Monday, May 9, 2005

Recommended Reading

Arianna Huffington has set up a new website called The Huffington Post which features a number of somewhat Liberal celebrity bloggers, including Larry David, Walter Cronkite, Harry Shearer, Ellen DeGeneres and David Mamet. Lots of fun stuff to read over there, though I have a feeling a lot of those folks won't keep up with any kind of regular posting schedule.

• Posted at 3:29 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Here's an article in the L.A. Times [you may have to register] that says the employment situation in the animation biz is improving. Case in point: My pal, Bob Foster.

• Posted at 12:49 PM · LINK

Bullet P.S.

I shoulda mentioned that the new DC logo was designed by Josh Beatman of Brainchild Studios, and that the 70's version was the work of Milton Glaser, who's been responsible for some of the most memorable insignias in the field of graphic arts.

The earlier version went through several incarnations before it became the version I posted in the previous message, but I believe most of them were the work of Ira Schnapp, who was the in-house lettering genius at DC Comics or National Comics or whatever you want to call it. Mr. Schnapp also designed most of the famous logos, including the Superman one we all know and love.

• Posted at 12:46 PM · LINK

The Magic Bullet

As explained in this New York Times article, DC Comics is changing its logotype, effective later this month. Can't say as how I like the new one, which is seen at right in the above illo...but then, it took me at least a decade to get used to the one in the middle, which they introduced in the mid-seventies. I grew up on the one at the left and it will always spell Home to a lot of us, even if we could never quite figure out what it suggested the name of the company was — DC Comics? Superman-DC Comics? Superman-DC-National Comics? For that matter, since "DC" once stood for one of the firm's first publications, Detective Comics, you could say that the company name didn't make sense in most of its forms. It sort of stood for Detective Comics Comics, the way "The La Brea Tar Pits" translates to "The The Tar Tar Pits."

What I suspect is unmentioned in the Times article is the significance of what's unmentioned in the logo: Comics. The word wasn't in the 70's logo either, but it didn't have to be because back then, all it was really used for was comic books. That was the only business DC was in. Today, the entity we think of as DC is the division of Time-Warner that has the primary control of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, et al, and — oh, yeah — they also publish comic books of them and try to develop new properties in other comic books. Eventually, I'd wager, everyone will refer to the company/division as plain ol' DC...and then even that name will probably be deprecated in favor of Time-Warner or even Cartoon Network. (Just try and find the name "Hanna-Barbera" on a current Scooby Doo project.) DC is jazzing up with a new logo but what they're also doing is leaving the old logo, which was synonymous with comic books, behind. I'll bet they didn't even think of putting the word "comics" in this one.

But hey, I can live with it. Just wish the "C" didn't look so much like a "G."

• Posted at 12:39 AM · LINK