§ Aline Kominsky Crumb talks about her husband vi his self-portraits in the LA Times:
As a child, my husband, Robert, already felt like an alienated old man (top left). He longed for the past, never having actually known what he was nostalgic for. It was as if he were born in the wrong time. He never felt part of the contemporary culture. You can see the roots of his alienation already beginning.
ONLY two weeks before he died, Paul Rigby had been a star attraction at the 22nd Australian Cartoonists Association Stanley awards and conference in Ballarat, Victoria.
He had talked for just under two hours about cartooning and his life. He could have talked another two, but conference timetables don’t allow speakers to go on forever — even if they are cartooning superstars.
The ACA that night gave Rigby the “Uncle Dick” — more properly known as the Jim Russell award — for his contribution to cartooning. Russell drew the Potts for more than 60 years, and Uncle Dick was one of the characters in the comic. It’s the highest honour the oldest cartooning association in the world can bestow.
§A humor strip popular in Alaska is makings its way to the wider, warmer world:
Chad Carpenter, while clearly one of the most talented comic strip artists around, is admittedly not a great salesman. Although he’s been drawing his hilarious “Tundra” strip since 1991, up until this year, it appeared in fewer than a half-dozen newspapers, all in his native Alaska. Content and earning a comfortable living by selling Tundra books, calendars, T-shirts and other items, Carpenter never really had the desire to go out and sell his comic strip to the masses.
Meanwhile, novelist Chad Taylor (Shirker, Electric, Departure Lounge) was one of 12 Kiwi writers chosen to represent New Zealand at Les Belles Etrangeres. Les Belles Etrangères is a French literary festival, created in 1987 by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, and organised by the Centre National du Livre (CNL, the French equivalent of NZ Book Council). The aim of the programme is to present foreign literature to French people. Along with cartoonist Dylan Horrocks and writers such as Elizabeth Knox, Alan Duff, Sia Figiel, Albert Wendt, Dame Fiona Kidman and James George, Taylor is currently travelling around France meeting locals and reading at schools, libraries and more.
cartoonist Shahid Mahmood of Toronto is among those Canadians who are now frightened to fly to the United States due to questions surrounding no-fly lists, and he encourages others to challenge the government’s plan to implement its own list by next year. Since he was denied a ticket for a flight from Vancouver to Victoria in 2004 because his name was flagged by Air Canada, Mahmood, an architect and freelance editorial cartoonist, has spent almost three years hounding government departments and the airline for answers.
§ The Onion explains the whole Bob Kane/Bill Finger mystery for those who came in late:
There’s little dispute, however, that Finger and his friend Kane worked together on conceptualizing Batman. It’s mostly a question of who contributed what. But whatever the case, Kane happily signed a deal claiming the character as his creation, then put Finger to work as his writer for a percentage of his page rate. In the years to come, Finger would provide most of the Batman scripts, fleshing out the mythos with artists like Jerry Robinson, creator of the Joker. Finger, who also co-created the original Green Lantern and contributed to the creation of or created whole-cloth such Batman staples as The Riddler, Catwoman, the Batcave, and Gotham City, died a despondent, forgotten man in 1974. Robinson, who went on to considerable success as an editorial and comic-strip cartoonist, founded the Bill Finger Award in 2005 to honor comic-book writers who never received popular recognition in a day when bylines were considered an indulgence, and business sense met with greater rewards than creativity.
