On a lazy Sunday.......

....You let NANCY do the dishes!

MURRRR! The GHOULA Comic Book is coming....(Creeeepy!)

I'm contributing a 7-page story to the GHOULA comic book, which will be out in October in time for Halloween and Dia de los Muertos. The theme of the book is the supernatural meets L.A. lore, two hot topics!

GHOULA is the Ghost Hunters of Urban Los Angeles and they are NOT ghost chasers or paranormal nuts...they're spirit chasers, as in they chase down spirits at bars and restaurants and hotels that are supposedly haunted. If you need a little background on the group, here's an article I wrote about them last year when GHOULA met at Patrick's Roadhouse in Santa Monica Canyon.

Other cartoonists contributing to the first GHOULA comic include my CARTOON FLOPHOUSE partner Jose Cabrera (CRYING MACHO MAN), my GUMBY'S GANG STARRING POKEY collaborator Raf Navarro (SONAMBULO), Javier Hernandez (EL MUERTO, AZTEC ZOMBIE), my fellow CAPSer Jim Wheelock, GHOULA founders Rich Carradine and Lisa Mouse, and Steve Nash of the Phoenix Suns.

Here's a clue to my story above!

(BOO! I was kidding about that last contributor.)

Random Rants and Raves

--- I'm looking forward to this graphic novel above. Anything Jason does, I'm like right there! One of my favorite cartoonists these days. All of his books: highly recommended!



---- Too Short may have written the greatest song ever with 2006's BLOW THE WHISTLE. It bumps for hours and hours. I fear Sir Mix-a-Lot has been dethroned.....

--- LL Cool J when from hero to zero when he overdid the smooth jam thing. I NEED LOVE helped kill hip hop....then he kept killing it again and again with more love rap. Someone stop him! He should listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers' NO CHUMP LOVE SUCKER and snap out of his daze! Or Wu-Tang Clan should stomp on his face!

--- Buy SILLY GOOSE!

--- I just saw three dissimilar films: IP MAN 2, which was pretty good and co-starred the great martial arts movie icon Sammo Hung......THE SOLOIST, which, despite some mixed reviews and some Oscar-baiting characters and feel good shmaltz, was pretty good, anchored by good performances by Robert Downey, Jr., Jamie Foxx, and the City of L.A.....



....and HOT TUB TIME MACHINE. It's out of control and a lot of fun, in the wackjob genre of BILL & TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE, DUDE, WHERE'S MY CAR?, HAROLD & KUMAR and stuff like that. Definitely a good rental. Watch the unrated version. Wink, wink!

--- Buy SILLY GOOSE!

---- What's more ridiculous? J-Lo singing JENNY FROM THE BLOCK (anyone remember her?) or Eminem's new NOT AFRAID song. I'm instantly sick of that single and it just came out. The older he gets, the more serious and one-note he gets about his daughter Haley. The whole song is about how he's gone to rehab and cleaned up for his little girl. Wow. So rebellious. Hardcore!

--- Please buy SILLY GOOSE!

--- Two of my favorite rap songs (by Lil Wayne and Birdman and by David Banner) have the word "Stuntin'" in the chorus....what the hell does that mean? Check out this Lil Wayne video, it's nuts!

---- Silly Goose has cleaned up, gone to rehab, and now writes songs dedicated to his young daughter. NOW will you buy SILLY GOOSE?!?

The reviews are in: ¡HOLY GHOST EL GATO! is a classic!

It's never too late to get a rave review. And when you've got great fans like the Flophousers, you'll get 'em, even if it takes them 11 years after publication!

Up in the Bay Area is one of my favorite gents and a longtime Cartoon Flophouser, RICARDO PADILLA. Ricardo was in a good mood, having recently caught the great Tim Burton film ED WOOD at the Castro in SF with his lovely daughter and having enjoyed a nice, gratuitous breakfast at AHN'S BURGERS on Grand Ave. in Oakland. Believe me, Ahn's will never get burned down in any riot: that place is indeed holy and if anyone is ever traipsing through the Lake Merritt area, go, go, GO get breakfast at Ahn's.

But I digress. Mr. Padilla sent me this nice note regarding the second El Gato book, ¡HOLY GHOST EL GATO!

But the main reason...I'm jotting this note....is that the other day....(in an altered state of consciousness) I found & re-read your 1999 edition of "Holy Ghost El Gato". Wow!

