During the summer and early fall of 2003 The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library featured the exhibition Ohio Cartoonists - A Bicentennial Celebration shown in the Philip Sills Exhibit Hall of the William Oxley Thompson Memorial Library, The Ohio State University Libraries, and The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library.

Ohio has remarkable place in the history of American cartooning. The number of well-known cartoonists who were born, educated and/or worked in the state is amazing. It was fitting during this bicentennial year to honor our state’s extraordinary legacy with this exhibition.

The digital version of the exhibition Ohio Cartoonists: A Bicentennial Celebration highlights the accomplishments of six of the state's most notable late nineteenth and early twentieth century newspaper and magazine cartoonists.

The on-line version presents the works of only six cartoonists: Edwina Dumm, Billy Ireland, Winsor McCay, Charles Nelan, Frederick Burr Opper and Richard Outcault. However, the images of comics and cartoons worth a visit.

Posted by Bibi on January 24, 2008 08:16 PM in Comics, History ||

Those who live in Los Angeles can enjoy the exhibition "Under the Influence: A Tribute to Stan Lee" on the Gallery 1988, until February 1. The other mere mortals, like me, can enjoy the neat art homages presented on this exhibition on its page Stan Lee Tribute Artwork. The works include paintings, collages, illustrations, watercolours, cute plush toys, sculptures and other mixed media creations. (via a sampler of things)

Posted by Bibi on January 16, 2008 01:37 PM in Art, Comics, Illustration ||

Here are my collection of links with cats, specially saved to blog today. And before you run away complaining "Oh no, cat pictures!", take a look on the images and their descriptions. They have cats, of course, but they aren't all just about cats.

The toy above, called Gato, was designed by Israel Chavira. This cat loves honey, probably cause his bee body type. A silly curiosity: the Spanish word "Gato" means cat, chat, Katze, katt, gàtto, and it has the same writing for Portuguese, gato.

Among the hundreds of cool scanned images of Modern Mechanix, the vintage articles with cats always get my attention. And, of course, I saved them to share: Cats Are Fun to Photograph, From Cats to Cataclysms, Cat Pictures Used to Scare Away Birds, Blows Glass Globe Around Cats (no cats were harmed!) and Things I Learned from Ten Thousand Cats. The last article is from 1934, but some things about what we know about cats didn't change.

By A. J. Adamson

ONLY by dealing patiently and kindly with a cat, particularly during its early life, may you develop the sort of animal everyone wants as a companion and pet. Unlike dogs, cats will respond only to kindness. Punish them and they grow surly and spiteful. I speak from rich experience, having bred fully 10,000 cats during the last quarter of a century.

The old idea was that every animal should be punished when caught in a wrongful act, but cats do not understand the meaning of a whipping. They are weak-willed and easily tempted and must, therefore, be guided in paths of righteousness.

Before all those stupid mania of LOLcats (I'm tired of them), there was The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats, a comic strip created and illustrated by the cartoonist Aloysius "Gorilla" Koford, according to Adam Koford his grandson. From 1912-1913 he produced a comic strip which was featured in 17 newspapers, including the Philadephia Star-Democrat, the Tampa Telegraph, and the Santa Fe Good-Newser. It featured the exploits of one Meowlin Q. Kitteh (a sort of cat hobo-raconteur) and his young hapless kitten friend, Pip. Adam is sharing those "treasures" (the comics are brilliant), and until now there are 340 images on the Flickr set. BTW, there is something on those comics that reminds me Krazy Kat. (via Will You Look At That)

The iCat is a project developed by Philips Research Technologies in 2005. I think iCat is a bit scary.

iCat is a research platform for studying human-robot interaction topics. The robot is 38 cm tall and is equipped with 13 servos that control different parts of the face, such as the eyebrows, eyes, eyelids, mouth and head position. With this setup iCat can generate many different facial expressions - happy, surprise, angry, sad - that are needed to create social human-robot interaction dialogues.

A camera installed in iCat's head can be used for different computer vision capabilities, such as recognizing objects and faces.

The giant Plant Cup designed by Gitta Gschwendtner, was available at YouSayTomayto for $338.00. You can't buy it for now, however, you can take a look on set of pictures Plant Cup, with more demonstrations of its uses by Eek, the grey cat, and Miss Moneypenny. Grey cats rock.

