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Alex Toth: Space Explorer!
A look at Alex Toth's panel sketch book pages.
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Roughing It With Bud Blake
I grew up in central New Jersey. Kendall Park to be exact. Our circle of family friends were largely transplanted New York Jews from Brooklyn and the Bronx. This was a vibrant group of opinionated story and joke tellers who could laugh and argue with the best of them. Many, if not most of the circle of friends, were natural performers for whom the spotlight was never bright or large enough. Some of them, including my father, appeared in amateur stage productions over the years, but most of those took place before I was cognizant of what was going on. But what I was aware of were the productions that…
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The Visual Verve and Vibrancy of Bud Blake and Tiger
The Home News was the newspaper in central New Jersey that my family subscribed to when I was a kid. It’s where I was introduced to the weirdness of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, the trials and tribulations of Harry Hanan’s Louie, and the beautifully drawn, sweetly humored Tiger by Bud Blake. Growing up, Tiger was comfortably familiar to me. Blake’s gags revolved around everyday kid stuff. The strip didn’t have the psychological weight of Peanuts. There wasn’t a ton of depth to the cast of characters. We knew that Punkinhead could be a nudge, Hugo liked to eat, and Julius was a bookish type. Tiger himself was sort of his strip’s…
Odd thoughts, observations, meditations and meanderings about comic, cartoon and illustration artwork