Makin’ Links # 5
Continuing the numbering from where Craig left off a year and a half ago, YOUR DAILY DOSE OF COMICS HISTORYis now MAKIN’ LINKS, complete with the somewhat controversial (Clizia doesn’t like it) Eugene Zimmerman drawing from 1910.
Back in the early seventies, Mike Barrier was the first person-in his fanzine FUNNYWORLD-I ever knew to take comic art and animation so seriously. He’s still doing it today at his enjoyable and educational site, MICHAELBARRIER.COM. Current posts include lots of Disney minutuae and an investigation into two lost Dr. Seuss cartoons.
http://www.michaelbarrier.com/index.html
Boris Vallejo was a lousy comic book artist in his one outing back in the sixties but he became an amazing fantasy painter. He may have been over-commercialized to the point where some no longer took him seriously as a fantasy artist but that never made sense to me. Just take a look at his lush paintings over at Joe Bloke’s GRANTBRIDGE STREET and you can see that Boris deserves to be up there with the best!
http://grantbridgestreet.blogspot.com/2009/09/boris-vallejo.html
A consistent stop for me lately has been TEN CENT DREAMS where today’s special is Bill Ward’s TORCHY. A seminal “Good Girl Art” strip from the 1940′s, TORCHY’s artist had drawn some BLACKHAWK and later did work for CRACKED. He also spent much of the rest of his life attempting to re-create TORCHY in ever-kinkier and more explicit versions under various titles for various magazines but nothing topped the coy sauciness of the original.
http://tencentdreams.blogspot.com/2009/09/torchy-bill-ward-master-of-good-girl.html
One could spend forever at the amazing INTERNET ARCHIVE but one reason for comics fans to check them out might be to listen to the little-known FANTASTIC FOUR radio series in its entirety. This series, introduced by Stan Lee himself (naturally) ran in 15 minute installments on just a handful of stations in the mid-seventies. If recalled at all today, it’s usually for the trivia that a pre-SNL Bill Murray played the Human Torch!
http://www.archive.org/details/FantasticFour
— booksteve
