(no title)

Remembering Mary

marytylermoore

In the past couple of days, after Mary Tyler Moore’s death, I have been hearing about how much she influenced the women and girls at the time. I feel as if it’s some inside joke that I wasn’t a part of, but it’s not a joke, she affected women deeply, being a guy, I didn’t know. I’ve watched so many women tv reporters and anchors speak of how she showed them how they could make it on their own. How they would be strong and single and do their own thing. Even Oprah Winfrey, the queen of it all was influenced by Mary.

A friend wrote on Facebook of how she felt the first time she moved from Queens to Manhattan on her own, as she drove over the 59th Street Bridge, she was crying, tears of emotion and joy, and she had Mary on her mind as she made her way to her new life! Amazing.

I enjoyed the show, I don’t think I missed an episode. Saturday night was Mary Tyler Moore night along with Bob Newhart, Carol Burnett and All in the Family and of course I have always enjoyed the Dick Van Dyke reruns. I enjoyed Mary because she was funny and her shows were well written and funny, but I admire her so much more now for seeing how she influenced so many women over the years. I didn’t even know it. I didn’t know how important she was to young women everywhere.

I always had her up there with Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett, but now I see her in a different light.

GoComics newbies

I’ve taken to reading GoComics again. I had taken a break for a couple of years. I like these newbies that I see there now.

comic1 — **Amanda the Great** reminds me of **Hark A Vagrant** and that genre of webcomic.

comic2 — **Wallace the Brave** has a **Cul de Sac** feel. It’s drawn so greatly and it’s funny.

comic3 — I love the look and feel of **The Sunshine Club**. It reminds me so much of the old **Eek & Meek** comic and now I know why, Howie Schneider, the cartoonist was Eek & Mee’s cartoonist! Eek & Meek were mice and then they turned into people or vice versa, I don’t remember, but I loved reading it. The Sunshine Club is rerun, since Howie passed away a few years back. We used to get it in the Homestead News Leader in Miami.

comic4 — **Next Door Neighbors** is clever and I love the drawing style.

comic5 — It’s not new, it’s old, and that’s what I love about **Mutt & Jeff** on GoComics.

comic6 — I like the drawing style and the gags in **G-Man Webcomics**.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle

I found this cool site, the Brooklyn Newsstand by the Brooklyn Public Library where you can see all of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s issues from 1841 through 1955. I was randomly reading something online and one thing lead to another and this site appeared.

I love reading old newspapers and this seems to be complete. The newspapers from the 1800s are a bit boring, as they are usually about four pages long with small type and boring stories, but as you go on from the 1900s and on, it gets quite interesting.

The first thing I always look for in old newspapers is the comics section and they had quite a few good comics from Mary Worth, Steve Roper to the Bumble Family.

You can look through some interesting old stories and advertisements. Look up any date and it’s there – the Titanic sinking, World War I and II, presidential races . . . whatever.

Of course there are many other sites with old newspapers, but for some reason, I don’t know why, I have always been fascinated by the Brooklyn Eagle. I read that it was once the largest daily afternoon newspaper in the country and perhaps I like it because I picture my parents and grandparents reading it during its heyday since their whole life was Brooklyn at that period. Sort of like the L train (I did a story on that here called “Ghosts of the L Train“).

The name Brooklyn Daily Eagle went into public domain and now is being used as a new digital version of the Eagle. You can see that here.

brooklyn-eagle2 — Tuesday, April 5, 1927

brooklyn-eagle4 — Saturday, June 8, 1935

The logo game

When I was in my teens and maybe early 20s, I used to design logos. I think I charged $89.00 for a logo. I worked at a community newspaper and they would run the ad for me in the classified section. It was a small black box, about an inch square and it said “Logos” very large and then my phone number. This is before email or I would have put the email address in the ad.

I would prepare a few designs and the person would buy one and I would make it into a black and white contact sheet and that was there logo. No EPS files or PDF files or vector files, just a black and white piece to work from.

In the village where I live, there was a shoe store that had my logo on their window, for so many years. It was called “Coconuts” and the “T” was a palm tree. And every time I passed I was proud to say, “I did that.” That was years ago, ironically, I just ate at that location, it’s a restaurant now.

pepsi

The whole subject comes up because I read that Pepsi changed their logo from the one on the left to the one on the right. And guess what? They paid $1 million to Arnell Associates to create the new logo for them.

I would say I’m in the wrong business, maybe I should go back to it. It’s like you create logos and if you’re fortunate, you get one huge account, do the job and retire.

The disappearing riverboat

This is an amazing shot. It was so foggy in New Oreans the other day, you could barely see your hand in front of your face. I’ve never seen fog like that before. I video’s this. Watch as the Creole Queen riverboat disappears as it heads out into the fog on the Mississippi River. Watch till the end. Amazing.

