Sunday, March 14, 2004

Valiant Effort

Today's Prince Valiant strip is the last by John Cullen Murphy, who has been drawing the venerable feature since the early seventies when its creator, Hal Foster, retired. Murphy had been drawing his own newspaper strip, Big Ben Bolt, and I guess sensed that its demise was near. (He handed it off to assistants in 1975 and it ended in 1978.) Around 1970, hearing Foster needed a hand, Murphy approached him and found that the veteran illustrator, at age 78, was thinking of handing the main illustration chores off to another. Other artists subsequently sought the job so a practical audition was held with the three best applicants each hired to draw one Sunday page over Foster's rough layouts. Gray Morrow, Wally Wood and Murphy each did one, and Murphy got the job.

Foster wrote and did increasingly-loose layouts for him until 1980. By that time, Murphy's son Cullen had begun to assist with the writing, as had author Bill Crouch. When Foster retired in full in '80, Cullen took over the writing, which he has done to this day and which he will continue to do with his father's successor, Gary Gianni.

For those of you scoring at home: Prince Valiant strips are numbered sequentially. Foster did #1-1756 before he began filtering in the tryout strips by Morrow, Wood and Murphy. Thereafter, Foster did some strips, Murphy did some over his layouts and there were at least three by another artist who has never been identified by historians. Murphy's audition was #1760 and then he did more and more. Foster last did finished art on #2000 and ceased his involvement with the layouts as of #2244. Murphy's last, the strip that runs today, is #3451 so he seems to have done around 1,657 Prince Valiant strips as opposed to Foster's estimated total of 1,789. Two amazing achievements.

• Posted at 4:26 PM · LINK

Cartoon Brew

Here's a new site for animation buffs to bookmark. Jerry Beck and Amid Amidi have joined forces to set up Cartoon Brew, a weblog covering the art form. Jerry and Amid are both wise about all things animated and well-connected to the industry and intelligentsia. So go there often.

• Posted at 9:24 AM · LINK

A Co-inky-dink

One funny coincidence that occurred last evening...

Yesterday, I was reading the weblog of one of my favorite political writers, Eric Alterman. He said that he was signing copies of his new book today (Sunday) in Santa Monica at a shop called Midnight Sun. I'd never heard of the place and when I did every conceivable kind of Internet search, I couldn't find it. I Googled. I Switchboarded. I even YellowCommed. No trace of any bookstore in Santa Monica called Midnight Sun.

Later, our little group met for dinner prior to the Winchell event at an outlet of Buca di Beppo, an Italian chain that specializes in serving platters of food that invariably feed two more than you have in your party. Next door to it, I found a bookstore called The Midnight Special with a display of Eric Alterman books in the window and the announcement that he's signing there at 2:00 today. Midnight Special, not Midnight Sun.

By the time I got home, Alterman's weblog had been corrected. I just thought it was odd that I went searching for this place and then, a few hours later, found it right next to where I was dining.

Okay, so maybe it's not that big a deal. I don't care. I'm going to bed. Good night, all!

• Posted at 2:03 AM · LINK

An Evening With Winch

So last evening, a bunch of us went out to Santa Monica where a small theater called The Santa Monica Puppetry Center was hosting an evening in honor of a wonderful man named Paul Winchell. Calling Paul a ventriloquist is like saying Bill Gates has a few bucks stashed away. Winch — as he likes to be called — was a superstar of early television, appearing with his wooden friends Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smif, and a packed house of his fans crowded into a little hot room to see him perform, watch clips of his classic work and hear him discuss his extraordinary life and times. The crowd included other ventriloquists: Willie Tyler did a little performance with his friend Lester, though Rickie Layne did not bring his pal Velvel. Jerry Layne (no relation) was also there. He's both an expert ventriloquist and a builder of figures as you can see over on his website. Among the dummies he builds are authorized, exact replicas of Winch's two friends. They are lovely. The minute he started making them, I bought a Jerry and a Knucklehead which can be found around my house, scaring the heck out of my cleaning lady.

The main attraction of the evening, of course, was Paul Winchell. At age 82, following a stroke and a bypass operation, he moves a little slower. Still, when he picked up Jerry Mahoney, you could see, hear and feel the magic. He entertained the crowd, he told stories, he answered questions. He spoke glowingly of the man he called his mentor, Edgar Bergen, and told of how the first time Bergen came to see him perform, he was too in awe of him to go out front and say hello. Later, the two met when they were booked as guest celebrities on a game show called Masquerade Party (anyone out there got a kinescope of that episode?). Paul made the point, obvious to all, that Bergen had inspired him...he had then inspired guys like Willie Tyler...and now Willie Tyler is inspiring new folks who'll keep the art of ventriloquism alive. It's been in trouble, Winch said, since Ed Sullivan died. "He was the only one who really supported ventriloquists on TV." Winch also spoke about how he got the idea for the prototype artificial heart he invented and patented, and noted that in a way, it was not all that different from the kinds of controls he was then installing in the dummies he built.

The occasion was also a publication party for an excellent new book, Dummy Days by Kelly Asbury. Kelly is a top animation director — he's currently finishing Shrek II — but he's also a historian of ventriloquism, and his book crammed with facts about and filled with lovely photos of Winchell, Señor Wences, Edgar Bergen, Shari Lewis, Jimmy Nelson and many others, with emphasis on their mahogany-headed sidekicks. (Okay, so most of Shari's were cloth, and Wences talked to his fist...but you know what I mean.) He hosted and arranged the evening, not so much to push his book as to give a batch of Winchell fans the chance to breathe the same air as the world's greatest ventriloquist and to throw a little love his way. There sure was a lot of it tonight. Anyway, you can order Dummy Days by clicking here. You can also move your mouse over to Paul's website to read more about this remarkable man. His autobiography will soon be available at that site and I'll alert you when it is. If it's even half as enjoyable as the evening we spent with him, it'll be a helluva book.

• Posted at 1:51 AM · LINK