Guhit @ Likha

Miriam Defensor Santiago

2015-10-17T12:06:00.000-07:00

Miriam Defensor Santiago [born 15 June 1945] is a Filipino politician, notable for having served in all three branches of the Philippine government – judicial, executive, and legislative. Santiago was named one of The 100 Most Powerful Women in the World in 1997 by The Australian magazine. In 1988, she was named laureate of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for government service, with a citation “for bold and moral leadership in cleaning up a corrupt-ridden government agency.” She ran in the 1992 presidential elections but was defeated in an election marred by allegations of impropriety by the victor.

In 2012, she became the first Filipina and the first Asian from a developing country to be elected a judge of the International Criminal Court. She later resigned the post, citing chronic fatigue syndrome, which turned out to be lung cancer. She has also written books covering topics in law and the social sciences. She has served three terms in the Philippine Senate.

source: wikipedia

Senator Miriam Fistfight

2015-10-16T02:34:00.001-07:00

tom richmond sketches

2015-08-31T03:44:00.000-07:00

Inspirational caricature artist; Tom Richmond, born May 4, 1966, is an American freelance humorous illustrator, cartoonist and caricaturist whose work has appeared in many national and international publications since 1990.

tom richmond

amy adams

angelina jolie

joe black

al bundy

david caruso

tom cruise

johnny depp

iggy

samuel jackson

jay leno

leonardo dicaprio

david letterman

david lynch

madonna

matt damon

carlos santana

snoopdoggiedog

Tom Richmond [born May 4, 1966] is an American freelance humorous illustrator, cartoonist and caricaturist whose work has appeared in many national and international publications since 1990. He was chosen as the 2011 "Cartoonist of the Year" Reuben Award winner by the National Cartoonists Society.

Some of Richmond's earliest publication work was for the comic book Married... with Children for NOW Comics, and the mini-series The Coneheads for Marvel Comics in the early 1990s. Specializing in caricature, he began doing editorial illustrations for magazines, art for advertising and CD-ROM graphics in 1992. In the late 1990s he had a brief stint at Cracked magazine before beginning to work for MAD magazine in 2000. Now a major contributor to MAD, Richmond's caricatures and cartoons illustrate many of MAD's trademark movie and TV parodies. He was the first illustrator in the modern (non-comic book) era to do his TV and film parodies in full color, coinciding with MAD's switch to a color format in 2001. In addition to MAD, Richmond continues to do freelance illustration for a variety of publications and advertising clients.

Richmond's work has also been seen in film and on television. He has a credit in the 2008 film Super Capers as an illustrator, having contributed caricature illustrations for opening credit and flashback animations for the movie. In 2010 he contributed animation character design for CGI animated segments in the film "I Want Your Money", as well as doing the one-sheet poster art. Also in 2010, he began contributing artwork and character design for the Cartoon Network animated show "MAD", based on the magazine.
Richmond has been honored with several awards, including Caricaturist of the Year twice, in 1998 and 1999 by the National Caricaturist Network and with a divisional Reuben award for Advertising Art in 2003, 2006 and 2007, and for Newspaper Illustration in 2009 from the National Cartoonists Society. In 2011, Richmond became the 34th president of the Society, succeeding Jeff Keane. NCS presidents are chosen for two-year terms.
Richmond designed the look of Achmed Junior, one of the puppets used by ventriloquist Jeff Dunham, which made his debut in Dunham's 2010 Identity Crisis tour, and made his first onscreen appearance in Dunham's 2011 Comedy Central special, Jeff Dunham: Controlled Chaos.
In 2011, Deadline Demon Publishing published Richmond's book on the art of drawing caricatures, The Mad Art of Caricature! A Serious Guide to Drawing Funny Faces.
On August 27, 2006, he appeared in the comic strip Pearls Before Swine. Richmond returned the favor by caricaturing the strip's creator Stephan Pastis inside a garbage can, in a 2006 issue of Mad. On December 30, 2012, he appeared in Mort Walker's comic strip Beetle Bailey.

source: wikipedia

Moebius Gives 18 Wisdom-Filled Tips to Aspiring Artists [1996]

2015-08-28T01:26:00.002-07:00

Article source...

