news paper

The World’s Greatest Comics Festival, Lucca   [1] Sergio Aragones prepares his morning cappuccino by Rick Marschall I have been to Europe more than 60 times, a good percentage of those trips centered around comics festivals, salons, and symposiums. That I often planned trips to coincide, or, more often, I was an invited guest as speaker, juror, or exhibitor (not exhibitionist) made

OLD DOC YAK TAKES HIS SPACE by Chris Beneke      COMIC EXPERIMENT. American comics of the early 1900s were rich with experimenters and experimentation. Within a decade or so, and certainly by the close of World War I, if not before, this experimentation had given way to a formula, based on strong characters and what-came-to-be-called sequentialism.      Here’s how Sidney Smith began Old

Art from Crowded Sketchbooks  by Rick Marschall I have been text-heavy in this space over the past several installments, so I will be merciful and be art-heavy today; or whatever its polar opposite is. In a “crowded life” in the comics and cartoon worlds, I have been blessed to meet many cartoonists beginning in second grade of school (mine, not theirs). Some blossomed into lifelong

 Jimmy - He Earns a Reward!   Chicago Examiner   August 6, 1911  S

 Al Capp’s Own Crowded Life and Family   by Rick Marschall  I knew Al Capp better through the conservative movement, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, than through cartooning. Nevertheless this Crowded Life I chronicle led me to interact in several ways and various times with him. I also knew his brother Elliot Caplin, about whom not enough has been written in comics histories.

Nassua, NY Newsday, 1971: At the station, (radio DJ Al) Doud goes into a studio to tape a segment of his show. His guest is Richard Schickel, movie critic for Life magazine, who wrote a book on Walt Disney a couple of years ago. His other guest is a cartoonist named Al Kilgore (Bullwinkle) who hates the book Schickel wrote on Walt Disney a couple of years ago. Kilgore has a copy of the

Paris Is Burning by Rick Marschall Caran d'Ache I will take a little detour this week. These columns are largely personal – the running title gives me away – but I intend to present a fairly comprehensive, and behind-the-scenes, history of comics of the past 50 years or so. This week, as Easter might distract us, properly so; and with the images of Notre Dame still seared in