign copies of his book, Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi.

7:00pm – Heavy Traffic
9:00pm – Coonskin

Tickets are $8, good for one or both features

Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. (corner of 2nd Ave.& 2nd St.)
NYC

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Here’s the NYTimes review from Heavy Traffic‘s opening. ________________________

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Here are some frame grabs from the “Hey, Maybelline” segment of Heavy Traffic by Mark Kausler. Sorry the quality stinks, but the dvd is a dreadful transfer.

Two excellent videos are posted on Willym Rome‘s site, Willy or Wont He. They’re film pieces by Emanuele Luzzati and Giulio Gianini. Both films are difficult to find available.

The Cat Duet is a work adapted from an operatic piece that uses much of Rossini’s music even though it’s not considered an opera by the composer. The background of the opera is hazy, but the animated film is a beauty.

Brancaleone alle Crociate (Brancaleone at the Crusades) is a title sequence for the film by Mario Monicelli. It stars Vittorio Gassman and is reminiscent of other pieces by Luzzati and Gianini. I’ve made some frame grabs and am posting them below to give a small taste of the work. Go to the site, and view both videos.

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See other posts I’ve done on Luzzati and Gianini. They’re all very musical, beautifully designed and cleverly animated films.

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- Craig Yoe posted a wonderful original Mutt & Jeff comic strip on the Arflovers Blog. The strip features cartoonist, Bud Fisher, trying to draw a politically correct strip in 1919. Take a look; it’s hilarious.

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- Speaking of politically correct strips, there’s a good post about blacks in the current comic strips at The Root. It’s enlightening to read about this stuff in the 21st Century when we’re considering a black man as President. (Go Obama!) Race still matters to some people, unfortunately..

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- And speaking about Obama if you haven’t watched the Will I Am song Yes We Can sung to Obama’s New Hampshire speech take the time to look at it. Over a billion people have watched it already. The last half is good. here
You should see it if only to appreciate the anti McCain parody
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- For something a little less controversial, check out the new post on the ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive. It’s a beautiful book illustrated by Gustaf Tenggren. Tenggren, of course, had a big hand in the design of Pinocchio. He was also the creator of The Poky Little Puppy._________________________

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- Yesterday, John Dilworth showed me the cover of the latest copy of ASIFA International’s magazine, Cartoons. He came across the magazine before I’d received my copy. I was surprised to see my work featured so prominently. That was a treat, I can assure you.

Thanks to the editors, Chris Robinson and John Libbey for the fine choice of cover and to Ray Kosarin for writing it in the first place.

It was even more interesting that Dilworth was the one who animated that cover scene from my film, Abel’s Island.

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- I had thought I’d comment on the Will Finn / Michael Barrier fracas, but it’s pointless. I think there’s been a bit of misunderstanding on Will’s part. His original thought about Chuck Jones’ later years is spot on, and I think Mike said as much. I do understand that Mike had to respond to Will’s nasty volley, and I thought his response was finely measured. It seems moot for me to comment on it further. However, the original thought about aging animators is something that interests me. Several of my key influences, here in New York, are older artists, and it’s interesting to watch how aging affects them all differently.

I would have liked to have seen how John Hubley would have changed as he got older. I’m sure his interests would have been more about the story than the drawings. That’s where he was going at the time. Faith Hubley’s solo films got richer as she got older.
Their two brilliant key animators, Tissa David and Ed Smith are still going strong. Their output is probably less than in the past, but they’ve had less to work on. Having worked closely with both in the last year, I have to say that both are just as strong.

Finally, I think of myself and how it’s affecting me as I grow older. I’m a little lazier as far as animating goes, but just as excited by the medium (or my version of it) as I was 20 years ago. Story and design have grown even more so in importance, while the world’s view of animation has gotten slicker. We’ll see what a few more years brings.

