TMBSOC accepted in OTTAWA Int. Animation Festival!
 Folks, I’m very excited to announce that our new cartoon short, THERE MUST BE SOME OTHER CAT, had been accepted into competition at the Ottawa International Animation Festival in September! Out last short, “It’s ‘The Cat'”, was screened out of competish at the Ottawa Festival, but this time they’ve opened the doors to us fully. September looks to be a good month for Itza, we’ll keep you posted.
Krazy is from 11-24 to 11-30-1941 this time. Loaded with visual and aural puns, Krazy tackles “Belles”, “Eggplents”, “Megic Coppets” and “Fur Trees” among other outlandish extensions of reason, all or most taking place on Herriman’s stage floorboards. Garge often thought of “Krazy Kat” as taking place on a little stage, you can see below the floorboards in the 11-26.
 Myrtle from 8-18 to 8-23-47, tries out a little continuity as Myrtle spends the first three days training Bingo to be a racing dog, only to be bested by a cat. Myrtle is kissed by a fish in the 8-21, goes on a handlebar date with Snoggons in the 8-22 and in the 8-23, we see a good example of Fisher’s panel gag timing between the third and fourth panel as Myrtle decides not to tell her Pop about the price of lampshades.
 In Felix, from 3-28 to 4-2-1949, Felix has to pay off his debt to Moocher Mouse, then in the 3-31, Moocher reverts to being Felix’s butler. It only takes two days for Moocher to rebel against buttling, and puts tacks in Felix’s bed in the 4-2. As David Gerstein suggested, this type of back and forth between Felix and Moocher suggests Tom and Jerry type conflict, which was at it’s height in 1949 in movie theaters.
 Here’s Yogi Bear from July, 1963. I’m missing July 14th, because I pasted over it in a comic scrapbook I was keeping back in ’63. If I’d had more foresight at the time, I would have kept the entire Sunday Comics supplement, but instead, foolishly spent a lot of time carefully clipping my favorites. I almost didn’t find the 7-21 and 7-28 episodes, but they turned up on the backs of POGO, which I also saved from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I didn’t know who Harvey Eisenberg was in ’63, but I knew I liked his style. I loved the Tom and Jerry comic books he drew.  He developed such a beautiful ink line, and his feel for forms in action was so appealing that when any other artist attempted to draw the Hanna-Barbera characters for print, they just didn’t look right to me. Joe Barbera had great respect for Harvey’s drawing, and went into business with him to produce the “Red Rabbit” and “Foxy Fagan” comic books for Dearfield Comics in 1947, without MGM’s participation. To see the full versions in black and white, including the missing 7-14 strip, go here: http://yowpyowp.blogspot.com/2013/07/yogi-bear-weekend-comics-july-1963.html over to Yowp’s blog and take a look.
I’ve had a lot of computer problems lately, I have an “old” OS, Windows XP, which is being orphaned by Microsoft at a swift clip, already YouTube and Daily Ink don’t work well with it. I upgraded the browser to IE 8, and then was forced to upgrade to the latest version of Yahoo mail, and that little click disabled my computer so that I couldn’t upload or download any pictures. This effectively derailed my blog for quite a few weeks. Thanks to brother-in-law Roger, who is a retired Physics professor and computer genius, all is now fixed up. I’m happy to be back again, see you soon, unless Microsoft has some more “upgrades” lurking in the background.
Daryl Boman says:
Awesome! Congrats on the Ottawa acceptance. Next up, the Oscars!
joe c says:
Congrats on getting into the festival!
Mark Mayerson says:
Hi Mark. Congratulations on getting into the Ottawa Festival. I hope to see the film there. Any chance that you’ll be attending?
Mark says:
Thanks Daryl, Joe and Mark!
There is an extremely remote chance I’ll be there, the expense will be hard to bear, and I fear travelling very much. So we’ll see about that.
Best regards, Mark
Charles Brubaker says:
That’s great, Mark! The film’s going to go big!
Roberto Severino says:
Huge congratulations to you sir. Very well deserved for a superhuman animator like you that I’ve been inspired by.