DO CARTOONISTS GET WORSE WITH AGE?

I imagine that they do, though there are exceptions (like Milt Gross). Anyway, here's (above) a beach cartoon by Don Martin, done when he was fairly young, and another beach cartoon (below) done when he was older. I thought it might be interesting to compare the two to see

if we can isolate the difference that age makes.

Let's see...hmmm...well, the emotions in the top cartoon are more extreme, and the poses are more caricatured. No doubt about it, young people are more judgemental about the people around them. They love to ferret out the phony and roast him over hot coals. Older people have a more live-and-let-live attitude, which is lethal for a cartoonist. Old people need to stop being so tolerant and learn to abhor everybody like young people do.

I notice too that the older Don Martin isn't as touchy-feely as the younger one. The girls in the topmost cartoon are all over the handsome guy. They can't keep their hands off him. And what's that quality in the faces in the older artist's cartoon? Is it intelligence!? What the heck is intelligence doing in the Don Martin universe? Martin characters are supposed to be stupid! We can all learn a lesson here. Cartoonists must constantly be on their guard against the debilitating influence of IQ points.

Here's (above) another example of Don Martin's early style. I'm dying to blow up the drawing of the zombie guy to life size, mount it, and stand it up in my hallway. Boy, nobody can draw stupidity like Don Martin!

GOTTA' BE GONE TIL TUESDAY NIGHT!

THE GLORIOUS, AWE-INSPIRING 40'S CHEMISTRY SET

Before the era of nuisance lawsuits, before my own time even, there were glorious toys. One of the all-time best was the fully-loaded chemistry set, which came in a metal box like the one above. To judge from the look of it I'd say this example is from the 40s. I'll bet there were even better ones in the 30s.

Every boy in that era had seen a million mad scientist movies and they were all chomping at the bit to blow things up and transform themselves into monsters a la Jeckle and Hyde. Of course, once they got the set, they got channeled into doing the experiments in the set's book, which were still pretty dangerous and awe-inspiring.

They also wanted a high-voltage lab like the one in "Frankenstein" and there were electrical sets to fill that need, too. I have a 600,000 volt spark generator in my garage, I guess because I want to make dead bodies come to life just like the kids of that era did.

If you're interested in hands-on chemistry you should spend 25 bucks for the Granddad's book above. I think Amazon has it. I used to have my own copy and I loved it. Chemistry must have been a lot of fun way back when.

"Popular Science" and "Popular Mechanics" used to be crammed with chemistry-related articles. Here's a small article about evaporation (below) from the March 1948 issue of Popular Science (cover above). Notice that it's not mathematical. Kid chemistry should be taught this way for at least a year before making it mathematical. Get kids interested in the subject first!

The article's below. Click to enlarge.

THREE MILT GROSS HANDS

Milt Gross does terrific hands. Usually they're not as detailed as this ginger root with finger nails (above) but this is a close-up so it gets the royal treatment.

Here's (above) a knobby, pointy hand that manages to be more interesting than whatever it's pointing at. With funny hands like this to learn from why are we wasting our time drawing normal, boring hands? We're cartoonists! We're supposed to be inventive!

Here's a dandy's hand. Maybe it's a deaf dandy's hand because it looks like it's executing sign language. I wonder if sign language poses could be helpful for drawing funny hands?

I love this hand because it suggests a whole set of mannerisms and a character to go with it.

Sometimes interesting hands require interesting, quirky arms like the ones on this Ted Geisel drawing (above). It's great how a single hand can suggest the way a whole character should be drawn. That's because the hand was non-standard. Drawing standard body parts dulls the imagination.

CARTOON ANATOMY: EARS

Most print cartoonists draw ears the way Don Martin drew them above.


It's a "C" within a "C", or a lower case "a" within a "C."


For caricatures and more realistic characters the "C" isn't enough. For those the more high class "Y" within the ear shape is necessary.


Some poor souls are born without the "Y!"



"Y"-less ears aren't very common, thank heaven.



I've seen so many boxing movies that cauliflower ears actually look good to me.



Most ears slope a bit. I think mine are like that.




Some, like Lyndon Johnson's, are vertical. Sometimes the vertical ones come with exaggerated lobes (above) and tons of ear hair. Ear hair is too big a subject to tackle here subject so I'll have to leave that for later when I can give it a seperate post.

Gee, this guy has lost his "Y." What's left is a puffy disappointment that doesn't deserve the noble name, "ear." Is this what happens when you get older? Are we all destined to loose definition there?

Big ears (above) aren't linked to the face at the lobe so they stick way out. These are noble ears that indicate poetic intelligence in the owner.

Another ear (above) without a fully-formed "Y." I include it here because the major chambers of the ear are symmetrical. Look at it, the top and bottom alcoves are the same size. This may be without meaning...on the other hand the person might be the Antichrist.

A number of how-to-draw books put the ear near the middle of the head. I don't know about that.

An awful lot of people are like Kali, with the ear favoring the back of the head.