Jean Giraud, aka Moebius, was a comic book artist who combined blinding speed with boundless imagination. He shaped the look of Alien, Empire Strikes Back and The Fifth Element. He reimagined the Silver Surfer for Stan Lee. And he is an acknowledged influence on everyone from Japanese animating great Hayao Miyazaki to sci-fi writer William Gibson.

In 1996, the Mexican newspaper La Jornada published a lecture given by Moebius called “Breve manual para historietistas” – a brief manual for cartoonists – which consists of 18 tips for aspiring artists. If your Spanish isn’t up to snuff – mine certainly isn’t – then there are a couple translations out there. Someone called Xurxo g Penalta cranked out a direct version in English, but to get the true nuances of Moebius’ wise words, famed illustrator William Stout’s excellent annotated version is best.

For instance, Moebius’s first tip is “When you draw, you must first cleanse yourself of deep feelings, like hate, happiness, ambition, etc.”

Stout amplifies this with the following:

    These feelings are typically emotional prejudices that function as a block to creativity.

    This was something I learned from drawing and hanging out with another Frenchman, the brilliant cartoonist-illustrator (and regular Atlantic Monthly contributor) Guy Billout, when we were traveling together in Antarctica and Patagonia back in 1989. Until I spent time with Guy, I had no idea how many pre-conceived notions and assumptions I held within me regarding people and situations and what a block they were to the flow of my creativity.

    Divorcing yourself from such emotionally blinding pre-conceptions allows you to see things with fresh eyes. Solutions and ideas then flow with much greater ease. I have noticed with all the creative geniuses I have met that they all share a childlike delight with whatever or whomever they encounter in life (they can even find amusement in life’s villains). For them, all creative barriers are down; life and creative problem solving for them is like constantly playing. They gush great ideas all day long like a fountain.

All of Stout’s annotations are like this. It should be required reading for anyone even vaguely interested in visual storytelling. Below are Moebius’ original observations. Stout’s thoughts on Moebius can be found here.

    1) When you draw, you must first cleanse yourself of deep feelings, like hate, happiness, ambition, etc.

    2) It’s very important to educate your hand. Make it achieve a level of high obedience so that it will be able to properly and fully express your ideas. But be very careful of trying to obtain too much perfection, as well as too much speed as an artist. Perfection and speed are dangerous — as are their opposites. When you produce drawings that are too quick or too loose, besides making mistakes, you run the risk of creating an entity without soul or spirit.

    3) Knowledge of perspective is of supreme importance. Its laws provide a good, positive way to manipulate or hypnotize your readers.

    4) Another thing to embrace with affection is the study of [the] human body — it’s anatomy, positions, body types, expressions, construction, and the differences between people.

    Drawing a man is very different from drawing a woman. With males, you can be looser and less precise in their depiction; small imperfections can often add character. Your drawing of a woman, however, must be perfect; a single ill-placed line can dramatically age her or make her seem annoying or ugly. Then, no one buys your comic!

    For the reader to believe your story, your characters must feel as if they have a life and personality of their own.

    Their physical gestures should seem to emanate from their character’s strengths, weaknesses and infirmities. The body becomes transformed when it is brought to life; there is a message in its structure, in the distribution of its fat, in each muscle and in every wrinkle, crease or fold of the face and body. It becomes a study of life.

    5) When you create a story, you can begin it without knowing everything, but you should make notes as you go along regarding the particulars of the world depicted in your story. Such detail will provide your readers with recognizable characteristics that will pique their interest.

    When a character dies in a story, unless the character has had his personal story expressed some way in the drawing of his face, body and attire, the reader will not care; your reader won’t have any emotional connection.

    Your publisher might say, “Your story has no value; there’s only one dead guy — I need twenty or thirty dead guys for this to work.” But that is not true; if the reader feels the dead guy or wounded guys or hurt guys or whomever you have in trouble have a real personality resulting from your own deep studies of human nature — with an artist’s capacity for such observation — emotions will surge.

