Don Markstein's Toonopedia Blog Entries

EXCERPT: From the length of time between this entry and the last, you can tell I'm not in the blog business. I do it, at least recently, but if I depended on it as a business, my family and I would long since have starved. It's hard to say exactly what we do depend on. No one thing, certainly, tho prominent among them is writing comic books, particularly for Egmont, which licenses the classic Disney characters ("classic" being Donald, Mickey etc. but not, say, Kim...

EXCERPT: A few days ago, I mentioned I make my living as a freelancer. If you know anything about a freelancer's life, you've probably heard the phrase "feast or famine" in connection with it. That's because when the work gets paid for, we rush around paying all the bills, but when a long time goes by without payments coming in, we don't even buy the stamps to mail them. Not too long ago, a bigger-than-average payment arrived, so big I even got to visit...

EXCERPT: For years, I've been making my living as a freelancer, rather than with a regular paycheck. Barbs about not being able to hold a job will be properly ignored, but the fact is, I find the freelancing life quite congenial. I like setting my own hours, even if that does mean working more of them than the paycheck guys usually do, and I like working at home — I sometimes quip that I make two stops on my to work, the bathroom and the kitchen. Of course, that means babysitting...

EXCERPT: Last week, I referred to myself as a "dilettante" about cartoons, specifically contrasting that to an "historian", who puts a lot of time and energy into digging information out from primary resources. Some people quarreled with that, saying I must be an historian, because look at all the toon history I write about. But I know who the cartoon historians are, and have too much respect for them to claim I'm one. Historians squeeze fresh information out of...

EXCERPT: Thank goodness I had the foresight to avoid promising to update this thing on a regular basis! This, as noted in the November 20 Today in Toons, is the anniversary of Bungleton Green, the longest-running comic strip ever to run in a newspaper serving its city's black community. I like to put up new articles on anniversaries, if I can, so here it is. Comics running in such newspapers have a surprisingly rich history, as anyone who has ever looked into the subject knows....

EXCERPT: I have a general policy of letting toons sit for ten years before writing them up — thus, no Spongebob article until at least July of 2009 (tho I'll surely get to it shortly after). It's not a hard-and-fast rule — in fact, I deliberately violated it a couple of months ago, because I decided Supermuse ought to be known by the comics community in general, rather than the few members of it living in New Orleans, who probably have more pressing concerns. The...

EXCERPT: I've just uploaded my fourth article, in a little over a month, about a Disney feature. That's somewhat more closely spaced than I might prefer, considering it's been over half a year ince the my next most recent article on a Disney feature, Peter Pan. In fact, it started last month, when I reflected I'd (ironically enough) gone too long since writing up a Disney feature, and did The Jungle Book to rectify that. That wasn't the case a couple of weeks...

EXCERPT: Suppose a man rattles a gorilla's cage, for no reason other than to piss the gorilla off. As justification, he cites the fact that rattling a gorilla's cage is not against the law, nor, in a free society, should it be. Now, suppose the gorilla reaches through the bars, and throttles the man within an inch of his life. Whose fault is it? Why, the gorilla's, of course. He should know, as all reasonable people do, that it's okay to rattle a cage. He has a perfect...

EXCERPT: I've just uploaded my first new article in five days — longer than I like to go between adding entries, but I'm loaded with excuses. I'll spare you a recitation of the demands on my time — we're all impossibly busy, aren't we? Mostly, I'm still getting the hang of dealing with the new way of uploading things, which is a bit more complicated than it used to be. But I'll get there. The first article added to the new site format is...

EXCERPT: Dick Tracy once said, "Buddy, if you can't tell the good guys from the bad guys, then you're one of the bad guys!" The speaker isn't known as a staunch supporter of civil liberties. But he's passionately devoted to justice, and will tend to side with the little guy when big guys attempt to oppress him. That's what's made him an American icon for more than three quarters of a century. Tho the analogy isn't perfect, I think Dick would...