- To continue this theme, I’d like to post something I’d put up back in November of 2006. James Stevenson did a brilliant cartoon about a comic strip artist who was losing it. The piece appeared in his book, Something Marvelous Is About To Happen. It’s a great take on comic strip cartoonists and the relationship they have to their strips.
Here it is, The Last Days of Tootie and Fred.

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I have this comic book page from Paul Terry’s Comics – pg 27. I thought I’d post it since I don’t know who drew the page and thought someone out there might have a good idea. I love Gandy Goose, so it’s enough that he’s featured in the strip. That was reason enough to purchase it a couple of years ago.

The magazine was probably published in 1952-3. Jim Tyer was drawing a lot of the strips at the time, though I’m not sure this is his artwork. The eyes look too normal despite the distortion in some of the bodies.

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- I recently posted a number of comic strips panels and story threads from The Gumps by Sidney Smith. This was an example of one of the great story strips that reigned in the 1920-30′s. It was certainly not the only example of these.

Gasoline Alley has always been one of my favorite strips. I fell in love with it when I was a kid just about the time that Dick Moores took over the strip from Frank King. Probably as a result of this, I have been more a fan of Moores’ work than I have been of King’s. There’s something about his open drawings that really sing to me.

Moores had been a long time assistant to King prior to taking over the strip, so he knew it well. Only recently, thanks to the work of Bill Blackbeard and Chris Ware have we been able to really appreciate this strip. It’s being published in chronological order via Drawn & Quarterly Books.

Walt found Skeezix, a baby, on his doorstep on Feb. 14th, 1921. For an unmarried garage mechanic to raise a child in the 20′s there were obvious problems to face. The strip faces these problems as we watch Skeezix grow up over the years and Walt grow older. Life goes on in this strip, and it’s wonderful.
Here are a few strips from the 1921 and 1922.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Within the first year you can already see the attachment between Walt and Skeezix, and you can see that Skeezix is growing up in front of your eyes. It’s just great.

A while back I posted a piece about the illustrated novel by Frank King “Nina and Skeezix.” It was published in 1941, 20 years after Skeezix was born. You can read that post here.

- It’s election day. Lots of local issues and representatives have their fates in your hands. How more appropriate than to post my continued appreciation of The Gumps. Here are more of the collected strips.

This is the start of a story about Andy Gump running for Congress. The writing in the strip starts to catch fire, and the characters have really developed their personalities.

(Click any of the strips to enlarge them.)_

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This comes from an excellent book that was edited in 1974 by Herb Gallewitz and
published by Scribners called Sidney Smith’s The Gumps.
It’s still available and worth the price.

– The Heartland Film Festival opens tomorrow in Indianapolis. I have a real connection to this Festival and Jeff Sparks, the Festival Director. I’ve won their Crystal Heart Award four times in the past, and I’ve won the audience choice award once. I’ve been a judge at the Festival twice. They’re a great group of people, and they consistently put together a great program of excellent films.

Starting Saturday, my new short Pabs’ First Burger will premiere, playing once at 3PM and again at 9PM. It will screen a half dozen times total. It’s on a bill with the documentary Note By Note.

I just wish I could be there to introduce it.

This short will also open the program at the Museum of Modern Art on November 12th when John Canemaker chats with me about my work. So, if you can’t make it to Indianapolis, you can see it at MOMA.

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At Live Journal, there’s an interesting collection of some of George Baker‘s Sad Sack comic strips as seen in Yank Magazine during WW II.

As a kid, I had an odd grouping of comic books to read regularly. I wasn’t really into the superhero strips, I appreciated more the cartoon strips. Naturally, I bought Carl Barks’ Donald Duck; they had the best stories and some great artwork. Little Lulu also appealed to me, and I read every issue. (Has there ever been a story on her creator, Marge?) In a pinch, I’d read Hank Ketchum’s Dennis the Menace, but I didn’t love it as much as others. When I got a little older, I read Archie.

