cartoon life

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Why can’t you stay dead?

David Apatoff does some fine posts, and really likes great pictures. I must direct any visitors here to THE MAD ECCENTRICS. 

In the course of just 100 intense years, comics have displayed the personalities of some deeply odd people …Why is this? Perhaps the medium combines the privacy for artists to sit alone at their drawing board– a little incubation chamber for their neuroses and quirks– with a wide daily audience for the resulting work product. Or, maybe the pressure of putting out a daily strip for decades simply drove them nuts. 

Scientist make a new molecule called Di-positronium, an element with positrons rather than neutrons. A positron is a positively charged antiparticle. This bodes well. Mirrors made of Di-positronium will make us look great in the morning. We’ll use Di-positronium pills to alter our pessimistic attitudes. Eyeglasses of Di-positronium will make your partner look like Angelina Jolie (or Brad Pitt)! Best of all, Di-positronium can be made into giant gamma ray lasers and we can destroy anyone who doesn’t agree with us.

From Comics I don’t understand

I caught the last half of an interview by Kevin Sylvester on Sounds Like Canada with Sarah Lazarovic, illustrator, about her founding of The Montrose Portrait Gallery of Canada.

The Torontoist post fill in some details.
Sarah sounds like a fun person, and while we wait for Bev Oda to decide what to with $45 million, she set up this gallery in her garage. I lived for a time on Crawford Street, so I know that garage.
BTW Kevin, that is a great portrait of our dear Stephen.

Buck Rogers, played by Buster Crabbe, has been recovered from his dirigible which crashed in the Arctic and is brought to Dr. Hewart’s secret headquarters. In this excerpt, Killer Kane threatens a captured pilot with a life of manufacturing drudgery. Is Killer Kane a racketeer really or merely an industrialist? Anyway, I love that the future is really messed up because 500 years earlier we were soft on crime.Planet Outlaws is available from the Public Domain Movies channel through Miro.

From this story at CBC.ca News, an artist’s rendering of the creature.

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From 2 Canadian boys with same name land on no-fly list

“Two boys … one from Saskatchewan and one from Ontario, were stopped while trying to board flights last week because their name matches a name that appears on a no-fly list.”                                           

Aged 10 and 15 years old they share the same rather unfortunate name of Alistair Butt. If I were a terrorist, that is certainly one the low-profile innocuous names I would choose.

“Transport Canada won’t confirm if the boys are on [one of three lists] a United States no-fly list, an airline no-fly list or Canada’s new no-fly list, which … is “believed to contain fewer than 1,000 names…”                                        

“We regret any inconvenience, but security must remain of paramount concern,” the airline said in a statement.  

Security? How about stupid irrational foolish fear? How about “I am so stupidly single-minded and directive-driven that I can’t look at a ten year old boy and decide that he can’t possibly be the person we’re looking for!” Wouldn’t these no fly lists actually be helpful if they held information useful towards actually identifying the suspect? Like; Alistair Butt: Caucasian,  Male, middle-aged, approx 5 to 6 ft, tall, weighs slightly more than 100 lbs.

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The Toronto Star ran this article about guerilla bike path painters…

“Perfect,” one says, as they notice a red Honda parked only feet away from a large Chevy. With lookouts at the ready, the pair crouch between the two bumpers. One holds down a large cardboard stencil, while the other traces the image with paint. Once the diamonds and bike logos are done, the woman puts on an orange emergency-worker vest and walks straight into oncoming traffic. As she signals for cars to pass into the centre lane, another walks behind her, using a line painter. Commuters instinctively take their positions, and bikes head right for the new lane, as drivers dutifully merge left. “Are we finally getting a bike lane?” asked a passerby heading into a corner store. “Yes ma’am,” one of the Repair Squad replies. “How exciting!”       

…reminding me of this cartoon from 2005

I picked up this booklet at City Lights some very long time ago, and recovered it from basement obscurity just last year. There is no publication date, no copyright notice, no ISBN, but I can only assume it was published at the end of 1957, as per this reference at the McMaster Library archives. The last dated cartoon in the book is June 12, 1957. It would have been the first of the cartoon collections. Merle “Ting” Tingley has a brief reference in the Canadian Encyclopedia article on Cartoons, Political; the Tingley collection at University of Western Ontario library archives houses a large collection of his work; a few entries in books - Best Canadian Political Cartoons 1984 and various National Cartoonists Society albums - collected at Michigan State University Libraries Comic Art Collection - as do I, incredibly. Two articles in The Ryerson Review of Journalism, Spring 1990, and Summer 1999 mention him in context of the politics and the workplace of the time. From a piece by Bill Brady in the May 19th Free Press;

It all started in Montreal as Ting began to draw in school, then there was an art course and, with no jobs in commercial art, he got work as a draftsman. But he soon grew bored and, in 1943, joined the army, where he found his true love — cartooning. While serving in Germany, Ting met someone who would become a lifelong friend, Jim Bowes of London, Ont. Bowes introduced Ting to the army weekly paper Khaki, and it was here that his real career began. At war’s end, without a job and no desire to return to the drafting table, Ting compiled a list of newspapers that did not have editorial cartoonists. Then, on his ancient motorcycle, he crossed Canada, visiting those papers, but headed back east with no prospects. He decided to drop in on his old army pal Bowes, who was working at The London Free Press. Bowes suggested that the paper really needed a cartoonist, but didn’t think they’d go for it and encouraged Ting to “get his foot in the door” and take any job available at the paper.”It sure wasn’t what I had in mind, and a long way from drawing cartoons, but I took the job anyway,” said Ting, who started at the paper washing prints in the basement darkroom, deep in the bowels of the newspaper building on Richmond Street. When George Wenige became mayor, an editor thought a political cartoon might be in order. Ting was summoned from his subterranean post, picked up his pencil and drew “King George” in a crown — Ting’s first Free Press cartoon.           

If the ‘Common Man’ were to draw cartoons, that would be Ting. He wasn’t Duncan MacPherson. He wasn’t Aislin. Where they had sabres, Ting had table knives. 

For forty years he showed up for work and drew cartoons, gentle, funny cartoons about our city and the province and the world.Even if we kids didn’t understand the issue, every day we would scour the cartoon for a glimpse of Luke Worm. Not only was I a cub scout on tour one day - no doubt Mr. Tingley would never recall the meeting, nor the example he set - but I was also a Free Press delivery boy. I loved those papers under 30 pages. That four-fold was easy to hurl from a big black Raleigh rolling down the sidewalk.

 Retro future stuff has always been fun. Some of these things have come true… (sure). The phonograph is an iPod… the TV, a DVD player… that parking radar - think GPS, or internet connection to Google maps - that would be useful - and that is a Smart car in the trunk isn’t it?Parking downtown has always been the issue we all scream about. There was never enough enough of it. Never will be. 

And look at this from 1954. From a retro-glimpse to the future, to a retro-glimpse of the past. As businesses move to city outskirts … downtown London may become a ghost town. Over 50 years ago. The issue hasn’t changed, and hasn’t been resolved.