What a classic! I have to admit I may have overlooked what a great character El Gato is.....you are quite talented....(u know that, I'm sure) But "Prof. Papp" is awesome as well.....your skewed perspective, your puns, sense of humor......I never really appreciated how talented you really are....It's inspiring to me....But the coup de grace was the back cover quote: "For He who lives more Lives than one, More deaths than one Must Die." --Oscar Wilde (Classic!)

I need more "El Gato" issues!

tu amigo,

relentlessly,

--Ricardo

p.s. What ever happened to the "Muscles of Justice" idea......should I harass Rafael Navarro?

MUSCLES FOR JUSTICE was supposed to be a superteam featuring El Gato, Navarro's SONAMBULO, and Javier Hernandez's EL MUERTO, AZTEC ZOMBIE, but for obvious reasons (busyness? laziness?), that book (or even a story) never came together (except for in some ads). But maybe one day, some hotshot like Miley Cyrus will give us the seed money and us three amigos will get it together and get our JUSTICE on!

Thanks, Ricardo, for the nice note. See you up at the Alternative Press Expo in mid-October, amigo!

And for anyone jonesing to order up some EL GATO, CRIME MANLGER, all four books are available for $5 each (plus $2 shipping) at:

CARTOON FLOPHOUSE
PO Box 25
Santa Monica, CA
90406

Toodles!

Tribute to the Late, Great Syd Hoff

Here's the first really fun article I ever wrote. It was on SYD HOFF, the great cartoonist and children's book author (DANNY AND THE DINOSAUR, ALBERT THE ALBATROSS, OLIVER, JULIUS, etc., etc. etc.).

Signing Hoff…
The Creator of Danny and the Dinosaur and
other Children’s Book Classics Asks “Where’s Prancer?”

by Michael Aushenker, Community Editor
The Jewish Journal

If you have children or friend with children, chances are you have come across Syd Hoff, the author and illustrator who, over a 40 year stretch, has produced some of our most enduring children’s books.

One reason Hoff, 85, has been around for so long has to do with the antic quality of his drawing – pleasing, economical pen-and-ink illustrations textured with monochromatic color. Another reason is, no doubt, related to the ideas and themes that his Jewish subconscious has projected into a plethora of whimsical adventures that reach out both to children and parent alike. These colorful yarns usually follow certain Hoffian conventions – the displaced animal or human outcast, wandering through and alienating, if benign, society, looking for a friend, a home, or a way home. Often times, the central character is shunned by the people or animals of his new environment – politely informed that he is unwanted – until the insouciant misfit performs an act that endears him to society and leads to his acceptance and happiness. Ultimately, Hoff’s books are thinly disguised celebrations of the individual triumphing over the conventional masses in devil-may-care fashion – finding love, purpose, and a place in the world.

In the case of “Stanley,” the story of a caveman kicked out of his clan for being too gentle, the book was published in 1962, at the height of “The Flintstones” prime-time popularity. But despite superficial similarities, Hoff most likely had another famous caveman in the back of his mind. “I think I must’ve subconsciously observed the humor in “The Flintstones,” Hoff told the Journal. “Prior to that, there was a comic strip with a caveman called “Alley Oop.” You try to subconsciously absorb something from everything (that you come across).” In fact, Hoff has publicly credited his grandmother’s eccentricity for instilling in him his flair for fantasy and penchant for exotic animal characters. After all, she owned a pet parrot and would routinely feed it blintzes, gefilte fish, matzo balls, and other homemade confections.

Born in the Bronx in 1912, Hoff grew up following the exploits of his favorite newspaper funnies. Strips like “Barney Google,” “Happy Hooligan” and cartoonists like Harry Hershfield and a sports cartoonist Thomas Alluewishes Dorgan (known by the initials T.A.D.), all had an impact on the young artist.

But Hoff’s first brush with his artistic destiny came when Milt Gross, a famous cartoonist best known for “Dave’s Delicatessen” and “Count Screwloose,” singled him out while visiting a Morris High School assembly.

Recalls Hoff, “We were friends for as long as he lived (until he died in the fifties).”

