Here’s the first animated version of a Tintin story from 1947. It was directed by Claude Misonne. I am very worried by the billboards around Los Angeles for the new Spielberg film. They are just horrifically ugly. That cannot be a good sign for the movie.

Thanks to Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds

Batman and Robin was a Columbia Pictures serial of 1949. It starred Robert Lowery as the batman and a rather stolid little fellow named Johnny Duncan. It’s a totally awkward, cheesy and humorless affair that very perfectly captures the true spirit of the comic book.  But shockingly there’s no batmobile!  The caped crime-fighting duo drive around in an old Mercury convertible as if they’re married and looking for a gas station.

Look, if Christopher Nolan wants to try to convince us all that he can make gritty realistic films about Batman, go ahead and let him. He’s wasting his own time. Batman is an absurdity and should be filmed as such. Enjoy this horrendous bit of movie serial history and don’t try to figure out all the machines and criminal plots. None of it makes any sense at all!
 

ADULT CONTENT

Here’s an awesome horror short that’s a very professional grade fan film based on Ben Templesmith’s ‘Welcome to Hoxford’ comic book. It’s bloody impressive and has a nice creepy psychotic edge to it.  The film was directed by Julien Mokrani.  Just what the warden ordered for Halloween’s month of October!

Here’s the fan film web site.
 

MATURE CONTENT AND LANGUAGE:

Matt Ellis draws and writes ‘The Man of Many Shades‘ which is a comic noir about a guy named Happy who’s trapped inside some kid’s drawings and uses his private eye investigation skills to find a way out.

Very cool set up for a comic.  You can read the whole thing for free online.

The Los Angeles Times’ Hero Complex blog has a post about Winsor McCay’s early animation efforts from 100 years ago. This is a film that features the cartoonist impressing his skeptical artist friends with moving characters from his great comic strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland.

The actual Nemo animation starts at the 8:15 mark.  Enjoy!

Thanks to Short of the Week for the tip.

Cartoonist Robert Crumb gets interviewed by a Los Angeles Times writer and talks about his living in France and his hatred for the pervasive corporate mono-culture that Americans seem unaware of.  He can’t stand it and chooses to live outside of it.

Really good perspective.

In a culture where you’ve got a Supreme Court actually giving corporate entities the rights of individual human beings, you’ve got total corporate control of every single living man, woman and child.  You can see this complete robotic control on very prominent and horrific display in the current president of the United States.  He a corporate hologram who moves only when commanded to by his boardroom overseers.  The entire country is oriented around cop/lawyer shows on television which are specifically designed to make you feel close and personal with the state/corporate stooges who work for police departments and gleefully lay disadvantaged people out on their faces on subway platforms and slaughter them with bullets fired straight into their backs from six inches away.  ‘The Mentalist’ is probably the supreme example of this attempt to make the corporate/police control mechanism seem odd and quirky and just a little cutely but intelligently eccentric.  ‘Medium’ is another.  The individual with oddball abilities or perceptions is entirely consumed and controlled by the state apparatus.  All cop shows are meant to make as many viewers as possible feel completely comfortable being visited by and talking to the police.  That is the entire truth of American television.  It’s message is simply this: when we come knocking, open the door.

That is the true subtext of every single show ever produced by American broadcasting companies.

R. Crumb is totally right.

Hey, tomorrow, Saturday August 28, 2010, is International Read a Comic in Public Day!

That means that all you unattractive, bedroom-bound, nerdish, geekster, loser, babeless nobodies can actually get up a little nonexistent courage and emerge from your domiciles to take your first tentative steps across the street with a real live honest-to-god paper-printed comic book in your hands!  Woooooo!  Get it on, baby!  Jivesteppin’ along the street with my ink pages!

Flavorwire has a nice little post about what comics to read for certain locations if you want to fit in and look cool.  I don’t happen to suffer from the decease of timidity or humble nerdishness.  I’m a real bastard who likes to walk up and push ballpoints into people’s throats if I think they aren’t showing proper respect.  So whatever your problem with reading comics in public might be I’m probably not going to understand it or be very sympathetic.  In fact, I might just chase your ass through the park to have a good laugh at your expense.

So, go for it.  Read your stupid comic in public tomorrow.  I dare you.

American comics genius Harvey Pekar has passed away at the age of 70.  I think Pekar was the greatest writer of comics because he treated the form as literature – for real – not like most of the dimwits writing ‘graphic novels.’ Pekar was serious and nervous and funny and angry, with very little separation between. His observations of everyday life run a full range from fixing a flat tire in a snow storm to surviving cancer to trying to find a file folder at work.  He looked at his life and wrote it all down for his comic books.

His comic books appeared in a series called American Splendor.

Smith Magazine has a new Harvey Pekar comic strip about how corporatism influences everything people do and think.

Can one work honestly inside a corporate system?  Can you write a book criticizing corporations and have it published by a corporation?

Are comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert completely owned by corporations?  My own answer is yes.  That’s why they are so boring.