Hey, kids! Comics!

[prog]

A nice interview with Robert Crumb, in the Guardian. I haven't seen much of him since the movie, and for someone I think of admirably I barely actually own any copies of his work. Will do something about that someday.

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On the topic of underground cartoonists, I'll also mention Nina Paley, who not only has a blog, but a free-ish archive of just about all her published comics from the last 15+ years. (Slightly less crappy interface here, mostly of older strips. Reload the page to get another random comic.) I loved to read her comics throughout the 1990's when I happened to come across them, and they were a prime motivator in my own comics dabblings. (Update: Entirely non-crappy interface to a subset of comics hyah (Noise warning!).)

I really like her visual style, and a dozen years ago I really dug her subject matter when it was reprinted in Dark Horse Presents. To read it all at once now, I see that she apparently had (and continues to have) trouble getting away from a couple of pet topics, most especially her pursuit of the "child-free" philosophy to the point of making it a personal religion. On the other hand, her anti-capitalist cartoons made me cringe and chuckle warily at the same time, which probably means they are successful. I admit that I like her anti-Christmas agenda for the same missing-the-point reasons that I liked the Unhappy Birthday page. I hate intrinsic fun.

More recently she has been playing with animation, and is trying to get a full-length feature, a jazzy adaptation of the Ramayana (an ancient Indian epic hero-fable) produced. She has a QuickTime preview of one of the musical numbers available, and it looks and sounds great! I wish her the best of luck with the larger project.

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It is unfortunate that the "Cartoonist Group" website, beyond having a crappy UI in general, boasts the most infuriating and customer-hating copy-protection scheme I've ever seen: every comic has an onMouseOver that screams accusations of copyright theft at you, and it is hard not to trigger it though normal page usage. This despite the fact that anyone with a modicum of HTML knowledge can look in the page source and download the image directly if they so wished. Or just take a bloody screenshot. Ugh.

Comments

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

I have adored Nina Paley for a very long time. I should go read this stuff.

Re: Comics Good.

[prog.livejournal.com]

It's clearly all his fault.

[novalis.livejournal.com]

Plus, in FireFox, right-clicking and entering the context menu triggers onMouseOut, which restores the image. Duh.

[xymotik.livejournal.com]

Or just turn off javascript in Firefox, IE, or any other browser and no more annoying mouse-over image changes from that "patent-pending, multi-level warning system."

[toonhead-npl.livejournal.com]

dayum I never knew Nina could do stuff like this! I only knew what I saw from the Dark Horse Comics.