Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

This material was sent to me by Bill Peckmann. Here’s Bill’s note accompanying it:

In a couple of days Dean Mullaney and and Bruce Canwell‘s Genius Isolated, a book about the work of Alex Toth, will be hitting the bookstores. This is certainly going to be a GREAT tome given the track record of dedicated work of the authors. (Early reviews bear this out.)

To celebrate the book here’s one of Alex’s Dell/Disney comic books. It’s the 1958 adaptation of the Disney movie Clint and Mac.

Alex was a big Robert Fawcett fan and I believe the 30 year old Toth had Fawcett on his mind when he illustrated this comic. There are so many beautifully designed panels on these pages. Sorry about the slap dash coloring of the book, but that’s the way Dell did it in those days, though the computer screen helps a lot.

One page of this magazine appears in the book. Here, you’ll get to see and read the whole thing. This is the first half of the book

The magazine’s cover

Inner cover

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Many thanks to Bill Peckmann for this rare piece of the Alex Toth collection.

- This is the comic book FRONTLINE COMBAT (#12). It was sent to me by Bill Peckmann, and he best delineates what makes this issue so important. In Bill’s words:

Here’s the worn, torn cover and imperfect pages* of FRONTLINE COMBAT (#12) comic book from 1953.

Harvey Kurtzman (Age 29) – Editor, writer and lay-out artist.

Jack Davis (Age 29) – Cover (Before he was famous for his TV Guide & Time covers.) and one story.

Alex Toth (Age 25) – One story.

It doesn’t get much better than this. Would be hard to find a bunch of comic book artists from this time period who could do a better job at setting mood, time and place. And, look at those ages, WOW… them, there young whipper snappers!

Alex’s graphic design of those pages is a wonder. At that period in his early career the story is really something to behold. He and Harvey battled (neither one had pleasant memories of this) over how this story should be done/told and unfortunately they never worked together again. If you look at AT’s other aviation stories (not done with Harvey) at this time, they’re good, but do not reach the level of great art that “F-86″ breached. So, even though they couldn’t/didn’t agree, without their collaboration, we would never have had this keeper of a story!

-Bill

ps: Pages are a little off register and some of the ink bleeds through from the other side of the page but there’s still a wonderful softness that’s there, kinda like 4 strip Technicolor movies.

I couldn’t agree more. Here’re the scans:

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It just so happens that I received an email from Tom Hachtman today, and I thought I’d post it here since it’s somewhat appropriate:

I just got a copy of ‘The Art of Harvey Kurtzman’ – because I am an artist and a humorist and not much of a musician I find Harvey more important than the Beatles and Harry Shearer, in an intro, says, ‘…no Harvey no Simpsons’ and ‘no Harvey no SNL’.
I’d like to add ‘ no Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein’ and probably no David Letterman – hard to say – ALSO – I think it is in ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ that there is a scene where John Lennon is reading a MAD paperback and those were all Harvey – so, maybe NO HARVEY NO BEATLES haha – and I think it was George at a press conference when they arrived in the USA, when asked what they call their haircut responded, ‘Arthur!’ – ‘Arthur’ was the name of the potted plant mascot that often appeared in the early MAD.

And of course ‘no Harvey no Crumb’ and if no Crumb – well, “NO HARVEY NO ME?”

I guess I am trying to say, “Thank you Harvey!”

Yet again, many thanks to Bill Peckmann for this treasure.

- We’ve been, lately, showcasing some of Lyonel Feirlinger‘s work. A close cousin of his would seem to be Ludwig Hohlwein. Hohlwein was a brilliant German poster artist. His influence seems to have fallen far and wide. Alex Toth and Rowland B. Wilson have both admitted a fondness for Hohlwein, and homage can be found in several of their works. There can also be no doubt that Vernon Grant was aware of Hohlwein’s work.

