These are some great panels from the Little Nemo comic strips by Winsor McKay. The Virginia Quarterly has a nice article on McKay’s influence.
Category: art
A collection of 191 versions of the Wham! holiday tune, Last Christmas. This is truly a triumph of international pop culture.
The next Fantastic Four movie will feature the Silver Surfer. The first film wasn’t spectacular, but it was good, clean fun in an exuberant Jack Kirby kind of way. You certainly can’t go wrong with the Silver Surfer, but I really hope Galactus figures in there somewhere.
A collection of classic snowman-building panels from Bill Watterson‘s Calvin and Hobbes comic strips.
A great collection of stills and posters from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. [via coudal by way of daring fireball]
From an industry survey about a decade ago, The 50 Greatest Cartoons. “What’s Opera, Doc?” takes first place. And here are video links for all but 1 of them.
Nicely complimenting last week’s article about airline security theatre, Andrea Harner has a great cartoon that captures the moment and offers a quick solution for harried holiday travelers. Not recommended at wintry northern latitudes, but it’s been in the 60s down at Atlanta’s airport…
For their first anniversary a couple months back, Visual Complexity created a cool mosaic of the first 360 projects from the year. Huge 2.1MB image here and a ginormous 11.6MB poster is also available.
If you like jazz standards and finger-tapping, here’s a video of Stanley Jordan playing “Autumn Leaves” on 2 guitars at the same time, soloing while ‘comping himself.
Khoi Vinh thoughtfully bemoans the ubiquity of Chris Ware in Comics for People Who Hate Comics:
In spite of his many and frequent innovations, WareÄôs name, to me, has become synonymous with Äòintellectually acceptable comicsÄô produced for people who basically think comics are crap. His works Äî especially his commissions Äî reflect not so much an appreciation of the comics art form, but rather a keen understanding of how it can be parodied, satirized and even ridiculed in the service to the intellectual flattery of an audience that would otherwise be offended by less self-conscious practitioners of the medium.
“The graphic novel has been a ‘legitimate’ art form for a while now. Does that mean we can start calling them comics again?” Publisher’s Weekly reviewers vote on their favorite comics from 2006. It was a very good year.
I agree that Absolute DC: New Frontier was really good. I loved Scott McCloud’s Making Comics (my review). I sort of panned The 9/11 Report: A Graphical Adaptation (my review), but it made the honorable mentions anyway. I just started Kevin Huizenga’s Curses, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is definitely on the (ever-lengthening) to-read list.
Wow. Jodi Picoult is going to be writing for the Wonder Woman comics line.
Pentagram just completed a new identity/ packaging design for Saks Fifth Avenue.
Coudal is selling pins with letters. You can spell whatever you like as a custom set, or just get a box full of letters. I love these little spin-off enterprises that Coudal does, like the sweet Jewelboxing products, the Chicago Bears victory t-shirts, and the multi-faceted live music packages. So cool.
You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice tracks art/design plagiarism. Though I’m not a copyright hound, I love this kind of “community standards” work to point out the offenders.
I made a book
I’ve always loved writing/ designing letters, and the next logical step is that lately I’ve gotten interested in bookbinding. This Sunday afternoon I made a simple 64-page single-signature notebook. I haven’t decided on a use for it. Maybe as a daily GTD notebook, or just a place to put “things to think about” that aren’t necessarily concrete to-dos. Sorry to say I’ve never been good at personal journaling.
A little ribbon helps keep my place.
Haven’t decided on a way to close it, but a pen fits nicely.
I like how the page edges turned out a little uneven. The rounded corners keep it from showing wear too quickly.
Cool, right?
Alex Ross links to a set of trumpet bloopers. They’re not so much funny but awkward in a way you have to empathize. I’m sure any musician can relate to the desperate attempt to nail some wild fingering, lip-burning extreme note, or in my case, some geometrically/ anatomically impossible mallet pattern on the marimba. Sometimes you just bomb.
Blankets (review 3.5/5)
I really liked Goodbye, Chunky Rice, so I was looking forward to Blankets. Craig Thompson’s more recent graphic novel is a coming-of-age sort of story of love and religion and obsession and companionship, mostly hopping between vignettes in the childhood and teen years, from boyhood to first love and after. It is, in fact, Thompson’s own story rendered with impressive honesty.
The artwork is fantastic and the dialogue is great, and Thompson really has a way with body language. From my layman’s I’m-not-a-graphic-novelist perspective, I can see how a graphic medium can make it so difficult to be subtle. There are times when the relationships in Blankets seem too clich?©. On the other hand, that sort of awkward transparency seems appropriate for melodramatic young love, and I really like how he just lets loose and puts it all on the page.
Mark Larson 
