He likes to paint new faces on magazine photos. This looks like a redo of a "What kind of man reads Playboy?" ad. This is my favorite of the pictures on this page. 
Two beautiful oil sketches by Rubens. The first (above) looks strikingly contemporary. You could almost believe it was done with PH Martin's dyes.
The second (above) is a terrific example of how a forceful, dynamic composition can still contain amazingly subtle and graceful detail. And what are those red/oranges? Is that vermilion or did he figure out a way to make ordinary burnt orange and red look luminous?
How about an Alphonse & Gaston page (above) from 1904? The writing isn't exactly Hamlet but it doesn't impede the graphics like most TV writing these days. .
Here's (above) a George McManus page from 1906. Once again, the story isn't much but it enables funny, beautiful layouts and that's no small thing.
Guys and Dolls was famous for its backdrops. Here's (above) a moody sketch of the sewer where the crap game took place. The designer made it seem immense, important and mysterious, like the interior of a cathedral.
I also like the sketches generated by theatrical costume designers. I say "sketches" because the real clothing seldom looks as good as the sketch it was derived from.
Set design went through a lot of drastic changes in the last 100 years. Here's a Russian design from the years immediately after the revolution. The chair in the middle gives us the scale. Russian modernists were incredibly inventive but their efforts came to an end almost overnight when Lenin decided that he preferred realism.
I'm not a fan of Hockney's swimming pool paintings but his stage design is interesting. Forget the simplistic vertical curtains in the design above. Look instead at the way he uses the orchestra pit as a set design element. He paints the floor white so the standing musicians in black look like sticks or spikes. In another picture (unseen) he blackens the floor so the black musicians are invisible then he puts bright red caps on them. In yet another one he underlights the musicians so they look like zombies. Nifty, huh?
I feel so bad! Mike is a wonderful host (I should know, I've been sponging off him for eons) and here I've gone and told the world that he's cheap and lives in a trailer park. Really, that's a terrible thing to do to a friend.
Once upon a time there was a generous host named Mr. Michael. He loved to bake cakes and pies for the many guests he invited to his beautiful house.
Whatever the guests couldn't eat they took home in buldging doggie bags. "What a friend!" they all said, "Hoorah for Mr. Michael!" 
What a shock then, when they discovered that a sleazey internet artist had accused Mr. Michael of being cheap! "He says Mr. Michael never has toilet paper for his guests! That's not true," said one outraged neighbor, "He almost always has toilet paper! And he's so generous with his pies! Who would print such a thing!?"
Who indeed? It was none other than "Uncle Bucktooth," a disgruntled guest who didn't like Mr. Michael's pretzels.
Now it so happened that Mr. Michael had a poodle named Poohul. Poohul was very upset by the slander his master had received. Not even a bath could calm him down.
"I'm gonna kick that guy's butt!" said Poohul.
And he did! Passers-by said it was the most gruesome beating they'd ever seen. Poohul acted rashley, they agreed, but all seemed to feel that Uncle Bucktooth had it coming.
A couple of months later when the heat had died down Poohul emerged from hiding. 
The two friends were re-united and they danced and danced the whole night through. Poohul even wore womens' clothing! They were very, very happy, and lived happily...you guessed it... ever after!
I just got a call from Mike Fontanelli who was very upset that my previous posts made me appear him appear lowbrow. Gee, I feel terrible. I certainly didn't mean to give offence. By way of making up for it I'd like to invite everyone here to a party in honor of Mike. It can be at my house or his house, whichever he prefers.
You'll be met at the gate by my butler Bam Bam who will take you to the house on a scooter. 
It's a small house. You won't have trouble finding your way around. 
Here's my household staff clowning around with a neighbor. Feel free to ask for anything you want.
Why not take a dip in the pool? When you're finished you'll find helpful staffers ready to dry you off by giving you a group hug in their terry-cloth bikinis.
Maybe Mike will want to hold the party at his place! Directions: hang a right at the Bail Bond place and it's the last trailer on the left. Lock your door securely; you might want to leave a guard dog inside. Try not to step on anything rusty.
Have a seat anywhere. Mike isn't a stickler on formality.
Mike's maid will probably be there. Ask for anything you need. Mike is usually well-stocked with Pez but you might want to bring your own toilet paper.
I've heard that geologists believe there were at least two great extinctions on Earth, one caused by an asteroid collision and the other by a volcano. I believe I can point to a third one, one that decimated funny cartoonists in the late 1920s and early 30s.
