Sorry, no Wacky Wonder Woman this week because Wonder Woman is too tired.

BUT, I HAVE SOME EXCITING NEWS! Starting next Monday there’s a NEW wacky super-person that’s gonna become a regular on the Arf Lovers Blog. Can you guess who it is?!? You’ll still have Wacky Wonder Woman every Wednesday-if she ever wakes up-but just wait till you see who is gonna start your week every Monday! And you thought Wonder Woman could be weird. Stay tooned!

Sure, I love those great convaluted comic inventions that got Rube Goldberg his name in the dictionary. And I’m nuts about the wonderful drawings of those wacky sculptures the ink-slinger did like we feature in Arf Museum (along with Rube’s hilarious essay "My New Passion For Modern Art"). But they thing I like MOST about Goldberg is how he LQQKS! I’d do him! Here’s some photos of the hottie cartoonist. The first one has an inscription where he drew a little one of the sculpture drawings that are profiled in Arf Museum (check out one of ‘em below the first photo). The second photo is Goldberg receiving from Otto Soglow the "Reuben", the National Cartoonists Society’s highest award*. It’s named after Rube and modeled after one of those sculptures. The third photo is just a great photo of the young Reuben at the drawing board. Yum! And, lastly, here’s the terrific portrait of the cartoonist Gary Taxali did especially for Arf Museum. Maybe if robust Rube and I get together you’d like to join us in a Rueben sandwich, hm?

*BTW both Soglow and Goldberg will have drawings in my Clean Cartoonists’ Dirty Drawings book!

Being a long-time and huge fan of the comics by Eddie Campbell I’m happy to see that we might both be a members of "The Mutual Admiration Society". On Campbell’s most excellent blog The Fate of The Artist he talks kindly about Arf:

"I just noticed Craig Yoe plugging (Jan 30) his recent Arf Museum book from July last. I picked it up at the San Diego Con and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s very much a grab bag of unrelated bits and pieces corresponding to the theme of ‘The unholy marriage of art and comics’. This, the second issue consists of such delights as a dozen full page color pieces of the Yellow Kid by Outcault, made for a series of lightweight book collections of the kid that never materialized, pages by Art Young, victorian cartoonist Charles Bennett, a dozen pages, mostly in color, tracing the iconography of King Kong holding Faye Wray aloft back through a US World War 1 enlistment poster (Destroy the mad Brute!), via a Homer Davenport cartoon against ‘Crokerism’, to a sculpture by the French artist Emmanuel Fremiet. Now that’s scholarship! And it’s all done with an outrageous sense of fun.’

So that’s what Campbell has to say about Arf, but you really should visit his blog for his and his reader’s long discussion on Mort Walker’s Lichtenstein strip for Arf Museum and all things Pop Art and Mort’s take on it. Some excellent food for thought and some good links related to the whole matter.

As promised yesterday here’s another cartoonist drawing on the surreal cornball bandleader Spike Jones. I picked up this original a few years ago, I’ve never read the entire printed sequence. I love Dick Tracy and I love Spike Jones so I was very excited to get this art. Apparently Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy is on some case with Spike Jones and his band involved. And there appears to be one of Gould’s bizarre villains lurking around. I’m told this villain has a sponge like mask, he soaks it in water then he hugs you and you drown to death. What a way to go! Can anybody tell us more about the story or where it is reprinted and are there other cartooning/Spike Jones connections out there?!? I know of one more that I’ll show next post if I can dig it up.

(click for a closer look)

In the book I’m working on now, Clean Cartoonists’ Dirty Drawings (Last Gasp, July) I have 65 Clean Cartoonists as of today and I’m trying to have a caricature or photo of each of them to accompany their bios. I’m going to have a visual of each of them so far except Bazooka Joe cartoonist Wesley Morse who I can’t find a thing on. But, one task I’ve given myself is to try and find an UNUSUAL pic of each of the ink-slingers. So I’ve got a photo of Alex Raymond in an Indian headdress, Otto Soglow bare chested wearing boxing gloves, Jack Davis riding a tricycle, a photo of Al Smith with a very nekid stripper, Bob Kane dressed up in a very strange looking Batman suit, etc. I’ll have an unpublished (dirty!) caricature of George Herriman from my colllection and a self-caricature of Chuck Jones done especially for me!

I just got this rare self caricature of Mort Walker that I’m gonna use, speaking of the creator of Beetle Bailey artist as I have been this week. My good friend Alan Kaplan turned me onto the 1949 publication with this in it. This caricature with the sexy pipe smoke will go nicely in the Clean Cartoonists’ Dirty Drawings book. The publication also had some great Walker cartoons from that year. The first cartoon has Beetle before he joined the army and before he became a newspaper comic! The last gag is about the wacky musician Spike Jones who I love. Tomorrow I’ll show you another cartoonist who referenced Spike Jones that will greatly suprise you.

“We have a bet on. If you won’t kiss me, I get to kiss you.”
(click for a closer look)

“Here comes Betty with your blind date”
(click for a closer look)

“Listen, darling, Spike Jones is playing our song on washboard.”
(click for a closer look)

(Click for a closer look)

Great news! I just checked and you can now pre-order Clean Cartoonists’s Dirty Drawings at a terrific discount on Amazon. You’ll be the first on you block to have one! Click to order HERE.