Hohlwein was born in 1874 and practiced his art until 1906 when he turned to pster design. He quickly became one of the leading masters of his day. (Interestingly, it was 1906 when Feininger did his two great comic strips and left to turn to oil painting in Germany.)

Bill Peckmann introduced me to Hohlwein, and he’s scanned many of the posters from the book to the right, a 1926 publication. Many thanks, again, to Bill for the material.

Here, then, are some of the posters from this book:

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Here’s a note from Bill Peckmann: “Here’s the color version of the ad/poster
from an oversized Dover reprint book. Sorry I couldn’t get it all on the scanner,
but you’ll get the jest of it. It’s that glowing coal of the cigarette in the
silhouette that Rowland just loved. Pretty neat, huh?”

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An Alex Toth image.

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Another Alex Toth image that looks
very much like a Feininger strip panel.

- Bill Peckmann has sent me a few pages from the R.C. Harvey book, A Gallery of Rogues: Cartoonists’ Self-Caricatures. There are a lot of great people in this book, and Bill has selected carefully to focus on those we’ve featured on this blog. Take a look.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

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Walt Kelly

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Floyd Gottfredson

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Carl Barks

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Alex Toth

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Harvey Kurtzman

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David Levine

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Gus Arriola

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Rowland B. Wilson

- This week Bill Peckmann forwarded this great series from Alex Toth. I have to share it. Enjoy.

From Bill:
Just found these silvertone prints of a story that Alex did for “Blazing Combat” magazine in the 1960′s. It’s in the great tradition of cartoonists Milton Caniff, Roy Crane, Noel Sickles and the movies “Wings” and “Dawn Patrol”, but it’s all Toth.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)
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Once again, many thanks to Bill Peckmann.

- Last week I posted Alex Toth‘s Jesse Marsh piece from the magazine Panels. Bill Peckmann who was the Associate Editor of the mag, answered my request and sent the article I noticed about Carl Barks. In fact, he sent me additional Barks material he’s saved.

These include a the following letter Carl Barks had sent him as well as a couple of images.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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Here’s the article from Panels, an interview between Ed Summers and Carl Barks.

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As ever, many thanks to Bill Peckmann.

- For a whilie Bill Peckmann was the Associate Editor, with John Benson editing, of a magazine called PANELS. Needless to say this was dedicated to comic strip and animation art. Here from Vol 2 of the magazine is an article by Alex Toth on Jesse Marsh.

This was the cover of that second issue.

This is the contents page.
(I’d love to see the Carl Barks article.)

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This cover is inset int0 #8 in B&W.
This is it in color from Bill’s collection.

The back cover of the issue.

Needless to say, many thanks to Bill Peckmann for this piece.

- Thanks to the inimitable Bill Peckmann, I have a few Alex Toth doodles which I’d like to share with you.

This is a color sketch done by someone who
obviously loves flying and loves drawing/painting it.

These are a pair of spot illustrations done for a newspaper.

Here’s a bit of animatic art done on vellum.

Here’s a bit of original Toth page art.

(this note from Bill Peckmann:) “This attachment has an Alex
doodle that I tried to turn into a ‘New Yorker’ cover . . .

. . . One rejection slip later, I still had the fun of Xeroxing and
painting it and now scanning it.”

I think the final piece, The New Yorker cover, is a piece of art in itself.

More doodles.

Last of the doodles.

Bill Peckmann writes of this piece:
“This was made for fun, Alex’s ‘Underoos’ L.O. drawings were so well done (what else!) and posed, that I ganged up a few of them, Xeroxed ‘em and painted them. It’s a pan cel.”

- It’s nice to know that there’s some playing at the top.
In designing an Underoos commercial for Phil Kimmelman and Associates, Alex Toth sent funny cards to Bill Peckmann, he responded with paintings of his own. Thanks to Bill, I have some of that material, and will post it here.