    By such studies you will develop and gain attention from others, as well as a compassion and a love for humanity.

    This is very important for the development of an artist. If he wants to function as a mirror of society and humanity, this mirror of his must contain the consciousness of the entire world; it must be a mirror that sees everything.

    6) Alejandro Jodorowsky says I don’t like drawing dead horses. Well, it is very difficult.

    It’s also very difficult to draw a sleeping body or someone who has been abandoned, because in most comics it’s always action that is being studied. It’s much easier to draw people fighting — that’s why Americans nearly always draw superheroes. It’s much more difficult to draw people that are talking, because that’s a series of very small movements — small, yet with real significance.

    His counts for more because of our human need for love or the attention of others. It’s these little things that speak of personality, of life. Most superheroes don’t have any personality; they all use the same gestures and movements.

    7) Equally important is the clothing of your characters and the state of the material from which it was made.

    These textures create a vision of your characters’ experiences, their lives, and their role in your adventure in a way where much can be said without words. In a dress there are a thousand folds; you need to choose just two or three — don’t draw them all. Just make sure you choose the two or three good ones.

    8) The style, stylistic continuity of an artist and its public presentation are full of symbols; they can be read just like a Tarot deck. I chose my name “Moebius” as a joke when I was twenty-two years old — but, in truth, the name came to resonate with meaning. If you arrive wearing a T-shirt of Don Quixote, that tells me who you are. In my case, making a drawing of relative simplicity and subtle indications is important to me.

    9) When an artist, a real working artist, goes out on the street, he does not see things the same way as “normal” people. His unique vision is crucial to documenting a way of life and the people who live it.

    10) Another important element is composition. The compositions in our stories should be studied because a page or a painting or a panel is a face that looks at the reader and speaks to him. A page is not just a succession of insignificant panels. There are panels that are full. Some that are empty. Others are vertical. Some horizontal. All are indications of the artist’s intentions. Vertical panels excite the reader. Horizontals calm him. For us in the Western world, motion in a panel that goes from left to right represents action heading toward the future. Moving from right to left directs action toward the past. The directions we indicate represent a dispersion of energy. An object or character placed in the center of a panel focuses and concentrates energy and attention. These are basic reading symbols and forms that evoke in the reader a fascination, a kind of hypnosis. You must be conscious of rhythm and set traps for the reader to fall into so that, when he falls, he gets lost, allowing you to manipulate and move him inside your world with greater ease and pleasure. That’s because what you have created is a sense of life. You must study the great painters, especially those who speak with their paintings. Their individual painting schools or genres or time periods should not matter. Their preoccupation with physical as well as emotional composition must be studied so that you learn how their combination of lines works to touch us directly within our hearts.

    11) The narration must harmonize with the drawings. There must be a visual rhythm created by the placement of your text. The rhythm of your plot should be reflected in your visual cadence and the way you compress or expand time. Like a filmmaker, you must be very careful in how you cast your characters and in how you direct them. Use your characters or “actors” like a director, studying and then selecting from all of your characters’ different takes.

    12) Beware of the devastating influence of North American comic books. The artists in Mexico seem to only study their surface effects: a little bit of anatomy mixed with dynamic compositions, monsters, fights, screaming and teeth. I like some of that stuff too, but there are many other possibilities and expressions that are also worthy of exploration.

    13) There is a connection between music and drawing. The size of that connection depends upon your personality and what’s going on at that moment. For the last ten years I’ve been working in silence; for me, there is music in the rhythm of my lines. Drawing at times is a search for discoveries. A precise, beautifully executed line is like an orgasm!

    14) Color is a language that the graphic artist uses to manipulate his reader’s attention as well as to create beauty. There is objective and subjective color. The emotional states of the characters can change or influence the color from one panel to the next, as can place and time of day. Special study and attention must be paid to the language of color.

    15) At the beginning of an artist’s career, he should principally involve himself in the creation of very high quality short stories. He has a better chance (than with long format stories) of successfully completing them, while maintaining a high standard of quality. It will also be easier to place them in a book or sell them to a publisher.