The art bazaar in NOLA

I’m in New Orleans for the weekend. Always love it here and I’m always finding something new. Yesterday I came across this art bazaar or bizarre as they call it there. It’s an empty lot in the middle of the block, on 1200 block of Decauter Street. For some reason, it looks like something you would see in Brooklyn, but I’m sure this is all originally NOLA.

There was an artist named Jason working on something and during weekends, there is more than one artists present and it’s like a little flea market then. It’s funny, with one artist it feels like a gallery, with more, a flea market.

I like the dinosaur, but how would I get it home?

Shattered sculptures thanks to FedEx

glass1

If you’re planning on sending something made of glass via FedEx or UPS, beware, your item may not end up in one piece, but this is the hopes of one artist. Los Angeles-based Walead Beshty has sent glass pieces for nine years, from 2005 to 2014, via FedEx, using their standard shipping boxes and the pieces of glass invariably crack in transit.

This is his goal. The cracked pieces are now art to Walead. It was his goal for the pieces to break. He calls them “FedEx Works.” The pieces are the size and shape of the boxes.

glass2

The pieces that are delivered to the galleries, are then taken out, pieces back together and displayed on top of their shipping boxes. This is the art.

From Wikipedia: “Beshty earned a Bachelor of Arts from Bard College in 1999, and a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University School of Art in 2002. He is an Associate Professor in the Graduate Art Department at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, and has taught at numerous schools including University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, Irvine; the California Institute of the Arts; School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and the MFA Program at Bard College. Beshty has exhibited widely in numerous institutions and galleries around the world.”

Walead discusses his art here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WffqBKryxk

glass3 glass4 glass5

George Herriman and the Southwest

wetherill — A piece that George Herriman drew for his friends the Wetherills with that incredible Southwestern background.

I’m enjoying the George Herriman biography. It’s draggy in parts but quite good. He had an interesting life and was right at the height of cartooning when newspapers were basically the only source of news and read by everyone daily. He was a humble man and a rich one. He made a lot of money producing Krazy Kat.

I enjoy the parts where he visits Arizona, which is often. That landscape became such a big part of the Krazy Kat comic strip as he played with the vistas and the light in each comic. He loved it there, even though he lived in New York and Los Angeles for most of his life. He was born in New Orleans.

There was a couple near Flagstaff, Arizona, the Wetherills, John and Louisa, who hosted George and friends in the real Coconino County. They sort of ran a guest house, something like that. George enjoyed visiting them and spending long dinners at a long table at their house with fellow cartoonists who traveled with him including Rudolph Dirks, originator of the Katzenjammer Kids, and cartoonist and artist Jimmy Swinnerton, who moved to Arizona with his wife in 1906 for health reasons.

George Herriman would do a few Krazy Kat comics and submit them and then take the train to Arizona. He would also draw there between day trips around Arizona with the others and mail in the strips to King Features Syndicate. He visited New Mexico and Utah, too.

I like so much of his lifestyle. I enjoy the aspect of traveling and cartooning along the way, that’s one reason I gave up my Wacom Cintiq for a Surface Pro, so that I could draw on my travels.

Oddly enough, I’ve always been drawn to the Southwest even though I have never been. I like the idea of being in Arizona and New Mexico and when I was a child I used to pretend that my bedroom was a trailer out in the desert somewhere. I don’t know why, but that always intrigued me. I used to like the tv show “Alice” because it took place in Phoenix and I got hooked on “Breaking Bad” right away when I saw the trailer out in the desert for the first time. Did I live there in another life? Who knows, but I like that I have that in common with George Herriman.

On hold

So there will be a slight delay in the relaunch of my Tomversation comic. I had planned for a January 1 launch, which I loved since it was the first comic publishing on the first day of the year, but I had to delay it a bit. It seems that I may start publishing at a comics website and also I am in talks with a major daily newspaper. So it would make sense to have all the comics run at the same time on the same days rather than start it at different times.

I’ll update you as soon as I know what’s going on.

George Herriman

krazykat I’ve been reading this new book on George Herriman, the creator and cartoonist of Krazy Kat. I always wondered what the early days of cartooning were like and this is set in that time period. When George Herriman first started drawing for newspapers, for ads and things like that, the whole idea of newspaper drawings was new and at the turn of the century (1900) comic strips started.

It was the time of Pulitzer and Hearst and the New York World and New York Journal and Park Row in NYC.

I sort of wish I lived at that time, when anyone with talent could get a job cartooning because there were so many newspapers and syndicates that there was room for everybody.

I saw this image of New York City from the snowy winter of 1905, which is frozen moment in time (no pun intended), the period I’m now reading about in the book. These people in the photo read the World, Journal and all the other New York papers and they saw George Herriman’s work when it was new and fresh.

oldny