After her impressive and highly disturbing debut Daddy’s Girl, Miss Drechsler went on to create an excellent, moody, duotone-colored comic book called Nowhere for Drawn and Quarterly. These comics have been collected in the book Summer of Love. Note that Summer of Love is currently available for a 50% discount on the Drawn and Quarterly website, including a softcover, hardcover and limited edition version.
Here’s another example of F.M. Howarth’s strip The Love of Lulu and Leander from 1905. Click the image to read the strip.
You can see more examples of this strip (and many other classic comics) at Barnacle Press.
Pictured above: Tiny Pirate, Monkey of The Seven Seas, drawn by Ape Lad
Ape Lad (aka Adam Koford) is easily the most prolific cartoonist in the previously mentioned 700 projects… he is also by far one of the best. He actually drew versions of all 700 of the 700 hobos single-handedly… and then drew 100 more!
When he isn’t participating in the 700 projects, what does he do? He draws, apparently! Check out his wonderful Hobotopia blog here. He is currently drawing comissioned monkey postcards, and they are all quite wonderful… and cheap! Only 20 bones, you provide a name and he draws it, full color. I’m ordering mine tonight. Bingo Bango and his Magic Fez, if you were wondering.
Also notable: Ape Lad has invented an interesting cartoonist parlour game… the one hour alphabet. His one hour alphabets are much, much better than the vast majority of a-z children’s books that I’ve read (and believe me, I’ve read a LOT of them in the last year)… and he did them in an hour! I gotta try that game some time.
To see much, much more of Ape Lad’s work, here is a link to his huge, amazing flickr pool.
Here’s another example of Frederick Opper’s strip Happy Hooligan from 1904. Click the image to read the strip.
You can see more examples of Happy Hooligan (and many other classic comics) at Barnacle Press. Here are some other Opper strips at Barnacle Press.
Alex Toth had an amazing eye for simplification and composition. His streamlined character designs for television animation are legendary, and extremely influential. He’s the man who designed Space Ghost.
Click on the above image to see a larger version on comicartfans.com.
#149 Art Adams
Art Adams got his start working at Marvel comics, notably creating the memorable character Longshot. Adams has a lush and detailed style won him a legion of fans from the beginning of his career. His masterpiece (so far) is probably Monkeyman and O’Brien, which was published and collected by Dark Horse Comics. He has also done a couple of wonderful Gumby comics with Bob Burden (the creator of Flaming Carrot), and did a recent pinup in this year’s Gumby Free Comic Book Day comic. He recently did a fun series called Jonni Future in the pages of Alan Moore’s Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales. You can find out more about Mr. Adams in his wikipedia entry.
Click the image above to see the full version at comicartfans.com.
Here’s another example of Rube Goldberg‘s strip Boob McNutt (along with a header strip called Bill), this one from January 5, 1930. Note that this strip also includes Goldberg’s characters Mike and Ike… they look alike! Note that this strip contains offensive racial depictions… if this sort of thing offends you I suggest you avoid reading it. Click the image to read the strip.
You can see more examples of this strip (and many other classic comics) at Coconino Classics.
This is the first of 150 posts covering a list I made of the World’s 150 Greatest Cartoonists! The list will be revealed from the bottom up on a regular basis until we get to number one.
The list is my top 150 that I wrote down, yesterday, May 8, 2007 (I actually wrote down 214, but we’re cutting it off at 150). I’m not a particularly consistent fella, and I’m sure the list would vary wildly depending on what day I formulated it on.
Some things to keep in mind:
1) This list is based on nothing other than my fleeting opinions of May 8, 2007. This is not a list of the most influential cartoonists, or most prolific cartoonists, or best draftsmen, or the best storytellers… just a list of the 150 cartoonists I felt were the best all-around cartoonists on this particular date. Some of them don’t draw, and just write comics. Some of them don’t write, and just draw comics. Most of them do both the writing and drawing.
2) There are some serious gaps in my knowledge. Although there are some non-US cartoonists on the list, by knowledge of comics is unfortunately skewed towards that which has been available in the US. Also, there are many, many more men than women… just as there have traditionally been more male than female cartoonists. In spite of being a web cartoonist, I really haven’t adequately experienced the wide world of webcomics either… there are so many of them, I wonder if anyone really has?
3) If I know you, you aren’t on the list. I don’t want to open that can of worms, and I can’t really be objective about the work of my friends, so although some of my comrades would certainly have made this list if they were considered, they weren’t.
Basically, an accurate title for this would be The 150 Greatest Cartoonists I Don’t Know, Based on My Limited Knowledge, and Only Accurate for the Date of May 8, 2007 Countdown! Let’s just call this ridiculous endeavor The 150 Greatest Cartoonists Countdown!, huh?
Mr. Kochalka is a pioneer of the webcomic diary, and his daily American Elf sketchbook comics are wonderful and almost always engaging, drawn with a beautiful zen simplicity. This is probably the best starting point for his work, and his sketchbook diaries have been collected by Top Shelf in two volumes so far. A partial bibliography of his work and a biography can be found on his wikipedia entry.
Don’t miss Kochalka’s hilarious Fancy Froglin’s Sexy Forest, which is probably the cutest obscene comic you will ever read. He has a lot of other comics worth investigating as well.
There was a recent request on the Comics Journal message board for more information about Rube Goldberg‘s Boob McNutt. Rube Goldberg is, of course, best known for his inventions comics that got him immortalized in the dictionary. However, the inventions were only one aspect of his output… I much prefer his other stuff to the funny but formulaic inventions strips.
Goldberg’s non-inventions comics have been unfortunately pretty neglected as far as reprints go. Other than random samplings in comics history overview books, such as the excellent out-of-print but widely available cheap Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, the only reprint of his non-inventions work I’m aware of is the Bobo Baxter volume of the Bill Blackbeard edited Hyperion Library of Classic American Comic Strips from 1977.
Here’s an example of Boob McNutt from February 22, 1925. Click the image to read the strip. I’ll have a color one for you tomorrow.
You can see more examples of this strip (and many other classic comics) at Coconino Classics.
Here’s a really nice Boob McNutt original I just found googling.
Here’s my contribution to the 700 Robots project from the larger 700 Things project.
Robot #288: Lumberjack 2.0
Lumberjack 2.0 is the latest in deforestation technology. Far superior to the Lumberjack 1.0 and 1.3, as well as the previous BunyanBot models, Lumberjack 2.0 can whittle a natural acre to lumber, firewood and toothpicks (with the little sculpted lines, like the ones you frequently find in Chinese restaurants) in less than an hour. Best of all, the Lumberjack 2.0 is entirely solar-powered, which works great since shade will soon be in short supply!
