Thanks to Drawn!, I discovered Hans Bacher’s archive of Animation Treasures. Bacher collects, restores and annotates rare frame grabs and background paintings from classic animations. From What’s Opera Doc? to Max Fleischer’s Technicolor Superman cartoons. For anyone with an interest in animation, it’s a wonderful find. Even for mere mortals, it’s still rather lovely.

Head there now.

Fleischer’s Superman animations can be downloaded here and here. Magnetic telescopes, mechanical monsters, foreign people, Lois in a jam! Something for everyone. Related, and possibly NSFW, Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.

I’ll be away tomorrow, but, please, dry your eyes; I’ll post fresh ephemera on Friday.

Thanks to Franklin at Artblog, I rediscovered Frank Miller’s NPR piece on patriotism and real-life supervillainy. Given some of Miller’s previous work, it’s an interesting development. Here’s an extract: 

“To me, [the flag] stood for unthinking patriotism. It meant about as much to me as that insipid peace sign that was everywhere I looked: just another symbol of a generation’s sentimentality, of its narcissistic worship of its own past glories. Then came that sunny September morning when airplanes crashed into towers a very few miles from my home and thousands of my neighbours were ruthlessly incinerated… Now, I draw and write comic books. One thing my job involves is making up bad guys; imagining human villainy in all its forms. Now the real thing had shown up. The real thing murdered my neighbours. In my city. In my country…

For the first time in my life, I know how it feels to face an existential menace. They want us to die. All of a sudden I realize what my parents were talking about all those years. Patriotism, I now believe, isn’t some sentimental, old conceit. It’s self-preservation. I believe patriotism is central to a nation’s survival. Ben Franklin said it: If we don’t all hang together, we all hang separately. Just like you have to fight to protect your friends and family, and you count on them to watch your own back.”

More here.

The creator of Sin City and The Dark Knight Returns has described his next book, Holy Terror, Batman! as “a piece of propaganda” and “a reminder to people who seem to have forgotten who we’re up against.”

Over at Samizdata, Perry de Havilland has a few thoughts on recent efforts by the Commission for Racial Equality to have Hergé’s Tintin in the Congo removed entirely from the shelves of British booksellers:

Tintin in the Congo has been moved to Borders’ adult graphic novel section and can be bought online here. Predictably, sales of the title have risen dramatically in the wake of the CRE’s protests. The book also comes with a warning that its contents include “bourgeois, paternalistic stereotypes of the period – an interpretation some readers may find offensive.” Readers will be thrilled to hear that Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is still available too. More on Tintin here.

I mention this because a few hours ago I caught part of the 1955 film The Dam Busters in which Richard Todd plays Wing Commander Guy Gibson, whose dog, a black labrador, is, unfortunately, called “Nigger”. Which raises the question of whether subsequent screenings will entail some discreet redubbing at the hands of the CRE.

I’ll be taking a short break for the rest of the week. Meanwhile, those with a taste for the fleshy artwork of Dave Cooper should look over his Flickr photo sets, some of which document the gestation of his unwholesome yet fascinating handiwork.

Cooper’s books are available via Fantagraphics. But his toys are harder to come by. (H/T, Drawn!)

Back Monday 9th.

I first encountered Marjane Satrapi’s comic book memoir, Persepolis, back in 2003. The book recounts the author’s childhood in and beyond revolutionary Iran, with Satrapi’s faux-naïf illustration luring the reader into unexpectedly adult territory. Through the eyes of a nine-year-old girl we see the collective hysteria of Islamic fundamentalism and its intimate, coercive evils, contrasted with smaller, more personal, acts of rebellion. As when a pair of black market Nikes, an ABBA recording or an inch of visible hair become gestures of truly hazardous proportions. Some four years later, Persepolis has been remade as an animated film, directed by Satrapi with Vincent Paronnaud. A recent screening at Cannes, where Persepolis shared the Jury Prize, upset the Iranian authorities, prompting the obligatory accusations of “Western bias” and claims that the film is “an anti-cultural act” and “an unreal picture of the outcomes and achievements of the Islamic revolution.” Audiences will be able to decide for themselves when the film is released later this year. Though not in Iran, methinks.

More at Satrapi’s blog.