PhysicsCentral, a web site run by The American Physical Society (an organization representing 48,000 physicists), has created a series of comic books designed to get kids excited about physics. If you click here, you can enjoy Nikola Tesla and the Electric Fair for free online. The 2008 comic book pits Thomas Edison against Tesla, the unsung hero of electricity and magnetism. Also on the Physics Central web site, you can enjoy four free comics from the Spectra series, which presents the adventures of a middle school superhero, who possesses all of the great powers of a laser beam.
You’ve started reading Ulysses, James Joyce’s modernist classic, and never quite made it the whole way through. Sound familiar? You’re in good company.
So here’s another approach. Start reading Ulysses Seen, the graphic novel adaptation of Joyce’s tome. The artist behind Ulysses SeenisRob Berry, and he’s devoted to using “the visual aid of the graphic novel” to “foster understanding of public domain literary masterworks.” He’s clear to point out that Ulysses Seenisn’t meant to replace Ulysses. Rather it’s meant to be a visual companion to the original work. It uses the comic narrative to “cut through jungles of unfamiliar references” and to help readers “appreciate the subtlety and artistry” of Joyce’s text. So far Berry has completed about 138 pages of Ulysses Seen, and more pages will be coming online at the Joyce Center web site in the near future. According to Publisher’s Weekly, the artist estimates that it will take roughly a decade to complete the full adaptation. (The original novel spans more than 700 pages after all.) In the meantime, here are some more resources to help you get through Joyce’s great work:
A friend of mine rails against the New Yorker’s weekly cartoon caption contest, insisting that while the reader-submitted entries are universally bad, the winner is always the weakest of the lot.
I disagree, agog at people’s cleverness. Any line I come up with feels too obvious or too obscure. Unlike my friend, I never feel I could do better.
Cartoon editor Bob Mankoff’s recent TED Talk offers some key insights into what the magazine is looking for (incongruity, dispositional humor, cognitive mash ups), as well as what it’s not interested in (gross-out jokes, mild child-centered cannibalism) He also cites former contributor and author of my father’s favoriteNew Yorker cartoon, E.B. White on the futility of analyzing humor.
Frequent contributor Matthew Diffee’s short satirical film Being Bobsuggests Mankoff editorial selections owe much to gut response (and a jerking knee). Such intuition is hard won. Mankoff gleefully alludes to the 2000 rejection letters he himself received between 1974 and 1977, following an unceremonious dismissal from psychology school. Then, finally, he got his first acceptance.
Last month we told you about The Strange Day When Bugs Bunny Saved the Life of Mel Blanc. It’s a true tale about how, back in 1971, Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny and other beloved Looney Tunes characters, got into a terrible car accident in Los Angeles and slipped into a coma. Blanc’s wife and son spent two long weeks in the hospital trying to revive him, but got no response. But then, one day, Blanc’s neurologist walked into the room and said to the patient: “Bugs Bunny, how are you doing today?” After a pause, a voice said, “Myeeeeh. What’s up doc?” You can get more on that story here. In the meantime, we’ll amuse you with another short story. Once upon a time, an ear-nose-and-throat specialist wanted to see how Mel Blanc (1908–1989) performed all of those Looney Tunes cartoon voices. So he took a fiber optic laryngoscope, stuck it down Blanc’s throat, and here’s what he saw. Watch above.
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On the eve of yet another Superman movie reboot—coming tomorrow with all the usual summer hit fanfare and noise—take a moment before gorging yourself on popcorn and extravagant CGI spectacles to reflect on the character’s enduringly simple origins. After all, this month marks the 75th anniversary of this most iconic of American superheroes, who first appeared in the June 1938 Action Comics #1. The brainchild of Cleveland high school students Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (so memorably fictionalized in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), Superman is what Neil Gaiman calls an archetypal “primal thing,” a character who can be reinvented every decade while still remaining unmistakably himself.
Witness, for example, the first appearance of Superman on the big screen in the 1941 Fleischer cartoon (top), Superman (or The Mad Scientist)—the first in a series of seventeen shorts. On the heels of the first non-print adaptation of the character—the Adventures of Superman radio drama (listen below)—the cartoon series shows us the original Siegel and Shuster hero, a rough-and-tumble space alien raised in an orphanage, not by the kindly Kents in rural America.
You’ll notice however, that Superman’s resume—more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings… etc.—hasn’t changed a bit. But some of the character’s attributes and origins were considerably softened after DC Comics editor Whitney Ellsworth instituted a code of superhero ethics (many years before the Comics Code Authority stepped in to censor the whole industry).