    16) There are times when we knowingly head down a path of failure, choosing the wrong theme or subject for our capabilities, or choosing a project that is too large, or an unsuitable technique. If this happens, you must not complain later.

    17) When new work has been sent to an editor and it receives a rejection, you should always ask for and try to discover the reasons for the rejection. By studying the reasons for our failure, only then can we begin to learn. It is not about struggle with our limitations, with the public or with the publishers. One should treat it with more of an aikido approach. It is the very strength and power of our adversary that is used as the key to his defeat.

    18) Now it is possible to expose our works to readers in every part of the planet. We must always keep aware of this. To begin with, drawing is a form of personal communication — but this does not mean that the artist should close himself off inside a bubble. His communication should be for those aesthetically, philosophically and geographically close to him, as well as for himself — but also for complete strangers. Drawing is a medium of communication for the great family we have not met, for the public and for the world.

The Cult Japanese Filmmaker That Inspired Darren Aronofsky

2015-08-27T15:24:00.002-07:00

Anime maverick Satoshi Kon’s work has made its way into countless other films that have reinterpreted his unmatchable style. Read more...

Astro Boy

2015-08-26T15:34:00.000-07:00

Astro Boy, known in Japan by its original name Mighty Atom [Japanese: 鉄腕アトム Hepburn: Tetsuwan Atomu?], is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Osamu Tezuka from 1952 to 1968. The story follows the adventures of an android named Astro Boy and a selection of other characters.

The manga was adapted for TV as Astro Boy, the first popular animated Japanese television series that embodied the aesthetic that later became familiar worldwide as anime. After enjoying success abroad, Astro Boy was remade in the 1980s as New Mighty Atom, known as Astroboy in other countries, and again in 2003. In November 2007, he was named Japan's envoy for overseas safety. An American computer-animated film based on the original manga series by Tezuka was released on October 23, 2009. In March 2015, a trailer was released announcing a new cartoon series.

source: wikipedia

In Search of Moebius (BBC 4 Documentary)

2015-08-25T02:21:00.000-07:00

Incal, Arzach, & Internal Transfer

2015-08-24T02:28:00.000-07:00

Paul Jackson Pollock

2015-08-10T12:59:00.000-07:00

Paul Jackson Pollock [January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956], known professionally as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was well known for his unique style of drip painting.

During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety; he was a major artist of his generation. Regarded as reclusive, he had a volatile personality, and struggled with alcoholism for most of his life. In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy.

Pollock died at the age of 44 in an alcohol-related single-car accident when he was driving. In December 1956, several months after his death, Pollock was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art [MoMA] in New York City. A larger, more comprehensive exhibition of his work was held there in 1967. In 1998 and 1999, his work was honored with large-scale retrospective exhibitions at MoMA and at The Tate in London.

source: wikipedia

Sebastian Krüger

2015-08-08T12:05:00.002-07:00

Sebastian Krüger [born June 30, 1963 in Hamelin, Germany] is a German artist. Sebastian Krüger was born in Hamelin in 1963. After studying free painting with Prof. Dörfler at the Braunschweig University of Fine Arts he made a stunning reputation as the designer of a number of cover spreads for the press in Germany and abroad and as an illustrator and creative designer of various LP covers. He then stepped away from commercial work and devoted himself solely to free painting. Artistically he has developed, in recent years, away from the early role of the so-called "star caricaturist" to that of a star of the New Pop Realism. His artistic visions are treasured and collected by other stars of the pop scene, like the Rolling Stones, who are friends of his, and by art connoisseurs all over the world.

In the quarter century of his creative career Krüger has remained true to the ideal of a New Pop Art, dedicating his art to a kind of game of deception, the interplay of identity and pose, of authenticity and fiction. This has enabled him to establish himself as a popular painter whose works draw large numbers of visitors to the galleries and museums. The defining feature of his work is creative reflection about the apparatus of media presentation and the manic iconography of contemporary picture production. His FACES are a kindly meant but thoroughly subversive tribute to the world of beautiful appearances and to the rock and pop culture of the sixties, with which the painter has cultivated an almost ritualistic relationship. According to his own comment on his work ["Everything is in transition, that's all"] he has devoted himself for some years, with the same artistic passion as before, to the reworking of the private world of his childhood.

