During the summer and early fall of 2003 The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library featured the exhibition Ohio Cartoonists – A Bicentennial Celebration shown in the Philip Sills Exhibit Hall of the William Oxley Thompson Memorial Library, The Ohio State University Libraries, and The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library.

Ohio has remarkable place in the history of American cartooning. The number of well-known cartoonists who were born, educated and/or worked in the state is amazing. It was fitting during this bicentennial year to honor our state’s extraordinary legacy with this exhibition.
The digital version of the exhibition Ohio Cartoonists: A Bicentennial Celebration highlights the accomplishments of six of the state’s most notable late nineteenth and early twentieth century newspaper and magazine cartoonists.

The on-line version presents the works of only six cartoonists: Edwina Dumm, Billy Ireland, Winsor McCay, Charles Nelan, Frederick Burr Opper and Richard Outcault. However, the images of comics and cartoons worth a visit.

Those who live in Los Angeles can enjoy the exhibition “Under the Influence: A Tribute to Stan Lee” on the Gallery 1988, until February 1. The other mere mortals, like me, can enjoy the neat art homages presented on this exhibition on its page Stan Lee Tribute Artwork. The works include paintings, collages, illustrations, watercolours, cute plush toys, sculptures and other mixed media creations. (via a sampler of things)

The list of Batman films I watched doesn’t include the 1966 Batman. The film directed by Leslie H. Martinson was filmed at the end of the first season of 1960’s Batman TV series. The LiveJournal page film_stills: Batman: The Movie has several high resolution images from the film, that apparently had the same “quality” of the TV series. Even if you was a fan you have to agree with me that the costumes aren’t the high point of the series. Julie Newmar was, but she wasn’t in the film. (via Bedazzled)
Related posts:
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The History of the Batmobile

Here are my collection of links with cats, specially saved to blog today. And before you run away complaining “Oh no, cat pictures!”, take a look on the images and their descriptions. They have cats, of course, but they aren’t all just about cats.
The toy above, called Gato, was designed by Israel Chavira. This cat loves honey, probably cause his bee body type. A silly curiosity: the Spanish word “Gato” means cat, chat, Katze, katt, gàtto, and it has the same writing for Portuguese, gato.

Among the hundreds of cool scanned images of Modern Mechanix, the vintage articles with cats always get my attention. And, of course, I saved them to share: Cats Are Fun to Photograph, From Cats to Cataclysms, Cat Pictures Used to Scare Away Birds, Blows Glass Globe Around Cats (no cats were harmed!) and Things I Learned from Ten Thousand Cats. The last article is from 1934, but some things about what we know about cats didn’t change.

By A. J. Adamson

ONLY by dealing patiently and kindly with a cat, particularly during its early life, may you develop the sort of animal everyone wants as a companion and pet. Unlike dogs, cats will respond only to kindness. Punish them and they grow surly and spiteful. I speak from rich experience, having bred fully 10,000 cats during the last quarter of a century.

The old idea was that every animal should be punished when caught in a wrongful act, but cats do not understand the meaning of a whipping. They are weak-willed and easily tempted and must, therefore, be guided in paths of righteousness.

Before all those stupid mania of LOLcats (I’m tired of them), there was The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats, a comic strip created and illustrated by the cartoonist Aloysius “Gorilla” Koford, according to Adam Koford his grandson. From 1912-1913 he produced a comic strip which was featured in 17 newspapers, including the Philadephia Star-Democrat, the Tampa Telegraph, and the Santa Fe Good-Newser. It featured the exploits of one Meowlin Q. Kitteh (a sort of cat hobo-raconteur) and his young hapless kitten friend, Pip. Adam is sharing those “treasures” (the comics are brilliant), and until now there are 340 images on the Flickr set. BTW, there is something on those comics that reminds me Krazy Kat. (via Will You Look At That)

The iCat is a project developed by Philips Research Technologies in 2005. I think iCat is a bit scary.

iCat is a research platform for studying human-robot interaction topics. The robot is 38 cm tall and is equipped with 13 servos that control different parts of the face, such as the eyebrows, eyes, eyelids, mouth and head position. With this setup iCat can generate many different facial expressions – happy, surprise, angry, sad – that are needed to create social human-robot interaction dialogues.
A camera installed in iCat’s head can be used for different computer vision capabilities, such as recognizing objects and faces.