Posted by Bibi on September 28, 2007 09:53 PM in Cats, Comics, Design, Friday Cat Blogging, Technology, Toys, Vintage ||

Doug Savage is known for his humorous cartoons Savage Chickens drawn on post-its. The Savage Chickens is daily cartoon with an acid humour, and for your enjoyment has a feed available. And I must say that just now I've got a decent attitude to subscribe to it (yes, I know, I should do it before).

The sometimes-slow-creature-here noticed this neat cartoon due to Doug Savage had won the Laura Veirs and Saltbreakers music video contest. The stop-motion video was made to the song "Phantom Mountain". The contest rules were simple: made a videoclip for any of their songs and send it until August 31th. He tells about his video experience on the page Behind the Scenes. Some of the Phantom Mountain Fun Facts:

There are about 500 sticky notes in the video, including a butterfly and 4 or 5 stunt butterflies.
There are over 1500 photos in the video. I used a digital camera on a tripod, which I had to sort of crouch over. My back was killing me!
I drew so many cartoons that I actually developed a callus on the inside of my left thumb from drawing too much. Towards the end, I had to get up and shake out my arm every few minutes.
The old clock radio on the table used to belong to my great-grandmother.

And finally, the winner music video bellow (3 min). Great work.(via Koreus)

Posted by Bibi on September 28, 2007 01:10 PM in Animation, Comics, Fun, Fun, Music ||

The classic sexy comic books' Vampirella had a Portuguese version: Zakarella, illustrated by Carlos Alberto Santos. On O Fantástico ilustrado por Carlos Alberto Santos (The fantastic illustrated by Carlos Alberto Santos), there are five covers of this Portuguese version and the original images of them (click on the covers to see them). According to the site in Portuguese:

The infernal (and sculptural) character, which gave the name to the magazine imagined by Roussado Pinto, was a kind of Vampirella with Portuguese manners, and because of lack of opportunities to great adventures, as the American version, she used to punish the troublemakers in Lisbon and its neighbourhood. Each number of Zakarella included a short story by Ross Pynn (pseudonym of Roussado Pinto) with the heroin adventures. The covers and the illustrations of those short stories were created by Carlos Alberto Santos, e good part of the success of this magazine is due to his work. (28 numbers / editions of Zakarella were published over two years)

I hope this so so, and almost literal, translation helps. The covers of the 28 editions published are available at Comics BD Portugal: just keep clicking on the tabs to see all them. BTW, those links are probably NSFW. (via coisas do arco da velha)

Related posts:
Lucifera
Comic Book Bondage Cover
Warren Magazine Collection
The Groovy Age of Horror

Posted by Bibi on September 22, 2007 05:00 PM in Comics, Pulp ||

Robert Berry, from the great pop culture site retroCRUSH, made a list of The Top 10 Greatest Super Villain Costumes Of All Time. The list includes: the Catwoman, Ming the Merciless, Black Manta, Poison Ivy, Dark Phoenix, the Riddler, Galactus, the Green Goblin, Harley Quinn and Doctor Doom.

Contradicting the provisions, my vote for super villain costume of that list doesn't go to Catwoman, it goes to Poison Ivy. My suggestion to that list: the French arch-villain character Fantômas, one of the most well dressed villains I've ever seen.

Of course he also made a list with the twenty Coolest Super Hero Costumes. The Phantom, The Shadow, Wolverine, Green Lantern, Spider-Man and even the costume of the Japanese superhero Ultraman are on the list. Not my favourite, the super kitsch Spectreman. I loved the TV series when I was 8 and I keep some good (=funny) memories of it.

Read also: The Top Ten Lamest Superheroes of All Time, The greatest comics and Canadians comic heroes, Pulp Heroes, International Superheroes, Sexual orientations of comics characters.

Posted by Bibi on September 19, 2007 02:56 AM in Comics, Culture ||

I never had a science fiction pulp book on my own hands, but in the last years I became an admirer of them, through several sites who kindly shared collections of those vintage books. EC Science Fiction Comics is one of those amusing sites. They have a nice collection of science fiction comic books released by EC Comics.

Entertaining Comics, more commonly known as EC Comics, was an American publisher of comic books specializing in crime fiction, horror fiction, satire, military fiction and science fiction from the 1940s through the 1950s, until censorship pressures prompted it to concentrate on the seminal humor magazine Mad.

The collection is composed of four galleries: Explore the galleries of cover of Weird Fantasy, Weird Science, Incredible Science Fiction and Weird Science-Fantasy. (via SciFi Scanner)

More posts with sci-fi comic book covers: Life on Mars, The Science Fiction Art of H. W. McCauley,L'univers des Bédés Elvifrance, The Visual Index of Science Fiction Cover art, Comics, pulp and sci-fi books, Scans of Eerie Publications and Star Trek Comics.

