TVSquad

I mentioned last year that Alan Moore, creator of the seminal graphic novel The Watchmen, would be appearing in an episode of The Simpsons. Now comes word that the episode, "Husbands and Knives," will air on October 7 and will feature not only Moore, but two other big comic book names: Art Spiegelman (Maus, Maus II, In the Shadow of No Towers) and Daniel Clowes (Eightball, Ghost World, David Boring).

I'm a huge Simpsons fan, and have been ever since they first appeared on the Tracey Ullman Show. Still, even a fanatic like myself can get sick of all the news and merchandising leading up to the Friday premiere of the Simpsons Movie. In my daily perusal of the Web I come across no less than seventy-five million bits of information pertaining to the new movie or the TV series itself, and most of it isn't really worth mentioning.

However, I did find this via Cartoon Brew, and thought it was pretty cool. A new set of Simpsons Qee figures from Toy2r will be launched next year, but you can see some hand-painted versions from the likes of Matt Sharp, Attaboy, Loungecat, Triclops, Sasha Huber and Matt Groening himself next month. The figures are currently on a world tour and will be on display in Los Angeles August 1 at Meltdown Comics. I probably should have clarified that you need to be in Los Angeles to see them.

Qee figures are little toy figures that come in pieces you can assemble. Apparently they're popular among collectors and folks like me who just learned what the hell they were about five seconds ago.

You know, you people should be thankful I have no life and spend way too much time on the internet. If it weren't for that, I never would have stumbled upon the deviantART page of Doc Hammer, writer and voice artist on The Venture Bros.

While I like pretty much everything Adult Swim offers, The Venture Bros. deserves special praise because it's one of the only hand drawn shows on during that block that has the mark of true artisans. The drawings, animation and writing are all top notch, and when you check out Hammer's oil paintings, you'll see why. The man is scary talented, and is allegedly self taught, or so says Wikipedia, a site I don't trust even though it's fast becoming the main information source for Web surfers. But I digress.

BlueSky Studios, which is owned by Fox Film Filmed Entertainment and helped bring the movie Ice Age to the screen, has a weekly challenge for their staff in which artists, animators and others are given a subject and asked to draw their interpretation of it. The work is displayed on the BlueSky Studios Challenge blog, and it's worth checking out. Some of the subjects are things like movie robots or dinosaurs, but there are also a bunch of great drawings of television characters, such as the Muppets ( I love this humanized version of Bert) and SpongeBob SquarePants. Also take a look at the '80s cartoon characters challenge, which includes this film noir version of Inspector Gadget. I love seeing these characters completely re-imagined the same way I love it when a band covers another band's song and completely changes it, making it their own. I'd love to see whole animated programs re-imagined this way, which wouldn't be anything new since The Jetsons, The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, Mighty Mouse, Alvin and the Chipmunks and Beany and Cecil were all at one time brought back by different artists with a whole new design. Still, I'd love to see more of that.

[via Cartoon Brew]

Mark your calendars, Family Guy fans, and buy some plane tickets or get ready to barter with a hobo and ride the rails to California, because on November 8 the Museum of Television and Radio is featuring an exhibition of several artist interpretating the characters from Family Guy with their own unique vision. The exhibit is called "What the Deuce Are You Staring At!?!: A Collection of Interpretive Work Inspired By Family Guy." The art is described as "Pop Surrealist," so it could be really interesting. If you don't live in the Los Angeles area or can't make the trip, don't be too upset. After January 21, 2007 the exhibit goes on a global tour of animation galleries, so there's a chance it might end up somewhere near you. Otherwise, I suggest ingesting a lot of Benadryl and spinning around really fast while watching an episode of Family Guy. That should create some interesting visuals.

Animation historian Jerry Beck mentioned a very cool new site set up by Nick Magazine (that's "Nick" as in "Nickelodeon") that features drawings of Nick characters as interpreted by other Nick animators or underground and alternative comic strippers. The concept originated in Nickelodeon Magazine, which has a section called "The Comic Book" that features underground cartoonists --or so I'm told, since I don't subscribe to Nickelodeon Magazine. The Live Journal site is a nice bit of synergy between Nick and the underground artists, and something I'm sure I'll be checking out a lot in the future. Here's Avatar as drawn by Butch Hartman of The Fairly OddParents and Danny Phantom. The picture on the left is Jimmy Neutron as drawn by comic artist Jake Parker. I think I prefer his version to the original.

Yesterday while watching Jeopardy! I had a question answered that has been bothering me for many years. How the heck do you pronounce Winnie the Pooh creator A.A. Milne's last name? I've only seen it in print and never heard it spoken, so I wasn't sure if it was pronounced "Miln" or "Mil-nay" or "Mil-nee" or whatever. Turns out it's simply pronounced "Miln." Okay, maybe no one else cares about that, but it certainly made me feel better, and that's really all that matters. Oh yeah, and speaking of Winnie the Pooh, there's currently an exhibit going on at the Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles which features drawings of scenes from the Winnie the Pooh Storybook done by preschoolers from the Hollywood Schoolhouse. These drawings were then given to "real" artists who rendered the children's drawings in their own style. The result is actually really cool. If you live in the area, you should check it out, but the rest of us will have to just enjoy the pictures online. Since Disney's interpretation of the citizens of the Hundred Acre Wood are all over television and have been burned into our minds, it's actually nice to see how other artists put their own unique twist on Milne's creation.

[via Cartoon Brew]

Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi is one of those people I would love to sit in a room with and listen to his rants. Since I'm still working on my John K. Kidnapping Machine, I have to settle for his blog (Warning: NSFW), which he's been using to provide sage advice to people interested in becoming animators and cartoonists, and to slam the conventions of modern day animation, most notably on shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park. On this post, he talks about how characters in old cartoons evolved at a much faster rate than characters on any of the aforementioned shows. As ideas grew and changed, so did characters. He writes: "You have to be raised in an uncreative environment in order to blindly accept how bland and crappy everything is today." Later in the post he adds: "No one should accept professional work that looks like they could do it themselves."

In the comments section of the same post, he further asserts that "the very concept of animated sitcoms is faulty in the first place." His argument is that no character in an animated sitcom has ever been able to emulate the best actors in the best sitcoms. And as pure animation, they don't exactly hold up, either.

I always love to see artists create their own versions of classic characters. It's like watching a musician cover someone else's song. Anyway, Saxton Moore recently posed a challenge on his blog where he asked artists to draw their own versions of their favorite characters from Fat Albert, and you can see the results here. This illustration of Dumb Donald is hands down my very favorite. Actually, all of the drawings and paintings are really well-done, but if you want to see something really cool, check out this painting of Homer Simpson done for an issue of Esquire by artist Roberto Parada back in 1999. It's fascinatingly disturbing.

[via Boing Boing]