Sunday, October 26, 2008

Sunday morning toons: Special "Super-duper Supermen" edition

Bob Geiger posts his toon review on Saturday, but I like to leave it open at the table until Sunday morning to let it breathe. I recommend Jim Morin as the pick of the litter this week, although it was a narrow decision. Good stuff.

It's also a good week at Daryl Cagle's round-up, in which Sarah Palin's shopping habits loom large--to no one's surprise. The McCain campaign's ability to drive the news cycle like this for days on end is positively uncanny.

p3 Picks of the Week: Nate Beeler, Mike Keefe, John Trever, and Brian Fairrington.

And for those of you who are finding yourself getting burned out on politics, but still interested in Reese's Pieces, there are even some Halloween toons thrown in, courtesy of Joe Heller, David Fitzsimmons, and Rob Rogers.

The p3 Made-You-Think-About-It Award goes to Daryl Cagle.

And a p3 World Toon Review shout-out Peter Broelman (Australia), Frederick Deligne (Nice, France), Derkaoui Abdellah (Morocco), and Sergei Elkin.

This week we present an Ann Telnaes Halloween twofer: Things that go bump in the night, and Things that make you scream.

The penultimate Opus is here.

Portland homeboy Jack Ohman detects Marxism in recent Washington goings-on.

I'm sort of on-again-off-again as a Ted Rall fan, but this week he's answered a question I've been wondering about for some time.


Banned Book Week hasn't been over a full month, but Oregon already has someone unwisely trying to censor a book of cartoons at her local public school's library.

If you want my list of lessons this imparts to her 13-year-old son--for whose sake she was presumably doing this--you can read it here. But meanwhile, just to make book-banning enthusiasts everywhere a little sadder, here are several of the cartoons from the book in question, set to music by "My Chemical Romance."



As you'll see, it takes a peculiar sensibility--and not one I'd want making my library-stocking decisions for me--to find this stuff terribly offensive. The book in question is a bit of whimsical black humor in the tradition of Edward Gorey (whose illustrations have been a signature on PBS's "Mystery!" for years), Gahan Wilson (ditto with The New Yorker), and Charles Addams--whose characters are soon to have their own musical on Broadway. I'm not sure who mom's protecting from all this.


Are we not the Supermen? This 1943 Disney toon was voted #22 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons. I remember first seeing it as a kid one Sunday night on Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color (as it was called then, although that was long enough ago that his Wonderful World would have been black-and-white around our house). The images were what caught my attention then--because, unschooled lad that I was, I didn't yet know who Spike Jones and His City Slickers were. The toon, at first titled "Donald Duck in Nutzi Land," featured the original song "The Fuerher's Face." Before it was released, though, Jones got his hands on it and produced a much more raucous arrangement than the Disney version. Jones's recording of it became so popular that Disney quickly re-titled the Donald Duck toon as "Der Fuehrer's Face" and released it to catch up with the popularity of the song. The arrangement in the Disney toon is the one by composer Oliver Wallace, not Jones.



(By the way, the marching band is made up of Hirohito on Sousaphone, Goering on piccolo, and Mussolini on bass drum.)


p3 Bonus Toon: Aiyee! Oregon Republicans--head for the high country! Jesse Springer shows you why (click to enlarge):

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