A website called the Comics Foundry has a very good interview with Neal Adams. It's about being a comic book artist but much of what he says in it has relevance to almost anyone who's out there trying to build a career as any kind of creative talent. Here's a link to Part One and […]
Funny guy, that Frank Gorshin. The first time I saw him perform live was at a Bar Mitzvah reception for a classmate of mine. The classmate was a relative of a gent named Arthur Ellen who was a somewhat famous hypnotist of the day, performing on TV and asserting he could help people become what […]
Brian Montopoli makes some important points about the current Newsweek scandal. […]
Frazetta: Painting With Fire is running many times this week on the Independent Film Channel. This is a documentary on the great painter of fantasy scenes and women with awesome rear ends. Here's what I wrote about it a year ago. If you haven't seen it and you get IFC, this would be a good […]
The classes sometimes seem a bit overpriced but there are some intriguing lecturers at The Learning Annex. If you're in the Los Angeles area and interested in getting into the writing of animated cartoons, my old buddy Jack Enyart (who's written a lot of them) is conducting a one night lesson on June 1. And […]
Still under Ye Olde Deadline, I haven't the time to write much here today. But Matthew Yglesias pretty well sums up the way I view this whole Newsweek scandal. I'm afraid I'm not much impressed when people only get outraged over the mistakes of their political enemies and overlook similar (and more serious) screw-ups by […]
Turns out that what I identified as an R. Crumb self portrait over on Tom Spurgeon's site is actually a Crumb drawing of Allen Ginsberg. This is not quite as big an error as Newsweek just owned up to but I was wrong. On the other hand, I don't think it looks very much like […]
Just saw a paper copy of today's Los Angeles Times — yes, they still make them — and there's a different R. Crumb self-portrait accompanying Crumb's little op-ed piece. That is, it's different from the one on Tom Spurgeon's site. […]
You have to really be into obscure comic book credits to know the name of Al Kurzrok. He worked briefly for Marvel around 1970, mostly as a letterer but he also wrote a few stories for them, including five issues of Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, a couple of western stories and some other […]
The L.A. Times website features a short editorial piece by Robert Crumb. [Subscription probably required.] I think the online piece is missing an illustration that presumably appears in the old-fashioned, paper Los Angeles Times. […]
Thanks to all who've written with concern about my mother and myself. She's better now but we spent another long night in the U.C.L.A. Medical Center Emergency Room…and by the way, the doctor part of the place is super-efficient but I've never seen unhealthier food than they have in their vending machines. Talk about drumming […]
And here we see a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup, which is an Internet tradition dating back to the fourth century. It means that the guy who runs the weblog is too swamped with personal matters (say, a not-well mother and a pressing script assignment) to update his website for a little while. […]
The "suspect" in the police chase I mentioned earlier has died in the hospital. KABC (and I would guess, other local stations) are replaying the footage up to the moment when the officers opened fire on the guy. In a way, this is a disservice to viewers because the full video clearly showed that the […]
Nice little piece on Buster Keaton by Kenneth Turan over in the L.A. Times Calendar section. You'll need to register and I'm going to suggest you do. They used to charge for this section so I never linked to articles over there, but it's now free and even if you don't live in Los Angeles, […]
Just happened on a high-speed pursuit on a local TV station — a "suspect" fleeing from cops through the streets of Wilmington and Long Beach. I'm not sure why he's a "suspect" when we're watching the guy driving at 100 MPH through city streets, endangering people and refusing to stop. What are the chances of […]