A Blog of Bosh

Like Thackeray, Alfred Crowquill (pseudonym for Alfred Henry Forrester) has his place in the prehistory of comics thanks to an 1849 booklet entitled A Goodnatured Hint about California, a satire of the California gold rush. Besides publishing a successful series of illustrated fairy tales, Crowquill collaborated with several magazines of the time, Punch among them.
One [...]

In his recent book on the Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), David Kunzle also discusses British parallels to the Genevan inventor of comics; among them a special section is devoted to William Makepeace Thackeray, in which Kunzle states that the Picture Magazine (vol. III, 1894) published [...]

Rush to Barnacle Press to enjoy the full run of The Explorigator, one of the most original, and nonsensical, comics of all times and meet a crew on a par with the one that set out to hunt the Snark.

After the success of his two Topsy-Turvys, Peter Newell published A Shadow Book (New York: The Century Co., 1896) in which after looking at a picture, e.g. of an Arab leading a camel,

you turn the page and place it in front of a light source, so that the image you now see represents something else, [...]

No. 1
“It seems to me it orter work,”
Said Farmer Hiram Beggs,
“By feeding Hens on Easter dyes
To deckerate their eggs.”
No. 2
And sure enough for several days
The eggs were many-hued
With stranger markings on the shells
Than Beggs had ever viewed.
No. 3
He peddled them about the town
And found a brisk demand.
He sold a dozen lovely ones
To Mrs. Cyrus Bland.
No. [...]

A few more interesting posts from the incredibly lively world of animation blogs:
Michael Sporn has four new nonsense-related articles:

Fantasia Program 1 & 2: a souvenir booklet sold with the initial roadshow presentation of Fantasia.
Alices: on the clash on Alice animations between Disney and Lou Bunin.
Belloc’s Bestiary.
Steig’s Bdsplr: on William Steig’s children books.

Mark Meyerson has [...]

Animation is one of the liveliest subjects on the Internet at the moment; among the mass of interesting posts, Michael Sporn’s two new articles (1 & 2) on the representations of the blank map in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark are not to be missed.

Of great interest to nonsense-lovers should also be the [...]

I have added an article on Gustave Verbeek’s monotypes, to which he devoted his efforts after abandoning comics in the 1910s: Hawthorne, Hildegarde. “A New Achievement in an Old Medium: Gustave Verbeek’s Monotypes.” The Century Magazine 92.2, June 1916, 96-102.

There are a lot of UPA cartoons on YouTube; I had never seen Christopher Crumpet (1953), another story drawn in a pseudo-simple style reminiscent of Edward Lear with a largely nonsensical tale by T. Hee and Robert Cannon. The cartoon also reminds me of the earliest animation sequences, which very often started with a hand [...]

James Thurber’s drawings, once extremely popular, place him firmly in the tradition of Edward Lear’s apparently childish illustration, while his stories tend to be mildly satiric or parodistic.
One of the most famous of these, The Unicorn in the Garden, was adapted for one of UPA’s most acclaimed cartoons. After watching the short, don’t miss Michael [...]