Miss Cellany’s Scattershot Saturday
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Updates on political cartoonist Clay Jones and Dick Tracy writer Mike Curtis, remembering Jules Feiffer and the WWII life of Charles Schulz, cartoonist Paul Dorin on gag cartoon clichés and comix pioneer Robert Crumb on paranoia, and Casper the Friendly Ghost is 80.
Clay Jones Update
Clay Jones is back to writing (dictating) on his Claytoonz Substack! At least he has a new one up.
A few days ago, someone asked me if I had tried to draw yet. Even though it wasn’t a rude question, it kinda pisses me off. I feel like the person who asked the question didn’t really appreciate that I had suffered a stroke. It’s not like I’m gonna start drawing cartoons again tomorrow. But today, Ii-Linh, an occupational therapy trainer, made me write my name. This result is after several attempts.
As Clay tries to get his body parts to do what his brain wants them to he hasn’t lost his sense of humor:
Here’s this blog’s funny story: I was doing a physical routine of placing my right foot on four different color circles. Of course, this was with my bad leg. While I was doing this with my physical therapy trainer, a supervisor came by and asked me how I was doing. I told her that the PT hadn’t fixed my leg yet, but he had cured my color blindness. My trainer just looked at me like I was crazy.
The Clay Jones GoFundMe is still active and short of the goal.
Mike Curtis Update
An update on Dick Tracy writer Mike Curtis‘ current circumstances from Shelley Pleger via Jim Doherty:
This is Shelley Pleger. It’s been a long time since we touched bases, but I do so now for our friend, Mike Curtis.
Mike has had a rough year dealing with chronic health issues and the passing of his beloved wife, Carole Curtis in August. A week ago, his stepson, Justin has moved him from the Curtis farm to a facility where he can have better care and be closer to the rest of the family. If you wish to call Mike at The Blossoms, the nurses station will pass along the call.
The Blossoms Rehab & Nursing Center 706 Oak Grove St, Mountain View, AR 72560 (870) 269-5835Now for the request. Justin will be getting Mike a cell phone soon and try to set up a cellular ipad for him too. Justin could not find Mike’s address book and has asked if I could pass along contact info from his friends. He says Mike is eager to get in touch with others again and is feeling better as of late.
Desert Islands and Pearly Gates
For Catholic Weekly Paul Dorin muses on the clichés of gag cartooning in “Drawing Clouds and Coconuts.”
YOU would think that after decades, cartoonists would have wrung out every last drop of humour from two of the most symbolic settings in the cartoon world – the Pearly Gates and the Desert Island.
Yet, somehow, they keep producing timeless comedy that continues to entertain readers finding fresh ways to make us laugh.
Maybe we draw the gates and the island because they remind us what cartoons do best – open up the impossible. Both are wonderfully spare in detail: a gate, a cloud; a palm tree, a patch of sand.
But those empty spaces invite imagination…
Remembering Jules Feiffer
Robert Lipsyte at Tom’s Dispatch remembers his friend Jules Feiffer.
It’s been more than nine months now since my friend, famed cartoonist Jules Feiffer, died, a week before his 96th birthday after continually warning me that the evil spirit that had descended on this country was leaving him frightened and dispirited. He was glad, he told me, that he was old and close to the end in an era he considered more dangerous than the Civil War and more treacherous than the Reconstruction era. He had, he insisted, lost both heart and hope. I found that difficult to take too seriously. After all, hadn’t he survived the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the McCarthy-era Red Scare, the nightmare of Vietnam, and the “Hard Year” of 1968, while being dubbed the greatest political satirist of his time?
And as it happened, he died only a few days after finishing a graphic memoir, “A License to Fail,” which stunned me with its insight and wit…
Still waiting for some publisher to take on that Feiffer graphic memoir.
World War II Veteran Charles M. Schulz
David Kindy for Military Times tells how Charles Schulz‘s Army service influenced his Peanuts comic strip.
It was a scene that played out countless times in homes across America during World War II: A young soldier, home on leave, making his tearful goodbyes to his family before shipping out to fight in some faraway land.
On Feb. 28, 1943, a 20-year-old draftee, who was inducted into the U.S. Army at Fort Snelling in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, said a particularly painful farewell. For the very last time, he addressed his mother, who was near death from cervical cancer.
“Goodbye, Sparky,” said his bedridden mother, Dena, who was 48. “We’ll probably never see each other again.”
She died the next day while “Sparky” — the childhood nickname of Charles M. Schulz — was en route to Fort Campbell in Kentucky. The cartoonist who drew the popular “Peanuts” comic strip, which marks its 75th anniversary this month, was unable to return home for her funeral.
“The Army taught me all I needed to know about loneliness,” Schulz later recalled of the tears he shed in his barracks following Dena’s death…
Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues
At LAist Julia Paskin interviews R. Crumb, the author/cartoonist of the forthcoming “Tales of Paranoia.”
The cartoonist R. Crumb has captivated, titillated and agitated audiences since the 1960s, first as the creator of Zap Comix, which included counterculture strips like “Fritz the Cat” and “Keep on Truckin’,” then during his rise through the small press “underground comix” movement of the ’60s to become a pioneer of counterculture comic book art.
In “Tales of Paranoia,” Crumb’s first publication of new work in 23 years, out this November, he includes a chart of powerful people he fears, ranging from J.D. Vance to Kim Kardashian, though Crumb doesn’t list them by name, cheekily out of fear of their reprisal.
“The thing about paranoia is it means that it’s not based on a full knowledge of what’s going on. It’s based on the fact that you don’t know what’s going on. So, you’re trying to find out, and in the process, your mind can go to all kinds of crazy places,” Crumb told LAist.
The Friendly Ghost
Michael Lyons for Cartoon Research helps us celebrate the 80 years of Casper the Friendly Ghost.
As this fall marks the 80th anniversary of Casper’s debut, and with it being the Halloween season, it’s the perfect time to look back at his first cartoon, The Friendly Ghost, how he first floated onto screens, and his not-so-scary afterlife in film, TV, and comics.
The character of Casper was created by artists Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo. As Reit discussed in a 2019 Cartoon Research article by Jim Korkis: “One weekend I wrote a three to four page story I titled ‘Casper the Friendly Ghost.’ The story was mine – every last word. Shortly after, I gave it to Joe Oriolo, who wanted to develop the visuals and perhaps peddle it either to the studio or to a children’s book publisher.
Now celebrating his eightieth anniversary, Casper, since his debut in The Friendly Ghost on November 16, 1945, has secured a place in animation history, for people who do and don’t believe in ghosts. The character’s appeal was best summed up by animator Myron Waldman who worked on the original Casper cartoons, and said in author Leonard Maltin’s book, Of Mice and Magic: “The boys at the studio used to kid me when we were doing the Caspers; they’d call them the ‘oooh-aah’ pictures, but I always felt those pictures would last much longer than a picture that was just based on gags, because nobody can remember the gags. When they go to see it again, or talk about it, I think they like a story – kids especially.”
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