The artist lives and works near Hanover and in California.

His primary medium is acrylic paint, and his paintings are hyper-realistic in detail, yet also extremely grotesque in their distortion. The Times praised him for "capturing the essence of his subjects" in his renderings. He is well known for his lifelike depictions of The Rolling Stones, in particular, Keith Richards.

The Genius Of Ely Santiago

2015-08-04T12:56:00.000-07:00

Article by: Hannah A. Papasin

I remember Coffee Cats.

I remember how two disembodied heads are talking to each other about practically anything under the sun, even the sun itself. I remember the snark. I remember the sarcasm of the guy on the left (always on the left) as he comments about the idiosyncrasies of life and the idiocy of the people running it.

Most of all, I remember the genius of Ely Santiago.

It was the 90’s when I first gotten hold of The Philippine Daily Inquirer. I had this habit of discarding the front pages and going straight to the Funnies (yeah, I was quite the intellectual). Then I noticed it. At the bottom left of the paper, just above the Crossword Puzzle. Two guys sharing coffee, talking about the Spratleys. Pure coffee table convo – with a punchline.

That was how I was introduced to Ely Santiago – and I immediately became a fan. For a fan, though, I know so little about him. I didn’t know, for instance, that he was the one who coined the term “MassKara” for the Bacolod festival, or that he was president of the Art Association of Bacolod. I don’t know him as much as, say, his brods in the Beta Sigma Fraternity or his classmates in UP Diliman.

Still, that does not mean that I couldn’t pay my respects to the man, the genius who unfortunately left us in 1993 at the not-quite-ripe age of 52. Which was a pity because the man could have done more, so much more than most run-of-the-mill cartoonists.

Fellow blogger and graphic artist Lee Santiago, Ely’s son, said Coffee Cats was his father’s “advocacy, his voice”, his own means of making a statement to the world.

“My father always did cartoons and comic strips since his college days at UP Diliman,” Lee shares, adding he had always admired Ely’s brand of wit which he describes as “biting sarcasm and the humor” that is, alas, conspicuously absent in most cartoonists.

Bacolod recently paid tribute to the man – along with other artists who made contributions to the celebration of the yearly MassKara Festival – in a group exhibit titled Lagaw-lagaw sa MassKara at the New Government Center. The exhibit opened during the second week of October.

It was just right.

After all, very few artists can lay claim to the title “genius”.

And clearly as caricaturist, painter and social commentator, Ely Santiago deserves (that’s with the present tense) the label more than any other.

see also: Remembering Ely Santiago

Living Works Of Art In The Rice Paddies Of Japan

2015-08-02T08:28:00.000-07:00

Art Portfolio of Illustrator Jason Seiler

2015-08-01T00:05:00.000-07:00

Stan Lee

2015-07-31T11:39:00.000-07:00

Stan Lee [born Stanley Martin Lieber, December 28, 1922] is an American comic book writer, editor, publisher, media producer, television host, actor, and former president and chairman of Marvel Comics.

In collaboration with several artists, including Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, he co-created Spider-Man, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Thor, the X-Men, and many other fictional characters, introducing complex, naturalistic characters and a thoroughly shared universe into superhero comic books. In addition, he headed the first major successful challenge to the industry's censorship organization, the Comics Code Authority, and forced it to reform its policies. Lee subsequently led the expansion of Marvel Comics from a small division of a publishing house to a large multimedia corporation.

He was inducted into the comic book industry's Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1995. Lee received a National Medal of Arts in 2008.

Stanley Martin Lieber was born on December 28, 1922 in New York City, in the apartment of his Romanian-born Jewish immigrant parents, Celia [née Solomon] and Jack Lieber, at the corner of West 98th Street and West End Avenue in Manhattan. His father, trained as a dress cutter, worked only sporadically after the Great Depression, and the family moved further uptown to Fort Washington Avenue, in Washington Heights, Manhattan. When Lee was nearly 9, his only sibling, brother Larry Lieber, was born. He said in 2006 that as a child he was influenced by books and movies, particularly those with Errol Flynn playing heroic roles. By the time Lee was in his teens, the family was living in a one-bedroom apartment at 1720 University Avenue in the Bronx. Lee described it as "a third-floor apartment facing out back", with him and his brother sharing a bedroom and his parents using a foldout couch.

