Illustrator Ben Butcher has done an interview with Grain Edit about his illustration process on Lots of Bots, a graphically-striking illustrated book being released this week as a tie-in for Pixar’s Wall-E.

Gary Panter (designer of Pee Wee’s Playhouse) has a new book from PictureBox Inc. Panter is doing a book tour this month that might be of interest to Cartoon Brew readers, including a show in Chicago where he’s introduced by Chris Ware and an LA signing introduced by Matt Groening.

Note these dates:
Saturday, May 10th, Gary Panter at PictureBox Departmental Store, 121 3rd St. in Brooklyn NY.

Saturday May 24th at 1 pm, introduced by Chris Ware at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave., Chicago, IL.

Tuesday May 27th, 2008 at 7:30 pm Lecture and Slideshow, at Skylight Books, introduced by Matt Groening, 1818 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles, CA.

For a complete list of other appearences including San Francisco, Texas, New York, Mexico, click here.

(Thanks, Hiland Hall)

A new exhibit opening at the Met today, entitled “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy,” is dedicated to exploring the “symbolic and metaphorical associations between fashion and the superhero”:

Featuring movie costumes, avant-garde haute couture, and high-performance sportswear, it reveals how the superhero serves as the ultimate metaphor for fashion and its ability to empower and transform the human body. Objects are organized thematically around particular superheroes, whose movie costumes and superpowers are catalysts for the discussion of key concepts of superheroism and their expression in fashion.

The exhibit is accompanied by a visually striking catalog designed by Abbott Miller. The Pentagram blog offers a preview of the book.

It’s been interesting to watch the convergence of fashion and comics over the past few years. While fashion designers are looking towards superhero comics for inspiration, comic artists and illustrators are jumping boldly into the world of fashion design, with notable examples including Paul Pope’s recent work for DKNY and James Jean’s designs for Prada.

A while back I mentioned briefly on this site that I had been offered an opportunity to write a book for Pixar, and today I thought I’d offer a few more details about it. The coffeetable book I’m working on, which will be out later this year, is directly tied in to the Pixar Short Films Collection dvd, and is an in-depth history of the studio’s early shorts. I was naturally thrilled when they asked me to come on board because, well, come on it’s Pixar, but also because I know the importance of shorts to the company’s history and the value that they place on creating animated shorts even now that they’re a successful feature studio. Admittedly, in the beginning, I was slightly concerned about whether there was enough to say about the shorts to fill an entire book, but it took only a couple weeks of working on the book before I was begging my editor to double the initial page count. We’re still in production on the book right now, and one thing I can say about it is that there’s a lot more text and meat in this than your average art of book. It’s exciting to see it come together and I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

Because the book’s content stretches back to André & Wally B. which was done before Pixar even officially existed, I had to familiarize myself with the ins and outs of the studio’s entire history. It’s truly a fascinating story. Today we look at Pixar as the untouchable 800-pound gorilla of computer animation so it’s easy to forget that not so long ago, they were a struggling hardware company and their animation division was comprised of just a handful of folks working in a company of over one hundred people. There was hardly a guarantee that their animation division would become what it is today, and it only happened because of the genius and vision of individuals like Ed Catmull, John Lasseter, Alvy Ray Smith, and a slew of computer whizzes like Bill Reeves, Loren Carpenter, Eben Ostby and Rob Cook.

When I began researching the book, I wanted to find a reliable source that would help me understand the early roots of Pixar and its earlier incarnation as the Computer Graphics Division of Lucasfilm. During an interview with Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith, he recommended I take a look at the recent book Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution. I took him up on that advice and am glad I did. This book is absolutely essential reading for anybody who wants to understand the roots of Pixar and its founders Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith. The book is not entirely about computer animation, because Lucas’ Computer Division also dealt with editing, game and sound programs, but the parts about Pixar’s pre-history make it well worth the money and the solid technical details and hardcore research are enough to satisfy the geekiest of the computer geeks. George Lucas has played a crucial role in contemporary filmmaking by introducing digital technology into all aspects of his productions, and this book is a wonderful document of how it happened…and as a result, how Pixar came out of it.

Speaking of essential, below is YouTube video with the author of the above book, Michael Rubin, interviewing Ed Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, Andrew Stanton and Brad Bird on stage. It’s 1 hour and 40 minutes, and it’s a fun and inspiring chat.

Just for the heck of it, let me share a few other random Pixar bits that I discovered online while researching the book:

Here’s a link to the personal website of Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith. He has an interesting page with rare Pixar documents and a page about the first “Pixar” short André & Wally B. with an amazingly in-depth PDF file about the making of that short.

