…that there are a lot of online-only comic strips out there. Many of them can be found on this page (along with a few newspaper-based strips).

What surprised me was how so damned many of them are about video game fanatics. And the ones that aren’t specifically about gaming seem to all be about other aspects of fanboy/geek male existence.

C’mon, cartoonists! There’s a whole world off of the screen to explore!

A fellow Stranger refugee stopped me on the street the other evening. He said he still enjoyed my writing, my vocabulary, and my sense of style.

But he also said he thought I’d limited my vision by holding to a rose-colored nostalgia for “the old Seattle,” a viewpoint that’s ill-suited toward effectively discussing today’s city of high tech and hipsters.

I beg, as I do so darned often, to differ.

You can’t really know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been.

The mindset that created the Century 21 Exposition, f’rinstance, is with us still. The magnificent Space Needle was built with private money on land essentially donated by the city. The publicly-funded exhibit buildings were either cheap “multipurpose” constructions (just like most local government buildings between then and the late ’90s) or repurposed older structures that weren’t that distinguished to begin with.

The old Seattle had its progressive, even radical ideas, alongside plain old fashioned racism/sexism. Some of its citizens held both types of beliefs at once. (I’m thinking of labor organizers who appealed to anti-Chinese hysteria among their flocks, and of “New Left” rabblerousers who defined “women’s liberation” as the right to give blow jobs.)

Today, Seattle loves diversity. Or rather, it loves the idea that it loves diversity; just so long as its white female children don’t have to go to the same schools as black male children.

The old Seattle had civic leaders who tirelessly struggled to have their burg seen as “world class,” but always by someone else’s standards. (Hence the ’60s campaigns to bulldoze the Pike Place Market, Pioneer Square, and large swaths of the Arboretum for parking lots, office towers, and highway lanes respectively.)

In more recent years, Seattle had civic leaders who saw every problem as solvable by a construction project. That’s why we can build new libraries and arts facilities, but can’t afford to run them.

The old Seattle’s governmental gears could grind very slowly; just as they can now. It took the “foodie” restaurant revolution of the ’70s before the city legalized sidewalk cafes. Now, we need, but are less likely to get, a similar outspoken demand before the city will allow new strip clubs.

If I may switch metaphors for a moment: Leonard Maltin’s book Of Mice and Magic, an invaluable history of the early animation business, refers at one point to the Warner Bros. cartoon studio’s desire in the thirties to “keep up with Disney, and plagiarize him at the same time.” Seattle’s assorted drives over the years to become “world class,” by imitating all the things all the other would-be “world class” burgs do, have often been just as self-defeating.

Warners conquered the cartoon world when its directors and artists stopped aping Disney and started to create their own brand of humor. LIkewise, Seattle will come into its own as it develops its own ways of doing city things.

We don’t have to have a cars-only transportation plan, or sprawling McMansions devouring the countryside. We don’t have to give in to corporate job-blackmail shakedowns. We can lead, not follow.

That’s not the “old Seattle,” but it’d be a better Seattle.

No fewer than three of the comic strips in today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer refer to personal-injury lawyers. Perhaps this wouldn’t be a good day to go out.

…without “The ORIGINAL Illustrated Catalog Of ACME Products.”

Somebody’s posted good quality scans of Action Comics #1, the 1938 comic book where Superman made his debut.

The cover’s still a striking image, with the beautiful art-deco logo above a less-than-hyperrealistic image of Supes lifting and smashing a car. The thirteen-page Superman story inside is frenetically paced and ends in a cliffhanger. The character’s more emotional, even vengeous, than he’d become in the ’50s. Creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (uncle of original Saturday Night Live writer Rosie Shuster) packed a lot of story and art into those 13 pages, for which (and for all rights to the character in perpetuity) they were paid $10 a page.

The backup strips are where the real wackiness starts. My personal fave is Tex Thompson, the tale of a cowboy hero in rural England who stumbles upon a domestic murder scene. Ya gotta love writer-artist Bernard Bailey’s description of the villainess: “A satisfied smile was evident on the girl’s face… The girl heads for a wooden shack, partially hidden between two hills.”

…there was another cross-studio team-up of animated favorites, the justly forgotten anti-drug screed Cartoon All-Stars To The Rescue.

CAL TECH SCIENTISTS have announced they’ve discovered the tenth planet of the solar system. The find, if it becomes generally accepted and acknowledged as a “real” planet instead of just a big rock, would fulfill the prophecies of 20th-century astrologers who posited a tenth planet as necessary to make their calculations work out. When Daffy Duck went to explore “Planet X,” he was off to the roman-numeraled world of the astrologers’ theories.

I’M SURE YOU’VE ALWAYS wanted to know what a real Tasmanian devil looks like.

The world of alterna-comix is filled with endearing characters on the page and intriguing characters off the page. One of the trade’s oddest tales is that of Dave Sim. In 1977 he started Cerebus the Aardvark, a funny-animal parody of Conan the Barbarian. A year or two into the title, and supposedly after an acid trip that sent him to a hospital, he proclaimed he’d put out 300 issues and then kill off the title character.

A quarter century later, he’s done it. Along the way, he’s turned into a recluse, an outspoken misogynist, and one of the industry’s top advocates for creators’ rights. His comic book has veered from social satire to epic adventure to meandering ideological rants. By the end, its circulation had dropped from 35,000 to 7,000.