Posted by Bibi on September 14, 2007 08:19 PM in Comics, Pulp, Vintage ||

After the comics about heroin abuse and the Grenada Comic Book, the Ethan Persoff site now presents the not intentional funny Comics with Problems. "Pick a problem" and start reading to get the message. There are sad stories of unborn children, drug addicts, S.T.D., sniffing for young people, stress, child abuse, poisonous substances and alcoholism.

Even been funny, those comics are also informative. An example is case of the comic book handed out one night only during a Madonna concert in 1897 about AIDS with the support of the American Foundation for AIDS Research. I could also point the Diabetes, the one of Household Dangers of Guns (for children) and the smoking dangers comic book, because I'm an anti-smoking person. (via coisas do arco da velha)

Read also: Horror, Suspense, Romance and Humour on Comics and Comics links: robots, gorillas and drugs.

Posted by Bibi on July 22, 2007 11:21 PM in Comics ||

What should do someone that would like to enjoy of some very very naughty literature, also know as pornography, during the 1920's or 1930's in the U.S.? One of the options was the Tijuana bibles, also known as eight-pagers. They were:

pornographic comic books produced in the United States from the 1920s to the early 1960s. Their popularity peaked during the Great Depression era. The typical "bible" is 4 by 6 inches, with black printing on cheap white paper, and eight pages long. In most cases the artists, writers and publishers of these tracts are unknown. The art is usually crude and sometimes included racial caricatures. Their subject is explicit sexual escapades usually featuring well known cartoon characters, political figures or movie stars (used without permission).

I've ask to myself how popular they would be nowadays, since there are some beautiful erotic comics available, as Milo Manara and his gorgeous drawings of women, tons of pornographic and erotic magazines, books, films and all kind of related material. The Tijuana Bibles has an expressive collection of those Tijuana Bibles to all of those who want to compare and take their own conclusions, or just to satisfy the curiosity. But remember that is definitely NSFW and it may be offensive for some of you. (via coisas do arco da velha)

Posted by Bibi on July 15, 2007 04:27 AM in Comics, Vintage ||

It seems there are exploitation materials for all kind of areas: blaxploitation, sexploitation, nazi exploitation and now Beatsploitation. The Beatniks, the stereotypes of the Beat Generation, were the inspiration for the comic book Kookie, published by Dell Comics.

Kookie herself was a square, naive and pretty waitress working at a Bohemian coffee house. [...]
'Kookie' was created by the beloved John Stanley, of Little Lulu comics fame, in collaboration with artist Bill Williams. In typical Stanley fashion, the stories are fun and well-paced, and characters and situations are vaguely reminiscent of sitcoms. (Though often more entertaining)

It "ran for all of two issues, one came out in 1961 and one in 1962." The entire 35 pages of the 1st issue of 'Kookie are available here and the blog I'm Learning To Share! posted several scanned images, including the cover and a complet story,from the second issue. (via Bedazzled)

Posted by Bibi on July 14, 2007 11:55 PM in Comics, Vintage ||

It's Friday and it's thirteen! I'm going to make my contributions to Friday Cat Blogging and some horror. I hope you enjoy.

Jaakko, a The Groovy Age of Horror (NSFW) contributer, posted about Biglie Humane (The Human Balls), a fumetti with giant children who likes to play with tiny, compared, humans. Cool, but not the best part. Those kids have a giant kitty that likes to play, as all the other cats. In the place of insects or toys, the cats play with those tiny humans. If you saw any time a cat playing, you are able to imagine the lovely (horror) scenes.

PS.: My condolences for you kitty Jakko. Take care.

The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire always celebrate the Fridays with an special Vampire Kitty Friday post. This Friday cookie jill gave to us a great cultural contribution from the Japanese folklore, telling to us about SaruDama: The Vampire Cat of Nabeshima.

Here's a classic Japanese tale dating back to the Hizen daimyo of the Sengoku Era (1568-1615). It presents a Shinto perspective of the spiritual dimension of Nature itself, here depicted in the form of a large cat who not only consumes humans, but then supernaturally changes its form to become that human, after which it interacts and easily deceives everyone it encounters.