By his mid teens, Hoff began training at the prestigious National Academy of Design. However by 1931, at the age of 18, Hoff gave up any pretensions of becoming a fine artist when he sold his first gag cartoon to The New Yorker. He instantly detoured into a multi-decade stint supplying gag cartoons to the magazine, as well as other periodicals like Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and Liberty. According to Hoff, New Yorker founding editor Harold Ross – “a brilliant man” raised in Aspen, Colorado with decidedly conservative, Puritanical values –most likely hired him to reach Jewish readers.

“With Ross’s editing, my characters became more and more Jewish,” Hoff related to a Florida paper. “Sometimes they would even change a caption to give it a real Jewish accent. They had a Jewish jeweler saying, ‘It’s solid golt.’ This would never happen today.”

Hoff often drew upon his predominantly Jewish immigrant environment for inspiration.
“I was trying to be realistic, capturing the people that I lived among. All my neighbors, all my friends, my parents.”

Within these exquisitely – rendered single-panel comics, Hoff quickly mastered the fine art of lampooning the tensions between the sexes and the classes in Urban American. This was all before Hoff’s career took yet another direction in 1958 with the sale of Danny and the Dinosaur (the good-natured exploits of a boy who befriends a museum dinosaur) to Harper & Row (now HarperCollins). Perhaps his seminal creation, “Danny” has its origin in a turbulent time in Hoff’s life, when his daughter, Susan, was convalescing following hip surgery.

“I drew a picture that I hoped would take her mind off her crutches,” he once wrote in an autobiographical sketch. “…my conception of a prehistoric creature, with my brother as a boy, sitting on its back.”

Susan’s enthusiasm inspired Hoff that night to cultivate the project that would establish his name and his fortune in the children’s book industry. Since then, the prolific Hoff has written and/or illustrated over 200 children’s books, all while maintaining a 20 year secondary career as a syndicated cartoonist, working well through the early 80’s on newspaper comics like Laugh it Off and Tuffy. He also tours extensively across the country, visiting grade schools on what he calls “chalk talks.”

Since his wife of 57 years, Dora “Dutch” Berman passed away in 1994 following open-heart surgery, Hoff has picked up the pace on his production schedule, recently completing two sequels to his most well-known work, Danny and the Dinosaur.” And while “Danny” may be Hoff’s called card (over 10 million copies sold to date), it certainly is not the author’s only classic –Julius (1959), Sammy the Seal (1959), Oliver (1960), Albert the Albatross (1961, and Grizzwold (1963) are just a few of his familiar titles.

Ask any gorilla, elephant, walrus, or bear, and they will most likely concur that of all the American Jews who have contributed to the advancement of the children’s book art form, Syd Hoff is the most American. For Dr. Seuss wore the crown as clown prince of surrealist verse, approaching Yiddish with his nonsensical cadences; Shel Silverstein lent a Talmudic wisdom to his gentle parables of life and longing; and when the Reys fled from Nazi-occupied France on a bicycle, the couple not only smuggled with them the manuscript for Curious George but also a European sensibility and sophistication that informed their work.

Syd Hoff’s work, on the other hand, has always conveyed a quintessential Americana of the 40’s and 50’s –clean, bold minimalism in text and art; cartoon idioms; whimsical characters set loose in generic cityscapes, populated by vaguely ethnic citizens and bulbous cars –all hallmarks of a tradition Hoff cultivated during his early years as a top-dollar gag cartoonist. Despite the sketchier line and flatter colors prevalent in his most recent books, Hoff’s winning artwork has been amazingly consistent over the years –a stability and quality that has directly linked the children of the 60’s to the kids of the ‘90’s.

But those deep-sea diving for hidden meaning in Hoff’s fish-out-of-water themes will not extract them from the author. Hoff is particularly elusive when the conversation turns to an analysis of his work. Concludes Hoff, “I’m just trying to be amusing or entertaining. Make the kids laugh. That’s about all.”

Reprinted with permission: The Jewish Journal – December 26, 1997. (www.JewishJournal.com). No part of this article may be reprinted without permission.



Syd was a terrific interview and he sent me a terrific letter of appreciation for writing this article. I'll never forget the experience, one of the best I've enjoyed in all of my adventures in journalism.

KIRBY Sez: "Don't Ask, Just BI (-Centennial) It!"

Hey, you Flophousers, put some muscle in yer hustle 'n' have a spectacular, fireworks-y Fourth of July Weekend!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MORRIS AUSHENKER!

My father turns 64 today. (Take THAT, Paul McCartney!)

I love U, PA!