Great talents seem to embody their craft. It’s as if they invented the form and then broke the mold when they were finished with it.
One of the best modern examples of this virtuosity is Mel Blanc, voice of Bugs Bunny and nearly all of the Looney Tunes cartoon gang. Blanc, who voiced more than 1,000 characters, was famously hard-working.

Bruce Lee has remarkable staying power. Forty years after his untimely death, he’s still celebrated as a charismatic and influential lethal weapon. Remember how Pelé ushered in America’s soccer craze? Bruce did the same for kung fu.

I’m a paper loyalist by age and inclination. I don’t begrudge those who do the bulk of their reading digitally, I just prefer the familiarity and object-ness of the printed page.

Anyone who’s seen Crumb, Terry Zwigoff‘s 1994 documentary about underground comics legend, R. Crumb, may consider themselves fairly conversant in both the art and the offbeat existence of the vintage-record-revering sexual adventurer and self-proclaimed wimp.

Contemplative types used to losing themselves in an image may wish to have a motion sickness bag on hand when viewing The Art of Illustration, the latest entry in Off Book, a PBS web series exploring cutting edge art and internet culture.

Cartoonist Lynda Barry, who has helped legions of adults grope their way back to the unselfconscious creativity of childhood, is teaching at the university level. Barry’s Unthinkable Mind course is designed to appeal to students of the humanities.

It used to be that you couldn’t go into a bookstore this time of year without being literally surrounded by Gary Larson’s The Far Side. His calendars and books were massive best sellers and his single-panel comics seemed to be everywhere, taped to cubicle walls and pinned to bulletin boards.

At the top of this post, you can watch 1941′s Superman, a short nominated for an Academy Award and (according to 1,000 animation professionals) the 33rd greatest cartoon of all time.

Those who have become interested in Japan in the past twenty years have done so, likely as not, because of Japanese animation, best known by the Japanese term “anime.

He describes himself as a “peripatetic patriarch of the free press,” and so he may be. John Wilcock, a British ex-pat who helped found the Village Voice in 1955 went to work as the New York Times’ travel editor. His Europe on $5 a Day was seminal in the travel guidebook publishing world. His subsequent Mexico on $5 a Day was a trailblazer.