Here's (above) the same character years down the line. It's overdrawn, grotesque and definitely not funny. I can't even imagine pulling off a gag with a character like this. John thinks the studio mindlessly shot itself in the foot by attempting to copy Disney. Steve Worth thinks Lantz might have been a victim of his own success. Maybe he had so much work to get out that he had to hire a lot of unfunny people. 
Here's (above) another version which is cuter and more appealing. You can do some gags with a character like this but only some. The design emphasizes charcter and dimensional animation possibilities, not comedy. This was the era of the Great Extinction. If you were funny and worked at one of the big cartoon studios then you probably kept your jokes to yourself... that is, until Tex and Clampett came along. 
Print media underwent a similar extinction. Opper (above) was doing funny cartoons in 1903. Somewhere in the 20s a lot of the Opper-types were weeded out and a new species replaced them (below)...
...the designers! One of the best designers was George McManus (that's his strip above). His stuff is beautifully drawn but it's not exactly funny. Mc Manus could be hilarious when he wanted to be but during The Great Extinction funny artists had to keep a low profile. Exceptions can be found: Milt Gross, Segar, Goldberg and De Beck; nevertheless, open any newspaper cartoon anthology from this period and you'll have to look hard for the practitioners of funny.
Eventually the writers (including artist/writers) took over. Little Orphan Annie (above) had so much dialogue that the charcters must have become stoop-shouldered. Newspaper strips of this era were READ, just like a novel. Eventually a counter-revolution was mounted but that's another story. The Great Extinction in print media raged for decades and it's still with us, even today. 
Isn't it beautiful!? I've had this picture for years but I can't remember where I got it. I think it's a detail of a Mayan wall. If anybody out there is about to undertake some brickwork, I recommend that they throw out their plans and redraw them to incorporate this.
You often hear animation writers complain that there was no time to make a story funny. Well, that happens sometimes, no doubt about it. I sympathize. The question needs to be asked though, "Why were the stories so unfunny when you did have time?" I imagine that this is an unanswerable question. Animation writers believe there's never enough time. 
In my Theory Corner opinion the most naked women in all of Europe are to be found in Scotland. Are they the prettiest over all? Who knows? What I do know is that in at least one, narrow area they shine, namely that they're the most astonishingly naked women in Europe, i.e., they're the sexiest without clothes.
Because they come attached to this (above): the mean, ornery, Goth skinhead of a Scottish brother. How'd you like to have this guy trailing behind you on a date?
Scottish women often have freckles, which is shockingly sexy. Your eyes follow the path of the freckles down the cheek to the neck, and down the neck to...well, you know.
Here's my best guess as to how your family will be housed two hundred years from now. Your successors will live in a tropical jungle populated by beautiful exotic plants and animals. Their weather-proof furniture will be arranged in clusters near tree trunks, ponds and waterfalls. No rain will fall on the house area if your family doesn't want it to. No bad weather unless your family desires it. Tame leopards, monkeys and beautiful birds will play in the livingroom.
The way I see it, walls won't be needed to keep out bad weather. Surely two hundred years from now there'll be devices that can keep an exposed area warm and dry, even in the middle of a storm. Walls won't even be needed for privacy since the air around the rooms can probably be made opaque or luminous depending on what the owner chooses. Most of the plants in the area will be real but maybe your family's walls will be holographic images of plants. I wouldn't be surprised if the paths and roadways leading to homes disappeared into faux holo-plants. Confronted with the dense wall of plants the owner would simply walk through them till he found himself inside the house.
I wonder if hard living structures will even exist in the future. If security and shelter can be had without hard walls and a roof would anyone still choose to live that way? If they do I predict the architects of the future will ransack the past for ideas based on real, historic structures. I wouldn't be surprised if some people decided to live in homes that looked like Thai temples or Italian villas.
My guess is that most people would want to live in newly-grown tropical rainforests but some will no doubt prefer the look of dense, temperate zone evergreens or Arizona-type deserts. I assume that plants of any type will be made to thrive anywhere our successors choose to plant them. Of course it's possible that people will live and work in virtual-reality cities that we can't even imagine. Maybe our successors will choose to imagine themselves as intelligent fish living in a coral reef or ants in an ant hill. The limitless possibilities of virtual reality make this kind of speculation difficult.