The Canadian newspaper supplement Saturday Night ran a fascinating piece about Sim’s triumphs and struggles, suggesting the stress of his self-imposed task pushed him to the edge of insanity. The comics weblog Sequential has posted image files of the five-page article (one, two, three, four, five).

Here’s Sim’s own “Hail and Farewell” essay from a wholesaler’s catalog.

I was never into Conan, or parodies of Conan, so Sim’s early work made no impact on me. The later, longer stories became so slowly-paced, you pretty much had to read them in the paperback reprint collections for them to make sense. But Sim’s brave and/or silly perserverence as a writer/artist/self-publisher may never be repeated.

Should it?

Sim employed several strategies to survive as a self-publisher. He started at the beginning of the specialty comic-book-store circuit, and maintained his place within it, even as he alienated most of his now-former friends and industry allies. He kept his famous-among-a-cult-audience title and lead character, long after he’d outgrown talking-animal stories. He wrote, drew, inked, and lettered 12 issues a year, usually with 20 pages of art plus a cover, collaborating only with background artist Gerhard; thus pushing as much quantity of product out at his audience as he physically could produce. He maintained his creative freedom and achieved a solid middle-class income; at the expense of potentially greater works he might have done if he’d had longer lead times and didn’t have to stay in the Cerebus universe.

ONE OF MY FAVORITE ex-employers, Lake City’s own Fantagraphics, has announced what may just be its crowning achievement (at least in the repackaging department): The Complete Peanuts! All fifty years of Charles Schulz’s masterwork, in twenty-five deluxe volumes to be issued over the next twelve and a half years; including many early episodes never before anthologized. And yes, it’s already on my Amazon.com wish list.

…behind Wonder Woman. Really.

THE FIRST Cartoon Law of Physics: “Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation.”

ANYBODY WHO CARES about the American short story, and how to market same, should look at the (probably unauthorized) online scanning and posting of A Cotton Candy Autopsy. It was the first episode of Dave Louapre and Dan Sweetman’s illustrated-story series, Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children.

Published between 1989 and 1992 by DC Comics’ short-lived Piranha Press division, Beautiful Stories wasn’t a comic book (not even a “grownup” comic book). Rather, Louapre wrote a different (usually darkly humorous) text story for each issue, to which Sweetman added large illustrations (in a different, appropriate style each time).

The various book and magazine incarnations of Beautiful Stories have all been out of print for years. I’ve no idea what Louapre or Sweetman have done since. But the series remains one of the last examples of a big media company packaging and selling an individual short story as a stand-alone, un-anthologized entity unto itself.

Loved the P-I‘s great ode on Thursday to one of my main here-n’-now heroes, Frank cartoonist Jim Woodring.

Have now seen the first three discs of the four-disc DVD set,
The Looney Tunes Golden Collection. You’ve probably seen ost of these 56 classic shorts repeatedly all your life. But with the DVDs you can go beyond the familiar gags and characters, and deconstruct the cartoons into nearly every detail.

Unlike real animals, the Warner Bros. critters don’t die when you dissect them. Instead, they become even more fully “alive” when you discover the sheer beauty within each element of the films.

The stills galleries display original pencil drawings of the characters, their expressions and subtle nuances frozen in time; as well as the background paintings, stunning oil and pastel landscapes suitable for framing on their own.

The “Music-Only Program” feature plays some of the cartoons with only the music-and-effects soundtracks, so you can fully appreciate Carl Stallings’s magnificent scores and Treg Brown’s ingenious sound effects.

Behind-the-scenes segments (including the entire 1975 CBS documentary The Boys from Termite Terrace) and commentary tracks explain some of the studio’s production methods and inside jokes.

An episode of the unseen-in-years Bugs Bunny Show, which aired on ABC primetime from 1960 to 1962, offers a rare peek at the original Warner animation team’s last great project. (Warner now says the Bugs Bunny Show‘s color negatives were inadvertently destroyed in the late ’60s, and it only has the complete episodes in black-and-white prints. But those can now be digitally colorized, so why aren’t they?)

Audio-and-stills snippets from a Mel Blanc recording session let us in on how the voice genius created some of his hundreds of memorable character shticks.

And thanks to the miracle of digital video, you can freeze-frame or slo-mo the complete cartoons themselves. You can learn for yourself how the characters were made to move, about the difference between “ones” and “twos” (inserting a new drawing in every frame of film vs. only in every second frame), about the character poses and color schemes and frame compositions.

The first disc includes a videotaped intro by legendary Warner director Chuck Jones (who died several months before the discs’ release). In it, he defines the Warner cartoons’ humor as “icons of America’s folk hero tradition.” The characters, “flexible and confident and eternally young, are embodiments of America’s robust national spirit and character.” That’s a good definition as far as it goes—Bugs, Daffy, & co. were created in the depression and WWII years, and, like Warner’s best feature films of the time, were driven by a punchy, aggressive, industrious pulse.

But what really makes the Warner cartoons eternal is also what makes them different from all the bad-boy comedy of recent years—the craft, the artistry, the precision.

Steve Martin famously said, “Comedy is not pretty.” In the case of the Warner cartoons, Martin was dead wrong. This comedy isn’t just pretty; it’s truly beautiful.