Lee attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. In his youth, Lee enjoyed writing, and entertained dreams of one day writing The Great American Novel. He has said that in his youth he worked such part-time jobs as writing obituaries for a news service and press releases for the National Tuberculosis Center; delivering sandwiches for the Jack May pharmacy to offices in Rockefeller Center; working as an office boy for a trouser manufacturer; ushering at the Rivoli Theater on Broadway; and selling subscriptions to the New York Herald Tribune newspaper. He graduated from high school early, aged 16½ in 1939, and joined the WPA Federal Theatre Project.

source: wikipedia

Splashes of Color

2015-07-30T11:08:00.000-07:00

Article by: Anna Gamboa

Street art gets elevated and exposed to a wider audience at Bonifacio Global City.

Trust Bonifacio Global City to take street art to new levels. Visitors, residents and those working in the district were surprised as colors and forms began to take shape on many walls on large buildings. An initiative of the Bonifacio Arts Foundation, Inc., the group partnered with LA-based art consultancy Le Basse Projects to curate the right blend of Filipino and foreign artists.

One of the most-seen murals around BGC, Drew Merritt and Cyrcle collaborated on the huge mural of the sideways suspended spaceman, an impossible astronaut in grayscale with straight lime green neon bars woven in and out of the figure. Another work by Merritt portrays a stark, alluring and almost monochromatic pin-up girl, whose back is presented to the viewer.

Anjo Bolarda’s playful and dynamic lines converge in a candy-striped mural that dominates a wall near Bonifacio High Street, while Kristin Farr’s meditative and geometric works, cast an almost hypnotic spell with the rhythm and melody of repeating patterns and colors. There’s Faile’s pop-art mural, almost garish in color, but still eye-catching in composition. Some wonder what it’ll look like after some time, when the sun has bleached away most of the colors. Egg Fiasco and his haunting deer mural, looking like something conjured out of a surreal dream.

Do they awe because of their size or beauty? Not all the art on display is on an enormous scale—there are smaller works, hidden around a corner waiting to be discovered by eyes that seek the novel or unusual. Nate Frizzell’s charming and haunting child-sized mural of a pre-pubescent boy armed with a spray can trailing a bright yellow line after creating a quickly sketched tiger, a more realistic tiger’s mask suspended before him. Another work, playing on the almost totemic animal-child, rough-versus-fine art theme portrays a boy in a dark hoodie leaning against a quickly sketched bear standing on its hind legs. Or the little child in jeans and a raglan shirt perched with almost-cartoonish birds.

Showcasing the inclusive nature of public art, other murals and artworks are tucked away, Easter eggs hidden in BGC’s works and crannies waiting to be chanced upon by intrepid explorers of the cityscape, in this global stage featuring pop art in its playful and poetic forms. They now form part of the landscape, delightful surprises that draw the eye with their pops of color or surprising turns of lines.

Anna Gamboa

Everything You Know About Copyright Is About To Change - Brad Holland

2015-07-29T10:29:00.000-07:00

Out-Faking The Fakers: Chinese Librarian Proud Of Forged Masters

2015-07-28T09:42:00.000-07:00

Article by: Austin Ramzy

A librarian who admitted to a court this week that he substituted his own paintings for works by Chinese masters, and then sold the originals at auction, insisted he was not the only one to carry out such fraud. He was simply the best at it.

Xiao Yuan, the author of several books on Chinese art and a former librarian at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, said he came up with the scheme when he began a project to digitize the school’s collection in 2003 and noticed that many originals had been replaced with fakes.

