Kirby Draws The Iliad -- Jack Kirby's Boy Commandos Fight the Trojan War!

From Boy Commandos #3 in the summer of 1943 comes this stunning Jack Kirby comic book epic featuring his Boy Commandos and the Siege of Troy!

Joe Simon and Jack Kirby must have realized how ridiculous this anachronism was, so right up from that ask the reader to... "stretch your imagination...to imagine that Rip Carter and his gallant Boy Commandos were living in the days of other great crusaders for freedom...to imagine for example that they were fighting at The Siege of Troy!"

It may be a goofy idea, but what the heck...
it's Jack Kirby drawing the Iliad!

There's lots of amazing battle scenes in this comic!

This kind of epic battle of gods and men
is the stuff Kirby was best at!

You can tell Kirby's having a lot of fun drawing this one!

Here are the scans for the complete story:

Click on any thumbnail for a BIG Kirby comic book page!

Click on any thumbnail for a BIG Kirby comic book page!

Click on any thumbnail for a BIG Kirby comic book page!

And remember...

There are lots more golden-age Kirby comics scans in the archives, so go take a look!

This image burned my brain when I was a little kid...

This image burned my brain when I was a little kid...

Sub-Mariner Battles the Human Torch by Bill Everett

I think it's one of the reasons I decided to become a cartoonist. I first saw this image in Jim Steranko's History of Comics book, and I remember begging my parents to buy the book for me at the Pickwick bookstore when I was about seven years old.

For full impact, you gotta see it BIG
at http://tinyurl.com/Submariner-Torch

This is just one of thirteen gorgeous comic book pin-ups specially commissioned for the Jim Steranko Calendar for 1971. See the whole thing in high-resolution at the Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog.

Alex Toth - Part 2: How a TV Cartoon is Created - Animating, Layout, Camera and Production

Welcome back to the second half of Alex Toth and Bob Foster's illustrated guide to how TV cartoons are made.
This ran as a bonus back-up feature in the 1976 Super Friends oversized Limited Collectors' Edition comic book. For more of the background on this feature and the artists who created it, check out the first part at http://cartoonsnap.blogspot.com/2008/11/tv-cartoon-is-created-by-alex-toth-and.html

The first five pages covered the earlier stages of cartoon production from development through storyboarding.

These last five pages cover stuff like...

Studio setup and animation desk...

Animation and Layout...

Character Design and Model Sheets...

Background Layouts...

Painting Animation Cels...

And right below are the full-page high-resolution scans
of the second part of Alex Toth and Bob Foster's
"How TV Cartoons Are Made."

 

Click on any page for a HUGE hi-res image

Click on any page for a HUGE hi-res image

Click on any page for a high-resolution comic scan

Click on any page for a NICE BIG high-res image

In case you missed it, the first five pages of this series on
"the how and why of animated TV Cartoons" are posted
here:

http://cartoonsnap.blogspot.com/2008/11/tv-cartoon-is-created-by-alex-toth-and.html

"How a TV Cartoon is Created" by Alex Toth and Bob Foster (Part 1 of 2)

"How a TV Cartoon is Created" by Alex Toth and Bob Foster is a great oversized 10-page illustrated essay that first appeared as a bonus in the 1976 treasury-sized Super-Friends Limited Collectors Edition comic book.

This is a classic guide to how Saturday morning cartoons were produced in the seventies by Hanna-Barbera studios. Most of what is talked about in this manifesto is still true to one degree or another...depends on the studio and how much outsourcing is being done. The biggest difference is in the camera work, as that is almost entirely being done digitally now.

If you've ever read any of Alex Toth's writing, it makes a lot of sense that he had help with the text. Toth was an amazing artist, but he rambles like crazy in his writings and letters. You gotta love that Alex Toth hand-lettering, though!

Bob Foster is listed as the co-creator along with Alex Toth -- and Bob Foster knows what he's talking about when it comes to cartoons. Bob Foster is the creator of Myron Moose, he was a layout artist at Hanna Barbera and Depatie-Freling throughout the 1970's, wrote the Donald Duck comic strip during the 1980's, he was a writer-artist and editor for Disney comics in the U.S. and overseas at Egmont, and he's been a storyboard artist on dozens of shows since then. Whew!

As far as I know, "TV Cartoons" has only been reprinted once in recent years, so for all those animation fans and Alex Toth fans who have never had the pleasure, "here is the how and why of animated TV Cartoons...the comic strips that move."

The high-resolution scans are below.
Just click on any of the pages below to open up
a HUGE hi-res page of Alex Toth's TV Cartoons.

Stay tuned for Part Two of "How a TV Cartoon is Created"
...the rest of this 10-pager is coming in a few days!

UPDATE: Part TWO of Alex Toth on TV Cartoons is HERE

How to Draw Cartoons - A New Set of High-Res Scans from 1940's Cartooning Book

A while ago I posted links to a terrific cartooning book prepared by Popular Mechanics for U.S. Armed Forces. Now that the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive has scanned another copy of the same book in high resolution, I wanted to point you all to it at http://www.animationarchive.org/2008/11/education-how-to-be-cartoonist-in-16.html

Here's a little hint of what's inside:

How to Draw Hands

How to Draw Cartoon Feet and Shoes

Other pages in the book cover How to Draw Heads, Expressions, Composition, How to Draw Clothes and Folds, Perspective, How to Draw Animals and Kids, and Inking Techniques for old-school ink-slingers.

If you want to see the rest of this classic how-to book on drawing cartoons, take a jump over to

http://www.animationarchive.org/2008/11/education-how-to-be-cartoonist-in-16.html

How to Draw Hats - Men's Classic Fedora Hat

If you want to learn how to draw hats -- y'know...those 1940's detective-style fedoras that you see in the movies -- then take a look at these scans from a couple of old drawing books...

Click on the image above for FULL-SIZED pages on How To Draw Hats

Old-school fedora hats can be kind of tricky to draw...and we have to draw a lot of them on Phineas and Ferb. Secret agent Perry the Platypus wears his fedora hat in every episode, so we end up having to draw hats from all kinds of angles a few dozen times in every storyboard.

Click on the image above for FULL-SIZED page on How To Draw Hats

I recently found a couple pieces of excellent hat drawing reference that I shared with some other artists on Phineas & Ferb, and I thought I'd spread the wealth and share it with everybody else, too.

"Draw the crown as if it fits directly over the skull, not the hair, no matter what angle is used for the hat. Some of the crown will not touch the skull because of the shape of the hat.

Center the hat on the face, using as your guide the imaginary line running from the center of the crown down to the chin."

"Study the taper of the crown; Pay close attention to the correct angle of the taper of the crown as this is a style feature...The taper may vary with style changes."

One big reason that "how to draw hats" reference is so helpful is that you just don't see fedora hats very often these days. There's lots of great hat images in classic Bogart movies and other Film Noirs. I just watched The Big Heat a few weeks ago, and I couldn't stop looking at Glenn Ford's grey fedora (well, it was a black and white movie, so everything's grey...).

Click on the image above for FULL-SIZED pages on How To Draw Hats

UPDATE: Here's a link to an amazing page about how the creases are formed in hats. This guy takes ONE basic hat-shape and puts a bunch of different creases in the crown to form a whole bunch of different hat styles.

TRUST me...it's worth a look. This page will change the way you see (and DRAW) hats from now on. http://www.thefedoralounge.com/showthread.php?t=10272