Saturday, December 31, 2005

Scott Not Free

As you well know if you have a brain in that head of yours, my pal Scott Shaw! is not only an acclaimed cartoonist. He's also a mock-serious historian of the weirdest comic books ever produced. Some are odd commercial endeavors. Others are mainstream funnybooks that cause one to wonder if the editors and creators really paused to consider what they were editing and creating. Scott has amassed tons of these things he calls Oddball Comics and every so often at some comic convention, he presents a slide show of them, accompanied by witty and semi-informative commentary.

Beginning next month, he takes his act to the Acme Comedy Theatre in the heart of Hollywood for a number of Saturday evenings. If you can possibly make it there, you'll have a very good time. Here's a link to the info on how you can get there and have that very good time.

By the way: I picked three Oddball Comics from Scott's online column to adorn this piece and I picked them almost at random. But once I got them up there, I realized there was perhaps a subtle message being conveyed. If we'd elected Barry Goldwater, we'd have had an atomic war and we'd learn thereafter to vote for Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters. Or something like that.

• Posted at 1:54 PM · LINK

New Year's Eve Raccoon Blogging

Took this one last night. Three, maybe four young raccoons were out back scarfing down cat food and this one paused to get a drink out of my pool. Fortunately for him, I keep it full of Evian.

• Posted at 10:43 AM · LINK

Hold That Tiger

Here's a longer obit on Bud Blake, creator of the newspaper strip, Tiger. It's in the New Jersey Star-Ledger and you may have to answer a few questions to get to it.

I wonder if King Features — or any of the older syndicates — would consider setting up a subscription website with full runs of their older, out-of-print strips. There are sites where you can log in and read current strips and occasionally a classic or three...but those only give you a day at a time. There's something like 38 years worth of Tiger and even more of some other strips. No one will ever put out books of all that material so why not a website? Or CD-Roms? I prefer reading such material on paper but since no one's going to issue The Complete Tiger, why not give us the chance to buy it in digital format?

• Posted at 12:05 AM · LINK