Peanuts

2015-07-27T23:57:00.000-07:00

Peanuts is a syndicated daily and Sunday American comic strip written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz, which ran from October 2, 1950, to February 13, 2000, continuing in reruns afterward. The strip is one of the most popular and influential in the history of comic strips, with 17,897 strips published in all, making it "arguably the longest story ever told by one human being". At its peak, Peanuts ran in over 2,600 newspapers, with a readership of 355 million in 75 countries, and was translated into 21 languages. It helped to cement the four-panel gag strip as the standard in the United States, and together with its merchandise earned Schulz more than $1 billion. Reprints of the strip are still syndicated and run in almost every U.S. newspaper.

Peanuts achieved considerable success with its television specials, several of which, including A Charlie Brown Christmas and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, won or were nominated for Emmy Awards. The holiday specials remain popular and are currently broadcast on ABC in the U.S. during the corresponding seasons. The Peanuts franchise met acclaim in theatre, with the stage musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown being a successful and often-performed production.

Peanuts has been described as "the most shining example of the American success story in the comic strip field"; this is ironic, given its theme is "the great American unsuccess story." The main character, Charlie Brown, is meek, nervous, and lacks self-confidence. He is unable to fly a kite, win a baseball game, or kick a football. In 2013, TV Guide ranked the Peanuts television specials the fourth Greatest TV Cartoon of All Time. A computer-animated feature film based on the strip, The Peanuts Movie, will be released on November 6, 2015.

source: wikipedia

Bugs Bunny at 75

2015-07-27T10:51:00.000-07:00

Article by Lily Rothman :

The usual gestation period for a rabbit is a month. But Bugs Bunny, the iconic cartoon character who turns 75 on Monday, took a lot longer to come to life.

Scroll down to read that story–but not before watching a clip from his first official appearance, in the 1940 Tex Avery cartoon A Wild Hare. The Oscar-nominated cartoon has all the classic Bugs favorites: outwitting Elmer Fudd, the signature ears and tail, the “What’s up, Doc?”

(Looney Tunes characters, names, and all related indicia are TM & © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. You can watch the whole thing here.)

Here’s how the world’s favorite cartoon rabbit came to be. Animator Chuck Jones gave credit to Tex Avery for the character, but Warner Bros. had made several rabbit cartoons in the studio’s earlier years. There were cutesy rabbits and wacky rabbits, but those rabbits aren’t Bugs. (One distinction, Jones explained, was that Bugs’ craziness always serves a purpose–in contrast to the unhinged Daffy Duck.)

The Wild Hare bunny is uncredited, though that changed before the year was up. Bugs was an instant star. By 1954, TIME noted that he was more popular than Mickey Mouse. (Mel Blanc, who voiced the character, later claimed that the name was his idea, saying that they were going to call the character Happy Rabbit, but that Blanc suggested naming him after animator Ben “Bugs” Hardaway. Alternatively, the name is sometimes traced to a sketch that designer Charles Thorson did on Hardaways’ request, with the caption “Bugs’ bunny”—as in, it was the bunny that Bugs had asked him to draw.)

Though Virgil Ross was the animator on A Wild Hare, Chuck Jones became one of the more famous hands behind the Bugs Bunny magic. In 1979, when The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie came out, TIME critic Richard Schickel noted that “it is possible that some day Animator Chuck Jones may come to be regarded as the American Bunuel” for the fact that Jones and the groundbreaking surrealist filmmaker so well understood the psychological underpinnings of comedy.

As these images from the late artist’s archives show, Bugs Bunny may have taken a long time to be born—but he sure has aged well.

Read more...

Charles Schulz

2015-07-26T23:40:00.000-07:00

[November 26, 1922 – February 12, 2000], nicknamed Sparky, was an American cartoonist, best known for the comic strip Peanuts [which featured the characters Snoopy and Charlie Brown, among others]. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential cartoonists of all time, cited as a major influence by many later cartoonists. Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson wrote in 2007: "Peanuts pretty much defines the modern comic strip, so even now it's hard to see it with fresh eyes. The clean, minimalist drawings, the sarcastic humor, the unflinching emotional honesty, the inner thoughts of a household pet, the serious treatment of children, the wild fantasies, the merchandising on an enormous scale—in countless ways, Schulz blazed the wide trail that most every cartoonist since has tried to follow.