My last contribution to this Friday Cat Blogging is the remarkable image of the two angry - and cute - baby snow leopards at the Zoo Berlin, via The Pet Blog. Ten-week old snow leopards Lanak, left, and Askai hiss to photographers during their first appearance in the Berlin Zoo in Germany. And they are right about hiss to the photographers: flashes are annoying.

Posted by Bibi on July 13, 2007 05:21 PM in Animals, Cats, Comics, Culture, Friday Cat Blogging ||

The on-line exhibition from the Bibliotèque nationale de France Comics Before Comics (La BD avant la BD) presents precious panorama of the comics beginning. The visual travel begins with the ancient illustrated bibles made for Kings and the aristocracy's books, inquires about its style origins, it shows the story of narrative, the page layout procedures and it ends with the use of sound in images - dialogues and onomatopoeia.

The exhibition gives a short vision of the comics pre-history, using great examples, like the Bible of Stephen Harding, Danse macabre, Cantigas de santa Maria, Histoire de la fondation de l'ordre cartusien and Little Sammy Sneeze by Winsor Mac Cay, among the several other examples. For a fast visual panorama try iconography page.

Posted by Bibi on March 30, 2007 07:47 PM in Books, Comics, History ||

There are thousands of versions of drawings, illustrations, photographies, videos and music based on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and there will always be something new to see. All over the world there are people fascinated by this classic. A good example is the Japanese art blog Hugo Strikes Back, which is always posting new images and he also created a wiki for Alice Illustrations.

I'm also a fan of Lewis Carroll book, but highlighting the images with dodos. What makes me remind one more time that I have to update that blog.

This time, the illustrated Alice in Wonderland version was created by Rom Deviseg. He gave a sexy touch to the story using some pretty pictures of the retro-fetish model Mademoiselle Isa with digital illustration. The result is a great work in a comics style. Site in English, Spanish and French versions. (via Unscathed Corpse)

More Alice in Wonderland: Children's Book Illustrators Gallery, Grandma's Graphics, Magic Lantern links, Arthur Rackham, Graham Corcoran, Alice In Wonderland and media, Pop-up and Movable Books and Lewis Carroll.

Posted by Bibi on March 15, 2007 01:44 PM in Comics, Illustration, Photography, Photography ||

The American illustrator John Held Jr. is most known his several works for cover of magazines like Judge, College Humor and Life. In addition to his archetypical flapper illustrations, during the same time Held also did cartoons in a 19th century woodcut style, in a bit of satirical nostalgia.

His other works included woodcut cartoons and faux maps to The New Yorker and comics. Merely Margy is one his creations: it started as a cartoon and become a comics in 1930.

His cheerful works were the subject of a delightful post at ASIFA Pinups: John Held Jr.. It's illustrated with few of his covers to Life and illustrations to articles. His pin-ups aren't the kind of pin-up I enjoy, per example the gorgeous woman illustrated by Alberto Vargas, that was also the subject of other ASIFA post (Playboy's Alberto Vargas - NSFW). However, his illustrations are remarkable and I enjoyed them. According to Stephen Worth, His style and subject matter defined the "Jazz Age" of the 1920s.

More about him here, here, here, here.

Posted by Bibi on March 13, 2007 01:49 AM in Comics, Illustration, Pin-ups ||

The comic book Detective Comics have been by DC Comics since 1937. With more than 800 issues now published, it is the longest continuously-published comic book in the United States, remaining a monthly publication as of 2007. A great collection with 500 covers of Detective Comics is available at the Comic Covers site, with Batman illustrating almost all of them. Take some time to enjoy the changes of the covers design. (via Martin Klasch)

Posted by Bibi on March 8, 2007 11:04 PM in Comics ||

The comics writer Yvan Delporte (EN) passed away on March 5, 2007. He was the editor-in-chief of Le Journal de Spirou (Spirou), a Belgian magazine, between 1955 and 1968 during a period considered by many the golden age of Franco-Belgian comics.

He also produced an immense amount of stories for several artists during this period, like 'Saki' for René Hausman, 'Alain Cardan' for Gérald Forton, 'La Ribambelle' by Jean Roba and 'Starter' by Jidéhem. Most memorable was his collaboration with h Peyo, which gave the world the tribe of famous blue good-natured dwarfs, 'Les Schtroumpfs' ('The Smurfs'), and the introduction of 'Gaston', at first in the editorial sections and later in the gag strip by André Franquin. [...]