Well, that's enough science for now.

I NEED SOMETHING I CAN PUT UP FAST!

I'm too sleepy to post something new. How about if I reprint this article I wrote for Animation Magazine way back when, when I was doing "Tales of Worm Paranoia?"

Thanks to Mike Fontanelli for the caricature of me, above. John K did the one that accompanied the article below.

Click to enlarge!

THE ORIGINAL, BLACK & WHITE "DISNEYLAND" SHOW

So far as I'm able to tell, the very best kids show ever on TV was the prime-time "Disneyland" show which aired for four years starting in ...Er, I'm not going to tell you when it aired because you'll think I'm Methuselah for having been old enough to have seen it.

This show is not to be confused with the inferior "Wonderful World of Color" which succeeded it. That show was full of sappy live action mini-movies about things like the indian boy and his eagle or the handicapped girl who won the Olympics. Yuck! The show I'm talking about is the earlier, full-strength, glorious, politically incorrect, gutsy, heroic, imaginative, black and white show..."Disneyland!"

The show was so popular that the streets were almost empty when it came on. The time slots opposite the Disney show were known as the "graveyard" slots because virtually every TV was tuned into Disney. I still remember the thrill when the show came on and the mysterious, Camelot-in-the-mist title card (topmost, above) came on. Walt was a great presenter. It was fun to look over his shoulder at the glimpses of artists working at desks full of funny drawings and under giant models of things like Mars rockets.

I loved the Fantasyland shows which featured Donald Duck cartoons and features like "Alice in Wonderland." I think Disney must have chosen the cartoons himself, taking particular care to pick the ones little boys would want to see.

You'd think that a movie like Alice, which was shown in two parts, would suffer from being shown in black and white. Actually, it didn't. I refer the reader to Marshall McLuhan's theories about B&W TV requiring more effort from the viewer and therefore being more involving. I don't know if that's true, but if it's not then something similar must have been in play. After seeing full animation on the Disney show we kids learned to disdain the anemic, limited animation cartoons that played on Saturday Morning.


I believe that "Davy Crockett" played on TV before it played in the movies. Imagine that, a show of that quality premiering on TV! The marketing people must have thought Disney was nuts! Why would people pay to see a film on the screen that they'd already seen for free on TV? Ah, but they'd seen it in B&W on TV and the film was in technicolor! Disney knew how to use TV as a teaser for his movies.

Davy Crockett is a remarkable film. My kids didn't think much of it so maybe the film's time has passed, but it had every element in it that kids of the B&W TV era wanted to see: a driving, catchy theme, an appealing kid role model, heroism, adventure, an amazing you-are-there style of story telling, and a pervasive sincerity.

This (above) could have been me. I had to have the whole Davy Crockett suit, gun and powder horn. Believe it or not, toy stores and book stores were actually full of toys kids wanted to buy in those days and I and every other kid were more than willing to throw tantrums to get what we wanted.


Disney's "Zorro" was it's own show but I have a dim memory that makes me feel it may have had a starter episode on the Disney show. Of course I and all my friends had to have the sword, hat, gloves and mask. No kid ever missed an episode of Zorro.


Did "Treasure Island" also debut on the Disney show? That's where I saw it first. Of course I had to have the Jim Hawkins flintlock pistol and a plastic cutlass or two. Like every kid I had a whole arsenal of plastic weapons. Death to New-Agers who denied things like this to kids in subsequent years!


I loved the three part "Man in Space" series. Kids of that period LOVED outer space and I was no exception. I loved Von Braun's style of speaking and I hung on every word of the story. I remember thinking how much fun it must be to work at a studio that had space projects and funny cartoons going on at the same time. It seemed that everything that kids of that era really liked was going on under the roof of that studio.



"Mars and Beyond" left me speechless. I and the other kids gathered in the school yard the next day almost too awed to speak. When we finally were able to talk we tried to shout each other down with remembrances.


Disney didn't condescend to kids about space. He made it seem very dangerous and mysterious. He took it for granted that man was by nature a heroic creature, who couldn't be happy unless he was exploring the unknown.


This amazing show went on for four years then it morphed into a new thing, "The Wonderful World of Color." I don't understand why Walt agreed to this. Very few people had color sets in those early days and the idea of debuting films in B&W on TV, then showing them in theaters for money, was a terrific income-generator. Animation historian Milt Gray says that ABC took the opportunity to lean on Disney to make shows they could easily do me-too versions of. The imaginative stuff was too hard to imitate. Anyway, the decline in quality was drastic.



If Disney had never existed we'd still have cartoons but I don't think the word "imagination" would have been linked to animation the way it used to be. Even today when non-artists find out that I work in animation, some will say "Animation!? Really? You must have a lot of imagination!" That's the lingering influence of Walt and the Disneyland show.

By way of an exit here's a reprint (above and below) of a terrific recent article by Milt Gray about his impressions of Disney. Click to enlarge!