Fred Kaplan discusses Bush's new plan for Iraq...and what a surprise! It's the same as his last new plan for Iraq! And his new plan before that and his new plan before that...
My pal Ken Plume does a nice interview with Berke Breathed, the man who brought you the Bloom County newspaper strip and Opus the Penguin and various ancillary exploits.
I am posting the following in my capacity as an advisor of some kind to the project in question and also as a devout, long-time fan of the newspaper strip in question...
CALLING ALL POGO FANS & COLLECTORS
We are requesting the help of Pogo collectors who may have original art or high quality reproductions of Walt Kelly’s Pogo strip.
We are currently assembling Walt Kelly’s POGO: The Complete Daily & Sunday Strips. We are looking for the best possible black-and-white reproduction of both Sundays and dailies — especially the Sundays. If you have original art or proofs that you would be willing to let us scan, we would be grateful if you’d contact us. You may e-mail me directly at groth@fantagraphics.com (Please put POGO in the header). Thank you.
Gary Groth
Fantagraphics Books
If you can help, please do. If you can't help, just order the books. They're gonna be great.
Incidentally, Tom Richmond's weblog (which I just mentioned) is currently addressing a topic currently being discussed on many a blog. There's a video making the rounds that does a nice, albeit unauthorized job of animating Bill Watterson's Calvin & Hobbes property. A lot of folks seem to think this is Fair Use. After all, the person who did it isn't making any money off it and since Watterson has declined to animate his characters, it's not infringing on his business plans.
I disagree strongly. I think it's theft, copyright infringement, disrespectful to Watterson and just plain wrong. That someone isn't making any money off some transgression is irrelevant. If I print up and start giving away free copies of your copyrighted novel, the fact that I'm not profiting does not lessen the damage to you and your work. And besides, I may be profiting in non-monetary ways, just as the guy who animated that Calvin & Hobbes bootleg is using Watterson's artistry and rep to make himself look good and to get attention. The fact that Watterson isn't (currently) interested in animating his characters is also irrelevant. Not animating them — and controlling their every appearance — is part of his business plan. It may not be how you or I think the property should be managed but our opinion doesn't count. We don't own it. He does.
A lot of my friends have looked at Mad Magazine the last few years and felt estranged. It's like, "Where's Jack Davis? Where's Dave Berg? Where's Antonio Prohias?" Well, Davis is retired and the other guys are enjoying what Jonathan Winters calls "The Permanent Dirt Nap." But the current issue might feel more familiar to long-time readers. Like every issue, there are cartoons by that Sergio Aragonés guy (when will he get a real job?) and a Fold-In by Al Jaffee, but there's also an article drawn by Paul Coker and a TV parody — of one of the C.S.I. shows — by Arnie Kogen and Mort Drucker. Mort's still got it and so has Arnie.
There's also a parody of Dog the Bounty Hunter drawn by Tom Richmond, who's become the magazine's "new generation" star caricaturist. Tom is not only skilled at drawing but he's skilled at sharing his skills and teaching others. His weblog is full of great tips and glimpses of work in progress...and he's assembled a video that shows how he colors his drawings and that's our video link for today. (By the way: Tom's coloring in a caricature of himself. He's one of the very few cartoonists I've ever seen who draws himself to look worse than he actually is.) Here's that lesson...
This piece by Gary Kamiya asks the musical question, "Why hasn't Bush been impeached?" and gives a number of possible answers. Some, I agree with and some, I don't — but I think all are worth discussing. Oddly enough, Kamiya gives little or no consideration to two reasons that I'd think would be near the top of almost anyone's list. One is the futility of ousting Bush only to wind up with Cheney...or the messiness of getting rid of both to wind up with Nancy Pelosi. Ms. Pelosi may or may not be a good Speaker of the House — I don't know — but she sure doesn't impress most Americans as having the chops, as they say, to be Prez. (And yes, the case can be made that a caretaker Chief Exec would be better than what we have now. But in wartime, that has its dangers and the main point is that the cry for impeachment would be louder if the replacement seemed more like presidential material.)
And the second point is that many of the people who would lead a genuine Bush Impeachment haven't recovered from their disgust at the Clinton attempt. In some cases, the disgust has probably grown greater as they've seen people who screamed "Rule of Law" and made moral condemnations at a fib over sex now look the other way at vastly more serious allegations. That whole episode made the idea of impeaching a president seem sleazy.
Anyway, read Kamiya. See what you think. I think he's on to something with the observations about Bush's war arising from a national yearning for revenge and how some people can't get too mad at him for attacking the wrong enemy. After all, he attacked someone and a lot of Americans either feel complicit or figure someone was better than no one.
May 23, 2007