Along with André Franquin he was responsible for Le Trombone illustré in 1977, the legendary supplement of Spirou containing more adult comics. Notable series that appeared in this supplement were 'Idées noires' by Franquin, and 'Arnest Ringard' by Frédéric Jannin, with scripts by Franquin and Delporte.

More about Yvan Delporte and Spirou:

- Hommage à Yvan Delporte: a beautiful homage with illustrations, pictures and texts at the forum of Spirou site.

- InediSpirou: a site for fans, with 400 unpublished pages of Spirou comics.

- La mémoire du journal de Spirou: the series, authors, publications and some illustrations of Spirou at the BD Oubliées site.

- Le Monde article: Yvan Delporte, scénariste et ancien rédacteur en chef de "Spirou"

- Libération article: "Spirou", un magazine orphelin.

- The complet list of Yvan Delporte collaborations for Spirou magazine.

- The official site of Spirou - Le laboratoire Ultramoderne d'humour webdomadaire.

- Yvan Delporte short biography at the Lambiek.Net, and the French version.

Related posts: Comics in Deutschland and Bandes dessinées oubliées.

Posted by Bibi on March 7, 2007 04:21 PM in Comics, People, People ||

I don't remember when datajunkie posted for the first time about The Black Cat, but I'm glad that he re-post several covers of this comic book, strips and illustrations of her tricks in The Original Black Cat.

She has a red hair, she's clever and uses a blue costume. What can I say? I loved her style, excluding the boots, of course. The Black Cat was one of the first female characters to wear what amounts to a bathing suit while doing superhero work.She first appeared in August 1941 in Pocket Comics #1 in a story drawn and written by Al Gabriele, published by Harvey Comics.

The Black Cat was Hollywood starlet Linda Turner, whose first adventure began when she suspected her director of being a Nazi spy. Trained as a stunt woman, she was an expert on Judo, motorcycle riding, lariat throwing, and other physical skills costumed crime fighters find handy; and her father, an amateur detective, had taught her the necessary mental skills. Knowing her superstitious quarry had a "thing" about black cats, she used that as a theme for her disguise. After smashing his spy ring, she combatted boredom with her glamorous but empty lifestyle by continuing to fight crime as The Black Cat.

Posted by Bibi on February 27, 2007 10:52 AM in Comics ||

As a fan of Edgar Allan Poe's works is my duty follow an on-line comic called The Surreal Adventures of Edgar Allan Poo. The Surreal Adventures of Edgar Allan Poo is a series of children's books created and written by Dwight L. MacPherson. The first book: "Edgar Allan Poo and the Great Door to Spindle Towne" is written, edited, and currently being shopped around for a publisher.

I'm had been follow the episodes by the warnings of new updates on my feed reader, a much easier way to remind to check the updates every Saturday. Seven episodes are on-line, but site down and relax: many other episodes will be posted. The comic has a myspace page, and you don't need to be afraid of it, because that one is a nice MySpace page. And if you have any doubts about try to read it or not, here is the series synopsis:

Join the enigmatic Edgar Allan Poo and faithful guide Irving the rat as they battle mythical beasts, ancient gods, magical ravens, sorcerers, the undead, inclement weather and treacherous terrain to escape the land of dreams.

(via The Cartoonist)

More Allan Poe: The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale Heart, Fantastic fiction writers, The Raven" illustrations, Read Print - online books and Grandma's Graphics

Posted by Bibi on February 26, 2007 10:27 PM in Comics ||

The sexy vampire heroine Vampirella, created by Forrest J. Ackerman, has been homaged in hundreds of sites. Vampirella Comics is the best I saw until now. The excellent site was created by an obsessive Vampirella's fan and his wife, that have been collecting Vampirella for a long time now. It contains tons of reproductions of comics books and magazine's covers, including foreign editions. (via The Groovy Age of Horror)

More Vampirella at the official site, Vampirella at Mad-Monsters.Com - two galleries with many covers, Vampilore, Warren Magazine Collection and Comic Book Bondage Cover.

Posted by Bibi on February 9, 2007 04:43 AM in Comics ||

I used to read Peanuts in the newspaper and watch the cartoon at the Sundays. It was nice, but I missed something: Peanuts isn't for kids. To really understand it you need of more knowledge that you just get with time. I think I will try to read it again, sign the feed to received the comic strips daily, and explore the Peanuts Gang Wiki.

All this because Manuel found The Peanuts Gallery, a nice collection with 21 vintage covers of Peanuts and Tip Top.

Posted by Bibi on January 30, 2007 02:23 PM in Comics ||