The giant Plant Cup designed by Gitta Gschwendtner, was available at YouSayTomayto for $338.00. You can’t buy it for now, however, you can take a look on set of pictures Plant Cup, with more demonstrations of its uses by Eek, the grey cat, and Miss Moneypenny. Grey cats rock.

Doug Savage is known for his humorous cartoons Savage Chickens drawn on post-its. The Savage Chickens is daily cartoon with an acid humour, and for your enjoyment has a feed available. And I must say that just now I’ve got a decent attitude to subscribe to it (yes, I know, I should do it before).

The sometimes-slow-creature-here noticed this neat cartoon due to Doug Savage had won the Laura Veirs and Saltbreakers music video contest. The stop-motion video was made to the song “Phantom Mountain”. The contest rules were simple: made a videoclip for any of their songs and send it until August 31th. He tells about his video experience on the page Behind the Scenes. Some of the Phantom Mountain Fun Facts:

There are about 500 sticky notes in the video, including a butterfly and 4 or 5 stunt butterflies.
There are over 1500 photos in the video. I used a digital camera on a tripod, which I had to sort of crouch over. My back was killing me!

I drew so many cartoons that I actually developed a callus on the inside of my left thumb from drawing too much. Towards the end, I had to get up and shake out my arm every few minutes.
The old clock radio on the table used to belong to my great-grandmother.

And finally, the winner music video bellow (3 min). Great work.(via Koreus)

The classic sexy comic books’ Vampirella had a Portuguese version: Zakarella, illustrated by Carlos Alberto Santos. On O Fantástico ilustrado por Carlos Alberto Santos (The fantastic illustrated by Carlos Alberto Santos), there are five covers of this Portuguese version and the original images of them (click on the covers to see them). According to the site in Portuguese:

The infernal (and sculptural) character, which gave the name to the magazine imagined by Roussado Pinto, was a kind of Vampirella with Portuguese manners, and because of lack of opportunities to great adventures, as the American version, she used to punish the troublemakers in Lisbon and its neighbourhood. Each number of Zakarella included a short story by Ross Pynn (pseudonym of Roussado Pinto) with the heroin adventures. The covers and the illustrations of those short stories were created by Carlos Alberto Santos, e good part of the success of this magazine is due to his work. (28 numbers / editions of Zakarella were published over two years)

I hope this so so, and almost literal, translation helps. The covers of the 28 editions published are available at Comics BD Portugal: just keep clicking on the tabs to see all them. BTW, those links are probably NSFW. (via coisas do arco da velha)

Related posts:
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Robert Berry, from the great pop culture site retroCRUSH, made a list of The Top 10 Greatest Super Villain Costumes Of All Time. The list includes: the Catwoman, Ming the Merciless, Black Manta, Poison Ivy, Dark Phoenix, the Riddler, Galactus, the Green Goblin, Harley Quinn and Doctor Doom.
Contradicting the provisions, my vote for super villain costume of that list doesn’t go to Catwoman, it goes to Poison Ivy. My suggestion to that list: the French arch-villain character Fantômas, one of the most well dressed villains I’ve ever seen.
Of course he also made a list with the twenty Coolest Super Hero Costumes. The Phantom, The Shadow, Wolverine, Green Lantern, Spider-Man and even the costume of the Japanese superhero Ultraman are on the list. Not my favourite, the super kitsch Spectreman. I loved the TV series when I was 8 and I keep some good (=funny) memories of it.

Read also: The Top Ten Lamest Superheroes of All Time, The greatest comics and Canadians comic heroes, Pulp Heroes, International Superheroes, Sexual orientations of comics characters.

I never had a science fiction pulp book on my own hands, but in the last years I became an admirer of them, through several sites who kindly shared collections of those vintage books. EC Science Fiction Comics is one of those amusing sites. They have a nice collection of science fiction comic books released by EC Comics.

Entertaining Comics, more commonly known as EC Comics, was an American publisher of comic books specializing in crime fiction, horror fiction, satire, military fiction and science fiction from the 1940s through the 1950s, until censorship pressures prompted it to concentrate on the seminal humor magazine Mad.

