I love this illustration by Klaas Verplancke for the recent ‘Style Issue’ of the New Yorker (which has a fun animated version of the cover on its website).
It works on lots of levels, but it also feels like a bit of nostalgic throwback. People look at their phones these days (although I did see someone with a word search book on the Toronto subway this morning, so some people are keeping it old school at least).
When PRINT launched in June 1940 (!), its first issue was a technical powerhouse from the foremost minds of the graphic arts. Then, in 2019, something remarkable happened: PRINT died. The company that owned it declared bankruptcy, and PRINT suddenly disappeared into the publishing ether from which it came.
And then, later that year, something even more remarkable happened: Debbie Millman, Steven Heller, Andrew Gibbs, Jessica Deseo, Laura Des Enfants, and Deb Aldrich banded together and formed an independent enterprise to save PRINT from its demise and former besuited overlords.
Now, in 2021, PRINT has moved on to its next chapter. So, yes, PRINT is dead. But it’s also more alive than ever.
Based on the short story “Her Lover” by Maksim Gorky, BOLES is short animated film by Špela Čadež about a writer with writer’s block and the woman who lives next door:
I have to confess that I frequently find This American Life kind of irritating, but this collaboration with Chris Ware and The New Yorker to create an animated magazine cover is neat:
The animation was done by Ware and John Kuramoto. You can read more about how it came about on The New Yorker culture blog.
It has been an undeniably grim few days, but if you’re looking for a moment of light-relief, take 15 minutes and watch the brilliant (and joyously silly) ‘Super Science Friends’pilot episode. Successfully kickstarted November 2014, ‘Super Science Friends’ was created by Brett Jubinville, and animated by Toronto-based Tinman Creative. It features a team of time-travelling super scientists led by Winston Churchill who travel through time to fight Nazis, Soviet zombie cosmonauts, and all manner of evil science villains:
In an interview with CBC Radio in 1958, pianist Glenn Gould recounted how he came to play Beethoven in a gas mask. Now CBC Music have turned that anecdote into a charming short film illustrated by designer Heather Collett, and animated by Philip Street and John Fraser:
For me, and I suspect plenty of other people of a certain age, the noir-inspired Batman: The Animated Series, is still the most satisfying version of the character to come to screen. The series has long since ended but happily, Bruce Timm, co-creator of the series, has produced a new, wonderfully retro, animated short called Batman: Strange Days to celebrate the Dark Knight’s 75th anniversary:
In a recent interview with Comics Alliance, Timm talked about his work on the original series and the retro look of the new short:
I wanted to make the whole cartoon look as if it was like the cartoon itself was made in 1939, got stuck in a vault somewhere, and nobody has seen it until now. Not that I thought we were going to pull that kind of hoax, but that was the feel I wanted. I wanted it to be so authentically old school. I went back and looked at those early Bob Kane comics and even though they’re really super crude, there’s something really cool about the way Batman looks in those comics. He’s got the really long ears, they kind of stick out in an inverted “A” shape, or a “V” shape, on the top of his head because they kind of stick out on an angle; they’re really tall. He’s got tiny eyes, his trunks are long, his boots are long. He has short little gloves. I tried to incorporate as much of that in there as possible.
No surprise then that like the animated series, it reminds me a lot of the Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons from the early 1940s. The first episode of that series, “The Mad Scientist”, was released September 26th 1941 (before Superman could even fly!):
Personally, I like the episode 2, “The Mechanical Monsters, a lot:
And just as side note, when Batman first battled Hugo Strange’s giant monster men in Batman #1 (Spring 1940), he doesn’t mess about with tear gas — he actually takes them down with a machine gun. It would be the last time Batman killed anyone on purpose.
How is that I’ve not seen Herzog and the Monsters before now? Lesley Barnes‘ lovely 2006 short animated film, made at the Glasgow School of Arts, has just about all you could wish for: “a small boy who steals words, a forest full of monsters and lots of vintage penguin books.”
Earlier this week, someone I know (you know who are!) suggested that people who work in publishing like to pay lip-service libraries while not actually making use of the services they offer. I can’t speak for everyone else in the industry, but this couldn’t be further from the truth as far as I’m concerned. I spent a lot time in libraries as a kid, and I use my local library now more than ever. There are two pretty simple reasons for this: I’m curious about stuff, and I can’t afford all the books I (or my curious kids) want to read!
All of which is to say, I’m very grateful for public libraries and, like many people, I find our politicians attitude to them deeply depressing. My local library is always busy. It is full of people — of all ages — making use of the quiet, uncommercialized space to read, work, or just sit. The computers in particular are in constant demand. It is an important part of our community.
In the face of planned service reductions, advocacy group Our Public Library has commissioned this animated short film on the Toronto Public Library, narrated by author Vincent Lam:
The film was made by James Braithwaite and Josh Raskin, the creative team behind the award-winning animated short, I Met the Walrus:
