TVSquad

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.

Stolen, a 2006 documentary by Rebecca Dreyfus and Susannah Ludwig, follows a group of men and women, most notably the late art detective Harold Smith, as they try to recover paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston in 1990. Thirteen paintings were taken from the museum by thieves disguised as policemen, including Rembrandt's The Sea of Galilee and Vermeer's The Concert. None of the paintings were ever recovered.

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]

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]