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Schulz grew up in Saint Paul. He was the only child of Carl Schulz, who was born in Germany, and Dena Halverson, who had Norwegian heritage. His uncle called him "Sparky" after the horse Spark Plug in Billy DeBeck's comic strip, Barney Google.

Schulz loved drawing and sometimes drew his family dog, Spike, who ate unusual things, such as pins and tacks. In 1937, Schulz drew a picture of Spike and sent it to Ripley's Believe It or Not!; his drawing appeared in Robert Ripley's syndicated panel, captioned, "A hunting dog that eats pins, tacks, and razor blades is owned by C. F. Schulz, St. Paul, Minn." and "Drawn by 'Sparky'" C.F. was his father, Carl Fred Schulz.

Schulz attended Richards Gordon Elementary School in Saint Paul, where he skipped two half-grades. He became a shy, timid teenager, perhaps as a result of being the youngest in his class at Central High School. One well-known episode in his high school life was the rejection of his drawings by his high school yearbook. A five-foot-tall statue of Snoopy was placed in the school's main office 60 years later.

Schulz's first group of regular cartoons, a weekly series of one-panel jokes entitled Li'l Folks, was published from 1947 to 1950 by the St. Paul Pioneer Press; he first used the name Charlie Brown for a character there, although he applied the name in four gags to three different boys as well as one buried in sand. The series also had a dog that looked much like Snoopy. In 1948, Schulz sold a cartoon to The Saturday Evening Post; the first out of 17 one-panel cartoons by Schulz that would be published there. In 1948, he tried to have Li'l Folks syndicated through the Newspaper Enterprise Association. Schulz would have been an independent contractor for the syndicate, unheard of in the 1940s, but the deal fell through. Li'l Folks was dropped from the Pioneer Press in January 1950.

Later that year, Schulz approached the United Feature Syndicate with the one-panel series Li'l Folks, and the syndicate became interested. However, by that time Schulz had also developed a comic strip, using normally four panels rather than one, and reportedly to Schulz's delight, the syndicate preferred this version. Peanuts made its first appearance on October 2, 1950, in seven newspapers. The weekly Sunday-page debuted on January 6, 1952. After a somewhat slow beginning, Peanuts eventually became one of the most popular comic strips of all time, as well as one of the most influential. Schulz also had a short-lived sports-oriented comic strip called It's Only a Game [1957–1959], but he abandoned it due to the demands of the successful Peanuts. From 1956 to 1965 he contributed a single-panel strip ["Young Pillars"] featuring teenagers to Youth, a publication associated with the Church of God.

In 1957 and 1961 he illustrated two volumes of Art Linkletter's Kids Say the Darndest Things, and in 1964 a collection of letters, Dear President Johnson, by Bill Adler.

source: wikipedia

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Chuck Jones

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Charles Martin "Chuck" Jones [September 21, 1912 – February 22, 2002] was an American animator, cartoon artist, screenwriter, producer, and director of animated films, most memorably of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts for the Warner Bros. Cartoons studio. He directed many classic animated cartoon shorts starring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, Pepé Le Pew, Porky Pig and a slew of other Warner characters.

After his career at Warner Bros. ended in 1962, Jones started Sib Tower 12 Productions, and began producing cartoons for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, including a new series of Tom and Jerry shorts and the television adaptation of Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!. He later started his own studio, Chuck Jones Enterprises, which created several one-shot specials, and periodically worked on Looney Tunes related works.

Jones was nominated for an Academy Award eight times and won three times, receiving awards for the cartoons For Scent-imental Reasons, So Much for So Little, and The Dot and the Line. He received an Honorary Academy Award in 1996 for his work in the animation industry. Film historian Leonard Maltin has praised Jones' work at Warner Bros., MGM and Chuck Jones Enterprises. He also said that the "feud" that there may have been between Jones and colleague Bob Clampett was mainly because they were so different from each other. In Jerry Beck's The 50 Greatest Cartoons, ten of the entries were directed by Jones, with four out of the five top cartoons being Jones shorts.

zource: wikipedia

First Comics News Dot Com

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Chuck Jones - The Evolution of an Artist

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