You can learn even more about Superman’s origins from his creators themselves, interviewed in the clip above for the 1981 BBC documentary Superman: The Comic Strip Hero. Siegel reveals how the idea for Superman came to him during one restless night in which he composed all of the basic script for the character, “an entirely new concept.” The very next day, Shuster sat down at his drawing board and Superman’s look emerged fully-formed. Both creators and their heirs have won and lost high-profile lawsuits over rights to their characters. But legal wrangling over compensation aside, there’s no denying that their mad eureka moment left an indelible cultural legacy no updated film, logo, or controversy can diminish.
Maurice Sendak (1928–2012), the great writer and illustrator of children’s books, would have turned 85 today. To celebrate his birthday, Google has adorned its web site with a fantastic animated doodle (make sure you press the “play” button) and Blank on Blank has released a video that animates Sendak’s musings about being a kid. Based on a previously-unheard interview recorded in 2009, Sendak speaks in the clip about his difficult childhood, which was surrounded by tragedy. (He grew up in Brooklyn, the child of Polish Jewish immigrants whose remaining family perished during the Holocaust.) He also recalls how children all have problems to work through — problems that remained at the front of his mind when he started writing his classic children’s books. It’s worth pairing the video above with another animated video of Sendak’s emotional last interview with NPR’s Terry Gross. And, for a completely random bonus, we’ve added below a clip of James Gandolfini (aka Tony Soprano) reading from Sendak’s controversial story book In The Night Kitchen. The reading took place on September 15, 2008 at the 92nd St Y in New York City, at a tribute held on the occasion of Sendak’s 80th birthday.
Spider-Man, he was apparently a Protestant. The Hulk, a lapsed Catholic. Thor, a worshipper of a Teutonic deity. The X‑Men, an assemblage of Catholics and Episcopalians. And Stanley Lee, the creator of these famous comic book figures, he’s Jewish. If you’re a comic book fan with a thing for trivia, you can peruse this database of over 10,000 characters and figure out the religious affiliation of Batman and Wonder Woman, plus lesser-known characters like Chameleon Boy, Swamp Thing, and Poison Ivy.
P.S. The creatures in the image above, they’re atheists, a category also tracked by this most thorough database.
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. At one point in his career, he scrambled from studio to studio around Los Angeles to work on 18 radio shows in one week.
As Malcolm Gladwell likes to say, that kind of practice leads to mastery. And, in Mel Blanc’s case, it may have saved his life.
Radio Lab, broadcast over WNYC, recently aired a piece about Blanc (listen below) featuring an interview with his son Noel Blanc, who is also a voice actor. Noel Blanc tells the story of a terrible car accident that badly injured his father in 1961 as he was driving home along Sunset Boulevard from a job in San Francisco. Mel Blanc, driving an Aston Martin, collided with another car on Dead Man’s Curve. Blanc was almost killed and slipped into a coma. Blanc’s son and wife spent two weeks at his bedside trying to revive him, but got no response.
One day, about 14 days after the accident, one of Blanc’s neurologists walked into the room and tried something completely new. He went to Mel’s bed and asked, “Bugs Bunny, how are you doing today?”
There was a pause while people in the room just shook their heads. Then, in a weak voice, came the response anyone would recognize.
“Myeeeeh. What’s up doc?”
The doctor then asked Tweety if he was there too.
“I tot I taw a puddy tat,” was the reply.
It took seven more months in a body cast for Blanc to recover. He even voiced Barney Rubble in the first episodes of The Flintstones whilelying in bed with a microphone dangling from above.
The Radio Lab piece includes excerpts from an episode of This is Your Life when Blanc’s doctor tried to explain how he revived his patient. “It seemed like Bugs Bunny was trying to save his life,” was all he could say.
Radio Lab features another neurologist’s opinion: Blanc was such a hard-working professional that his characters lived, protected from the brain injury, deep in his unconscious mind. The doctor’s question must have sounded like a director’s cue.
Essentially, “Mr. Blanc, you’re on.”
And he was, until 1989. Listen through to the end of the podcast. The end of Blanc’s life is as remarkable as his long career.
Below, we have added a related documentary, Mel Blanc: The Man of a Thousand Voices.
Kate Rix writes about education and digital media. Visit her website to see more of her work. Follow her on Twitter: @mskaterix.
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