I was shocked and saddened on Tuesday morning — as were many of my fellow comics fans and comic art aficionados — to receive the news that artist and former Disney animator Al Rio had passed away in his native Brazil, the result of an apparent suicide. Those of you who have followed Comic Art [...]
Archive for the ‘Reminiscing’ category
Comic Art Friday: RIP, Al Rio (1962-2012)
February 3, 2012Comic Art Friday: The best of 2011
December 30, 20112011 was another light year on the commission front, due to economic circumstances with which I’m certain many of you could identify. It was, however, what the late film star Spencer Tracy might have termed a Katharine Hepburn kind of year — there wasn’t a lot of meat on its bones, but what there was, [...]
Comic Art Friday: Nice people rock!
December 23, 2011As most of you are aware, I celebrated yet another anniversary of my birth on Monday of this week. (That’s December 19, for the calendar-impaired.) That very day, I arrived home from a fun time touring the holiday sights of downtown San Francisco with The Daughter only to discover this beauty of a birthday gift [...]
You can still rock in America, even if you need a rocking chair
October 6, 2011Way back in America’s bicentennial year (1976, for those of you who are either too young to recall or lousy at math), Jethro Tull recorded a concept album entitled Too Old to Rock and Roll; Too Young to Die. The record’s theme reinforced the notion that rock music is a young person’s game. (Remember The [...]
RIP, Donnie the K
January 18, 2011This will only mean something to you if you were listening to pop-rock music in the 1960s and ’70s, or watched TV programs of similar vintage revolving around said music. Don Kirshner is gone. Kirshner — or Donnie the K, as I like to call him — started out as a Tin Pan Alley music [...]
Comic Art Friday: The very best of 2010… maybe ever
December 31, 2010In previous years, I’ve presented my favorite comic art acquisitions of the foregoing 12 months on the last two Fridays before year’s end. Last year, I mustered sufficient ambition to make an entire week out of it. 2010 was a sparse collecting year for me, for reasons you can probably deduce if you follow this [...]
Descent into the Pitt
November 23, 2010Sad news for genre film fans today: Ingrid Pitt, one of the leading ladies of horror movies during the 1970s, has died — this time, for real — at the age of 73. Pitt became a cult star by way of her appearances in Hammer Films’ The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula, The House That [...]
A day for roses
August 19, 2010Today would have been KJ’s half-birthday. The custom of half-birthdays — and ultimately, half-anniversaries — was one that I brought into our relationship from my childhood. Because my birthday is only six days before Christmas, my major gift-receiving opportunities were bunched together into a single week of the calendar year. It became my habit, therefore, [...]
On television, everything dies
March 29, 2010As evidence of the title of this post, I offer the following three exhibits. Last Wednesday, Robert Culp died. Robert Culp first became a TV star in the late 1950s as the lead in a Western series entitled Trackdown. Culp played a Texas Ranger whose job involved — as the more mentally nimble among you [...]
Dancing in the dark, walking through the park, and reminiscing
March 23, 2010This headline struck me with a lightning bolt of nostalgia: Fruitport Township Board OKs casino agreements with Little River Band You know, I loved me some Little River Band back in the day. A series of charmingly pleasant pop hits made the Melbourne, Australia-based LRB ubiquitous on American Top 40 and Adult Contemporary radio in [...]
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