First this short note from Bill about what follows:

“. . . about 30 years ago PK&A was lucky enough to do a TV “Under-Roos” spot with Alex Toth (since I was and am a HUGH Toth fan, I probably badgered Phil and the Ad agency into using Alex to do the super hero character designs and LO’s of the spot) and with that, I also became the lucky recipient Alex’s many missives. These came in the form of letters and postcards, which were wonderfully illustrated with doodles and sketches. One doodle that he used quite a bit was his cigarette smoking, signature alter ego “Grumpy Duck” (see attached).

And with that, I did some riffs on his Duck character showing the history of aviation (we were both airplane buffs) and photography (we both appreciated good photos). These were done with xerox and cel paint. Happy to say, Alex seemed to get a kick out of these.”

An example of one of Alex Toth’s mailings to Bill.

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Here’s the series of ducks that Bill painted for Alex.

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(Click any image you’d like to enlarge.)

“Here are some setups that Alex Toth did for the ‘Underoos’ spot for us. Since Superman and Spiderman came from rival companies, very seldom or never did they appear together. You might have a Toth fan or two in your audience, mebbe we’ll make you one. At end of s’heros is a doodle, one of his many.”

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A sample of one of Alex Toth’s many doodles.

Finally, a thank you note (the original was in color) that Alex did for Rowland Wilson, they were big mutual fans. The two were friends:

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Enlarge to read the panel bottom center.

Yesterday, the Producer’s Guild of America named these films as the nominees for their Producer’s Guild Award as Best Produced Animated Feature:
CARS, FLUSHED AWAY, HAPPY FEET, ICE AGE: THE MELTDOWN, MONSTER HOUSE.

Nominees for Best Produced Films include:
BABEL, THE DEPARTED, DREAMGIRLS, LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, THE QUEEN.

There’s a good chance that these will be the Oscar nominees for Best Animated Feature and Best Film of the year, respectively.

Today, in New York, we have the short list screening of Live Action shorts to select the nominees for this category. This is one of my favorite events of the year. Generally, I find a lot of the Live Action shorts more creative than the animated shorts, and this screening always gets me excited.

There is no screening in New York of the shortlisted animated shorts. We saw all the original qualified entries and helped pick the list of those on the current list. To allow us to do that, the Academy made a deal, so that they wouldn’t send the films a second time to NY, wherein only those at the original screening are eligible to vote for the nominees.

It’s not ideal, and I wish they would spend the money to give us a second look. But such is the way it is.

As reported on Cartoon Brew, the shortlisted animated short films are:

The Danish Poet by Torill Kove (NFB)
Everything Will Be OK by Don Hertzfeldt
Family Ties: Dreams & Desires by Joanna Quinn
Guide Dog by Bill Plympton
Lifted by Gary Rydstrom (Pixar)
Little Match Girl by Roger Allers (Disney)
Maestro directed by Géza M Toth
No Time for Nuts directed by Chris Renaud & Mike Thurmeier (Blue Sky)
Tragic Story with Happy Ending by Regina Pessoa
One Rat Short by Alex Weil

Congrats to Bill Plympton, Chris Renaud & Mike Thurmeier the New Yorkers on the list.

For those of you who live in New York and want to know about a trio of great live action shorts look to the Film Forum up till Tuesday, January 9th.

Ellen Bruno is an Independent filmmaker living in San Francisco who makes extraordinarily powerful and difficult films.

The subjects are difficult but the films have a poetry and a wisdom beyond the screen. SACRIFICE examines the selling of Burmese girls (some as young as 12) into prostitution in Thailand; LEPER travels to Nepal to meet a society of lepers in a remote village; SKY BURIAL records a Tibetan monastery ritual in which corpses are consumed by huge vultures, allowing spirits of the deceased merge with the sky.

There’s an on-line interview with Ellen here.

I met Ellen years ago at the Heartland Film Festival where SACRIFICE was being presented, and I spent the rest of the festival’s week with her after seeing how great a film she’d made. One always hopes a bit of the brilliance will rub off.