Best wishes to all our readers!

QUICK PLUG: Nice little interview with Henry Selick posted on Animated News.

Americans will be feasting with family and friends over the upcoming weekend.On a semi-unrelated note, I’m thankful to ebay for making items like this easier to find.

I know we’ve done this a lot recently, but couldn’t resist pointing out a couple more designer blogs that I just ran across. One of the very best, Lou Romano (THE INCREDIBLES), arrived online a couple days ago. And I wasn’t familiar with the work of Pete Oswald, but he’s a designer on FOSTER’S and he’s also posting solid stuff on his new blog.

Not an animator, but an influential print cartoonist - Lou Myers passed away yesterday in New York at age 90.I’ve always enjoyed his sketchy, raw style in advertisements, New Yorker covers and illustrations (including his famous movie poster image for La Cage Aux Folles (1978) at right). He was one of the most popular cartoonists in advertising art during the 1960s. I hadn’t seen much of his later work in the last 20 years, I didn’t even know he was still alive - but I highly recommend seeking out his work.

AWN reports that Bill Plympton recently completed a new animated music video for Kanye West. The video, for the song “Heard ‘Em Say,” is scheduled to premiere today on MTV during TRL. Now what’s interesting is that the Plympton video is the second one produced for this song. Michel Gondry had already directed a video for “Heard ‘Em Say,” and for reasons unknown, this second video was commissioned from Plympton. According to this entry at Wikipedia:

A Christmas-themed video was originally set to be the official video for “Heard ‘Em Say”, set in Macy’s flagship NYC department store, it was directed by Michel Gondry. It featured Adam Levine as the store’s security guard. Shortly before the original video was to be premiered, MTV pulled it from the schedule. On November 12th 2005, the new video for “Heard ‘Em Say” premiered on Channel 4 in the UK. The video is a black and white animation by Bill Plympton, although the video occasionally cuts to scenes of Kanye and Adam Levine… MTV will premiere the original [Gondry] version as a Christmas special in December 2005.

This Flickr collection of 1950s bird illustrations by Charles Harper, courtesy of Eric Sturdevant, is incredible…so many interesting graphic variations on a single theme. I’ve heard that Harper is still alive — somebody should really do an in-depth interview with him while he’s still around. Though I don’t think he ever worked in animation, he’s influenced many animation artists. Background designer Scott Wills acknowledged Harper’s influence on SAMURAI JACK in the book MAKIN’ TOONS:

What I love about Harper’s work is the ultra-stylization…Even the character design here has been influenced by him–how we draw birds, for example. We’ve a lot of influences, I have to say, but when I feel like I’ve done a painting that’s very SAMURAI JACK, the way I want it, it’s mostly Harper’s kind of feeling.

(via fwak blog)

Sadly we must note the passing of our friend Wendy Jackson Hall. She passed away this past Monday in Seattle, from complications relating to cancer.Wendy was a true friend to animation and all involved with it. She was President of Asifa Pacific NW, a writer for various animation journals & industry trade publications, and a respected teacher. I knew her when she was involved with AWN from 1996 to 1999. She had a real passion for contemporary and classic animation - and her enthusiastic spirit will be missed.Her husband, Porter Hall, is updating her website in tribute to her life. There will be a memorial service on the West Coast on Saturday at 3pm at the Seabold United Methodist Church, 6894 NE Seabold Road off of the 305 on Bainbridge Island WA. On the east coast, a memorial service for Wendy will be held at the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church in Medfield, MA on Saturday, December 3 at 3pm. Directions to the church can be found here.

“Masters of American Comics,” a major exhibit co-organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art and UCLA Hammer Museum, opens in Los Angeles this weekend. Between the two museums, over 900 pieces of art will be on display. The exhibitions focus primarily on fifteen different artists: Winsor McCay, Lyonel Feininger, George Herriman, E.C. Segar, Frank King, Chester Gould, Milton Caniff, and Charles M. Schulz at the Hammer Museum, and Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter, and Chris Ware at MOCA. Articles about the show are at the LA WEEKLY and LA TIMES, and the exhibition catalog/book is available at Amazon.

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