The third in a series of holiday gift-giving suggestions from your pals at Cartoon Brew.

The self proclaimed “most obscure strip of the 1950s”, Gene Deitch’s daily and Sunday Real Great Adventures of TERR’BLE THOMPSON, Hero of Hist’ry has been collected in a wonderful trade paperback by Fantagraphics Books.I love Gene Deitch’s animated cartoons (especially his Terrytoons), and his print cartoons like The Cat are stylish, funny and - in the case of Terr’ble Thompson - Terrific! That’s because Thompson is the forerunner and template for Gene’s most popular cartoon creation, Tom Terrific. The obscure strip ran less than a year (from October 1955 through April 1956, while Dietch was running UPA New York, until he got the call to head Terrytoons) in no more than 14 papers. Gene himself didn’t save any of the original art. The book masterfully reprints all the original strips from digitally retouched newspaper clippings (you’d never know) and Gene recounts the entire experience in his introduction and footnotes (among the various tidbits, details of Jules Feffier’s failed attempt to become Gene’s assistant - with an example of Feffier’s try out strip; the villian, Mean Morgan, is a charicature of John Hubley; and information on the aborted Golden Record and animated pilot).Deitch’s modernist artwork and bold color design were way ahead of the curve for most comic strips of the era. The stories are great fun, and the art is eye-candy cool. Deitch’s son, Kim, and comics historian Dan Nadel contribute an informed foreword and afterword, respectively. Put it on your holiday list. For comics fans or animation fans, I think this is an absolute must.

I came across this commercial for BLIP, the digital game, while I was transfering to DVD some cartoon shows I taped in 1980. It’s not animation, but I thought it was worth sharing on You Tube. My, how far we’ve come in 30 years (the toy was first released in 1977).

Have you ever wondered what Chuck Jones’s HIGH NOTE (1960) would look like if it was remade in CG? Well, neither have I, but somebody went ahead and made it anyway. “One Bad Note” is a 50-second TV commercial directed by Craig Wessels of the South African studio Wicked Pixels. The results are pretty decent. Watch it below:

(via Hydrocephalic Bunny)

While Eyvind Earle is the best known of the Disney artists who illustrated Christmas cards, a number of other Disney artists had successful careers as card designers including BAMBI background stylist Tyrus Wong and longtime background painter Ralph Hulett. Hulett’s son, Steve, who is the business rep of the Animation Guild Local 839, is posting thirty-six of his father’s Christmas cards on the Animation Guild blog. There’ll be one a day between now and New Year’s Day. The first three cards are already posted:

Day 1 with Introduction
Day 2
Day 3

In the second part of Ward Jenkins’s terrific John Canemaker interview, Canemaker reveals a project he recently contributed to which should be of interest to Disney fans. It’s an upcoming documentary by Frank Thomas’s son, Ted Thomas, about the 1941 South America trip by Walt Disney and some of his top artists, including Frank Thomas, Mary Blair and Ken Anderson. Ted Thomas was also the director of the 1995 doc FRANK AND OLLIE.

Either Makinita (a.k.a. independent cartoonist Andres Silva, in Ecuador) is a demented genius - or just demented. You decide:Also check out more Makinita madness with this bizarro intro piece and this other thing in color.

A couple talented animation folk have redesigned their websites to incorporate journal/blogs:

Indie filmmaker Chris Harding (of LEARN SELF DEFENSE fame) has just unveiled the new ChrisHarding.net, which features a production log for his next animated short as well as a CafePress store.

Dice Tsutsumi, color stylist and visual development artist at Blue Sky, has added a journal which he plans to updated regularly, and has also posted many new beautiful paintings to his site. Check him out at SimpleStroke.com.

Animation festivals are fine nowadays, but I can’t think of any event that could possibly compare to the Montreal Expo’s World Exhibition of Animation Cinema which took place in 1967. Michael Sporn has some info and photos from the event posted on his blog.

The guest list is a jaw-dropping who’s who of animation legends from around the world: Chuck Jones, Peter Foldes, John Halas, Ward Kimball, Ub Iwerks, Ion Popescu-Gopo, Carmen d’Avino, Len Lye, Bill Hurtz, Dave Hilberman, Robert Breer, Art Babbitt, Feodor Khitruk, Ivan Ivanov-Vano, Paul Terry, J.R. Bray, Walter Lantz, Otto Messmer, Dave Fleischer, Norman McLaren, Bruno Bozzetto, Bill Tytla, Bob Clampett, Karel Zeman, Dusan Vukotic, Bretislav Pojar, Jean Image, Grim Natwick, and John Whitney, to name but a few. If I had a time travel machine, I know the first place I’d be headed.