Pixar has a sub-site where they make available all the technical papers that their technologists have presented at SIGGRAPH. It’s pretty heavy on the tech, so beware, but there’s also some QuickTime tests that accompany a few of the papers, like this one about “Volumetric Methods for Simulation and Rendering of Hair.”

Here’s a new link posted yesterday: Didier Ghez did a short interview with David Price, author of the just-about-to-be-released The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. I don’t know how the book will turn out, but it sounds like Price has done his homework and I can’t wait to read it.

Finally, one of the fascinating aspects of Pixar that nobody talks about is their TV commercial work. Did you know Pixar produced 71 TV commercials in the early- and mid-’90s? A complete list can be found by following this timeline on their site. They’re surprisingly difficult to locate online, but there’s a handful on Youtube, including the very first one the studio produced, for Tropicana, directed and animated by John Lasseter:

On his blog, Didier Ghez points out an interesting-sounding book that was self-published a few days ago: Working for Disney: 1936-1937, The Ingeborg Willy Scrapbook. This is the description of it:

Reproduction of a 1936 scrapbook made during Ingeborg Willy’s first year working as an inker for the Walt Disney Studios. The scrapbook contains numerous photos of other Disney employees, internal memos, production work sheets, and a large number of original pencil sketches from the first feature-length animated film, Snow White, and other early Disney cartoons.

I’m going to wait to hear more before recommending it though. As is often the case with self-published books like this, the quality of image reproduction and presentation could leave a lot to be desired. The amateurish cover design certainly doesn’t do much to inspire confidence. But it could potentially be a very cool book.

Imagine curling up in your comfy recliner chair, snug in your smoking jacket, slippers and monocle, pipe in your mouth and brandy snifter at your side, perusing your personal leather bound copy of The Hanna Barbera Treasury.

Yes, The Easton Press has just published a limited edition leather-bound edition of my H-B book for royal sum of $147. (payable in three monthly installments of $49.00). I don’t have one myself - I didn’t even know they were publishing such an edition - but I’d certainly recommend it for the cartoon fan who has everything - and I do mean everything! Place your order here.

I just found out that my Hanna Barbera Treasury has become a finalist in ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards.

Before we get too excited, keep in mind I’m competing against 652 finalists in 61 catagories. The Hanna Barbera Treasury is nominated in the Popular Culture catagory, against some strong competition, including one book on The Beatles and another on Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon).

According to the ForeWord Magazine website, “ForeWord’s Book of the Year Awards program was designed to discover distinctive books across a number of genres. The winners will be determined by a panel of librarians and booksellers, selected from our readership. Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners, as well as Editor’s Choice Prizes for Fiction and Nonfiction will be announced at a special program at BookExpo America at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles on May 30. The ceremony is open to all BEA attendees.”

My thanks to the editors and designers at Palace Press/Insight Editions for creating such an incredibly fun tribute to the legacy of Hanna Barbera. This was a rare case where the finished book turned out exactly as better than I envisioned it.

If you haven’t been a regular reader of Leonard Maltin’s website or his quarterly newsletter - both named Movie Crazy - you should be. Leonard has now collected the best articles from the newsletter into a 410-page trade paperback also named, you guessed it: Movie Crazy.

It’s loaded with incredible interviews with, and articles about, the people in front and behind the cameras during the golden age of Hollywood. It also contains many pieces of particular interest to animation fans. These include an interview with Janet Waldo (voice of Judy Jetson and Penelope Pittstop), a bio of Arthur Q. Bryan (voice of Elmer Fudd), an interview with Betty Kimball (Ward’s wife) and Marie Johnston (Ollie’s better half) on their careers as ink-and-paint girls at Disney, rare Hollywood caricatures by Disney Legend Joe Grant and an amazing publicity photo of Spanky McFarland and Mickey Mouse.

It’s published by Mike (Dark Horse) Richardson’s M Press imprint and available on amazon.com for $13.57 - and worth every penny.

Golden Legacy: How Golden Books Won Children’s Hearts, Changed Publishing Forever, and Became An American Icon Along the Way is a book chronicling the behind-the-scenes history of the famous children’s book publisher. Though it is published by Golden Books, it appears to be more than your average corporate fluff piece, and seemingly has lots of original historical research. It is also copiously illustrated with illustrations and photos, and includes coverage of all our Golden Book favorites including Mary Blair, Gustaf Tenggren, Aurelius Battaglia, JP Miller, Alice and Martin Provensen, Mel Crawford and Tibor Gergely, among others. If anbody has actually read the book, please share your thoughts about it in the comments.

Previous Entries