My friend Ken Avidor sent me this hilarious Disney transportation vision of the future from the 1958 Disneyland TV Show episode entitled “Magic Highway USA”. It looks like it was animated by Bruce McCall. Somehow they missed the brilliant modern innovations of talking on the phone and watching movies as you drive, which seem like such obvious good ideas!
This blog has been fortunate enough to get a lot of link love lately for the Crumbling Paper Index…
arflovers
The Beat
Collected Comics Library
The Comics Reporter
Drawn.ca
The Fate of the Artist (Eddie Campbell’s Blog)
Flog!
History News Network
¡Journalista!
Metafilter
Neatorama
Newsarama
Thanks much to everyone who has linked here… it is much appreciated!
I commented extensively on Eddie Campbell’s blog here regarding some confusion over what I said regarding the world of the early comics versus the modern world in the post I made on race and ethnicity in the early comics.
UPDATE: The esteemed Mr. Campbell noted something in my comments that I should have… that it wasn’t his confusion I was commenting on over on his blog, but rather confusion one of his commenters had.
Barnacle Press has more historical comics posted than anywhere else I’ve seen on the web. Run by two fellas, Thrillmer! and Holmes!, the amount of historical comics material they have put out on the web dwarfs what I’ve presented here… it is a huge collection. They have a wealth of examples of comics that have been reprinted nowhere else. I link to them almost every time I post old comics, because they frequently have other examples. Don’t miss this one.
Pictured above, the first panel of the May 18th, 1902 episode of Alice in Funnyland on Barnacle Press. One of a hundred and fifty examples of it they have there, if I counted right. That’s one of the almost 200 features they have represented there so far.
Here’s a wonderfully funny strip I scanned titled Majic Pictures and Cut-Outs by Prof. Bughouse by an unknown artist from 1905. If you can identify the artist, please let me know… his signature is in the lower right panel.
Click the image to view the full strip.
UPDATE: Troylloyd in the comments pointed out something obvious I forgot to mention… the cartoonist’s last name signed in the last panel appears to be Anderson. He also pointed out that there was a Professor Bughouse strip by John A. Lemon in 1904, which is likely to be related to this feature. Thanks, Troylloyd!
Here is an utterly bizarre short by the largely forgotten animator and actor Charley Bowers. You have to skip over the excessively obnoxious first 40 seconds to get to the film. The fantastic animation isn’t until the last half of the film.
Read more about this film on the Internet Movie Database.
There’s a Charley Bowers DVD that I gotta see one of these days. Here’s the product description for that:
Who is Charley Bowers? The inventor of the no-slipping banana skin, unbreakable eggs, and cat-pushing trees! At the end of the 1920s, this unknown genius created and directed a score of cinematic burlesques filled with surrealist imagination, crammed with fantastic sights and animated puppets, among which the most delicious include “Egged On,” “Fatal Footstep” and “Now You Tell One.” His body of work is unique, though the astonishing course his career took has been chronicled by few and left him as one of the more enigmatic figures of American cinema. After a childhood spent with the circus, he became interested in animated drawing, adapting comic strips for the cinema including the “Mutt and Jeff” series created by Bud Fisher. Advances in animation which developed during this period explain the astonishing illusions which emerged in these comedic shorts. In the 1930s he directed “It#s a Bird,” his first sound film. Bowers returned to animation for advertising films, in particular the first short film by Joseph Losey, the oil-commissioned “Pete Roleum and His Cousins,” while also continuing his puppet films. He died in 1946, completely forgotten. To this day, 11 of the 20 short comedies are still considered lost. At the end of the 1960s, vault discoveries provided more of his story and three of the exhumed films were shown in 1976 at the Annecy Animated Film Festival, where they were met with enthusiasm. After 1992, worldwide research retrieved surviving prints of the missing films with requests to the world#s notable cinema collectors, who allowed access to their original elements. For the first time this extraordinary collection assembles the complete films of Charley Bowers which survive today, magnificently restored from the original elements with the collaboration of ten cinema societies.