Sad Sack was also among those comics I enjoyed. It’s interesting how a strip designed specifically for soldiers would have a life after the War. I guess the good writing and funny drawings kept it alive. Beetle Bailey popped up in 1950, and I suppose it really was nothing more than a rip off of Sad Sack. Although the drawings weren’t as funny, that strip offered enough to make it popular as well.

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- I love the recreated background sites that Hans Bacher and Rob Richards have developed. On Animation Backgrounds, Rob has posted some backgrounds of the Witch’s Castle from Sleeping Beauty. I also really like seeing the two BGs he posted from Sword In The Stone and would love to see more from this film. 101 Dalmatians had a specific look to accomodate the new Xerographic process they were using in the cels. Sword In The Stone took another turn in its backgrounds, and I like both films.
It’s a real pleasure to visit both sites; I go there often. I can’t get enough of the Snow White BGs on Animation Treasures II.

- Here’s the third cache of comic strips featuring The Gumps.
This is from an excellent book that was edited in 1974 by Herb Gallewitz and published by Scribners called Sidney Smith’s The Gumps.

As I mentioned in the last two posts, The drawing is funky, but the story is brilliant. I’m posting these so that you can get an idea of the rhythm of the strip and the characters. In the next couple of batches I post we’ll start getting into some serious story material.

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- The Gumps debuted in a peculiar way. Old Doc Yak was the comic strip that Sidney Smith drew at the Chicago Tribune. Joseph Patterson, an editor at the paper, came up with the idea of The Gumps and asked Smith to move onto it. Old Doc Yak, a talking animal strip, had run its course and Smith agreed to move onto a strip about ordinary people in their lives.

In the last strip, Old Doc Yak and his family were evicted from their house by the landlord. The last panel of the last strip showed that empty house standing there. The next day’s strip showed the Gump family moving in and taking over the strip occupied by the Yak family.

Comic strips were more of an art form back then. First off, they were large enough to be able to read them. They also had a large enough popularity that they were able to grab a regular and large readership. This allowed them to be daring enough to try to grab a larger audience through whatever means necessary.

The Gumps was clever in many ways and provided the goods with an exceptional story line that had a very large audience.
(Click any image to enlarge.)

Here’s part 2 of the Early Years of The Gumps.

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- The Gumps was the first comic strip to tell a running story. Like a serial the strip continued on a daily basis from 1917 through 1957. The story was particularly compelling; readers grew addicted to it, like a soap opera. In 1923, the Board of Trade in Minneapolis suspended operations so that the brokers could get the afternoon paper to find out whether the Gumps’ billionaire Uncle Bim had been trapped in marriage. When Mary Gold died in 1929, it was the first time a cartoon character died in a strip, and the Chicago Tribune was swamped with mail and phone calls with people threatening to cancel their subscriptions to the paper if she wasn’t brought back.

An Editor of the Chicago Tribune, Joseph Patterson, came up with the idea of having a strip that reflected the stories of “real” people. He didn’t want a daily gag with this strip and hired Sidney Smith to develop such a strip. Patterson came up with the title, “The Gumps” and brought some story ideas to Smith to develop.

It was the first strip to make its creator, Sidney Smith, a millionaire. It was that popular, and they promoted the contract. He drew the strip until his death in 1935. Smith had just signed a new three year contract and went out to celebrate. He died in a car crash.

The strip went on to a couple of assistants who worked with Smith, Stanley Link and Blair Walliser. However, for reasons hard to understand now, it was Gus Edson, a staff artist for the New York News, who continued the strip into the 50′s. (Edson was later one of the creators of the strip, Dondi, also created with an appealing, continuous story.)

The story being everything, I thought I’d introduce the strip here with a number of panels to give you a taste, and then I’ll follow through once a week with more chunks of the story for those interested. Believe me it’s a compelling story, well told, and even the drawing style becomes pleasant as you get into it. So here are the first strips.

{Click any image to enlarge to be able to read it.)

________________________________________________To be continued.