Tom The Dancing Bug Blog

Last one out turn off the lights, please

It's just been officially announced that the Village Voice / New Times chain, the largest group of alternative weeklies, is suspending the use of all syndicated comic strips in all its newspapers.

Now when readership plummets because there are no comics in the newspapers, they can say, "Whew, good thing we dropped the comics when we did because now things have gotten REALLY bad!"

Down the rabbit hole...

of computer problems.  My computer has decided to spaz out and freeze after 5 seconds to 10 minutes of use, depending on its whim (increasingly, much more toward the 5 second end of the spectrum).  So please excuse any delays in posting, reposnding, etc. until this gets sorted out.

(Tekserve, New York City's Apple repair and sales mecca, has looked at it and said there's no problem!)

Here we go.

Another Harvey

I took the whole family to the official opening of the Harvey Comics exhibit at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoMA) last night.  What fun, and what a stellar job curators Ellen S. Abramowitz and Karl Erickson did presenting this show (with original curation work by Andrew Farago).  Beautiful job by Cliff Abrams on the wall illustrations.

The second and third generations of the Harvey family were there, and it was really nice to see Harvey experts and enthusiasts gathered, analyzing art and swapping stories.  And my kids had fun running around with the Harvey grandkids.

I was proud that I was able to positively identify the artist on a page of art that had been labeled "Artist Unknown, possible Steve Muffatti."  (It was obviously a Warren Kremer.  Duh!).  And, speaking of "Duh," of course I was disappointed that Baby Huey, my personal favorite Harvey character, wasn't properly represented.

The exhibit runs through March 15.

This week's comic...

Don't click on the above picture.  You might catch something.  Click here.

And check out master colorist Brian Whitmer's brilliant job on the Charmin bears.

I'm on the internets.

I speak my mind on a couple of other blogs -- because you just don't get enough of me in my comic strip and this blog.

"From the Editors" interview.  John Glynn and I get adorably silly.  We're irrepressible!

Will I miss Geo. Bush?  Don't miss my surprising answer!

The face of mainstream media

Thanks to everyone who came out to KGB Bar for the comics presentation.  It was really Tim Kreider's night, and his presentation rocked -- Bush imitations, robot voices, and everything.

One snippet of my little talk:  I described seeing John King on the Colbert Report last week.  Colbert asked him about the criticism that the press was too soft on Bush for the first five years of his administration.  King's response:

“We, as an institution, did make some mistakes.  No question about it.  In the lead-up to the Iraq War, in the post-9/11 moment, we in the media did, I think his own party, and the Democrats in Congress did.  Too many people got caught up in the post-9/11 patriotic mood and thought maybe we’re not supposed to ask the critical questions of the president.  I hope we ask those questions of any president, whether his name be George W. Bush or Barack Obama, and I hope we learn that lesson.”

I told the crowd that it wasn't this canned self-serving speech that sent shivers up my spine -- it was the smirk King shot Colbert for a split-second, right afterwards.  The smirk said:  See, I got off my obligatory little paragraph proving I'm not an idealogue and will admit to mistakes, so get out of my way and let me do my new Sunday morning talk show, where I'll have on the same people who were so confidently wrong during those five years, and ignore all the unserious wack-jobs who were right.

And then, the crowd gasped when I showed on the screen...
the smug smirk of the mainstream media:

Way before SNL

Via Jerry Beck and Mark Evanier (that's two in a row for Mark, but this one is too good to pass up):

The home movie that the Barstow family took of their vacation in Disneyland in 1956 was recently given the honor of being named to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.  This caught the attention of Steve Martin, who was eleven years old at the time the movie was shot and working at the park selling guidebooks (which I'd read about in Martin's autobiography, Born Standing Up).  He spotted himself in the footage and contacted the filmmaker Robbins Bastow.  If you watch the movie, you can see little Stevie Martin very briefly, described in this article.

EVENT REMINDER: SUNDAY, 7PM - KGB BAR, NYC

 

click here for details.

Meeeeeee-ooooooo-wwwwww.

Via the always entertaining and informative Mark Evanier, this clip of Walt Disney voicing Mickey Mouse, opposite actor Billy Bletcher.

Apparently Walt Disney almost never did his Mickey Mouse voice in public, probably for the sake of both his image and Mickey's, so this is rare footage.  And it's amazing how deep and rich Bletcher's voice is despite his 5'2" frame.

But what struck me about the clip is that seeing the actors perform really highlights the slow pace of these old cartoons.  In today's cartoons, there would be four jump-cuts and two scene changes in the time it takes Bletcher to say "Meow."