The collection is composed of four galleries: Explore the galleries of cover of Weird Fantasy, Weird Science, Incredible Science Fiction and Weird Science-Fantasy. (via SciFi Scanner)
More posts with sci-fi comic book covers: Life on Mars, The Science Fiction Art of H. W. McCauley,L’univers des Bédés Elvifrance, The Visual Index of Science Fiction Cover art, Comics, pulp and sci-fi books, Scans of Eerie Publications and Star Trek Comics.

I grew up picturing death as the Grim Reaper, the skeletal figure carrying a large scythe. Even though I studied in catholic schools, I’ve never believed their philosophy that death is an angel of God and there is a better place after the death. Death is the end. I like the idea of reincarnation but I don’t believe in it, but if I did believe in it my friends very well know that I would like to return as a cat.
Ingmar Bergman took me to a new fantastic dimension of death with his masterpiece The Seventh Seal. Since then, the grim reaper, played by Bengt Ekerot in the film, is a nice and strange man that plays chess, that still carries a scythe. In that cause I would be… damned (I can’t use any “f word” here), because I’m a terrible chess player. In this new representation of death, the death itself was much more human than the catholic teachings would have it. He/she had intelligence, sense of humor – even if a bit strange – and it was almost understanding of our shortcomings, but still implacable. Remember: the grim reaper cheats and always win.
Neil Gaiman showed me another version of death, as a cool pretty girl with a Gothic style, who everybody loves.His death “looks like rock star Nico in 1968, with the perfect cheekbones and perfect face she has on the cover of her Chelsea Girl album.” His death always try to be nice, but keep doing her work. Interesting vision, but I keep the Bergman’s portray of death as my favourite.

But that was until now. From now on, the grim reaper is a cat to me. This article changed it all for me: Oscar the Cat Predicts Patients’ Deaths (via The Pet Blog):

When Oscar the Cat visits residents of the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island, the staff jumps into action — Oscar can sense within hours when someone is about to die.
In his two years living in Steere’s end-stage dementia unit, Oscar has been at the bedside of more than 25 residents shortly before they died, according to Dr. David Dosa of Brown University in Providence.
After about six months, the staff noticed Oscar would make his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses. He’d sniff and observe patients, then sit beside people who would wind up dying in a few hours.

The fury grim reaper is the cutest representation I ever seen. That’s the perfect image of death for me. However, I don’t want he visiting me for now. The story about Oscar the cat was originally published at The New England Journal of Medicine by David M. Dosa, and it’s in everywhere now, including Scientific American and BBC (video). My favourite part is:

Making his way back up the hallway, Oscar arrives at Room 313. The door is open, and he proceeds inside. Mrs. K. is resting peacefully in her bed, her breathing steady but shallow. [...]
One hour passes. Oscar waits. A nurse walks into the room to check on her patient. She pauses to note Oscar’s presence. Concerned, she hurriedly leaves the room and returns to her desk.[..]
The priest is called to deliver last rites. And still, Oscar has not budged, instead purring and gently nuzzling Mrs. K. A young grandson asks his mother, “What is the cat doing here?” The mother, fighting back tears, tells him, “He is here to help Grandma get to heaven.” Thirty minutes later, Mrs. K. takes her last earthly breath.

He’s Charon. If you thought this interesting, read also Can pets sense illness? article.
More posts with death: Cinemorgue, The Fantastic in Art and Fiction, My Death Space, Collection of Life and Death Masks, Death according to Giornale Nuovo,Medieval Macabre and Coconino Classics.

After the comics about heroin abuse and the Grenada Comic Book, the Ethan Persoff site now presents the not intentional funny Comics with Problems. “Pick a problem” and start reading to get the message. There are sad stories of unborn children, drug addicts, S.T.D., sniffing for young people, stress, child abuse, poisonous substances and alcoholism.
Even been funny, those comics are also informative. An example is case of the comic book handed out one night only during a Madonna concert in 1897 about AIDS with the support of the American Foundation for AIDS Research. I could also point the Diabetes, the one of Household Dangers of Guns (for children) and the smoking dangers comic book, because I’m an anti-smoking person. (via coisas do arco da velha)
Read also: Horror, Suspense, Romance and Humour on Comics and Comics links: robots, gorillas and drugs.