“Content cannot be manufactured, in my opinion. That which I can find is better than that which you can make. That which we find, the work and the use of the people out there, it’s natural, that’s what ordinary people do, that interests me.” - Fred Herzog
Made With Paper
Bill Murray on Gilda Radner:
“Gilda got married and went away. None of us saw her anymore. There was one good thing: Laraine had a party one night, a great party at her house. And I ended up being the disk jockey. She just had forty-fives, and not that many, so you really had to work the music end of it. There was a collection of like the funniest people in the world at this party. Somehow Sam Kinison sticks in my brain. The whole Monty Python group was there, most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people, and Gilda. Gilda showed up and she’d already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn’t seen her in a long time. And she started doing, “I’ve got to go,” and she was just going to leave, and I was like, “Going to leave?” It felt like she was going to really leave forever.
So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny did it for a while. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way—over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. And that went on for more than an hour—maybe an hour and a half—just carrying her around and saying, “She’s leaving! This could be it! Now come on, this could be the last time we see her. Gilda’s leaving, and remember that she was very sick—hello?”
We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, “She’s leaving, I don’t know if you’ve said good-bye to her.” And we said good-bye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know.
And because these people were really funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there.
It was just one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life. I’ll always remember it. It was the last time I saw her.”- from Live from New York: an Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live
(Source: jhermann)
I thought, “When we’re eighty, I’ll tell Margot I’ve been doing this her whole life…”
One of the dozen or so reasons I love this film.
(Source: lucyliued)
Old pics
Really, the New Yorker magazine? Marvel Entertainment drew that image? Not Jack Kirby and Don Heck? Really?
Sure, your art department was happy, having ironically depicted the goofy, clunky, first comic book appearance of Iron Man to illustrate the review for the new-fangled, shiny, 3D movie version of the hero-robot. Sure, the legal department cleared it because, yes, a court of law has upheld the fact that a corporation created this art. But your massive fact check department let an attribution like this slide?
When every other week your back pages feature an “illustration” or two that’s nothing more than some Photoshop fun with stock photos, the person doing the shopping gets credited as well as the people who snapped the pictures and the syndicate who bought them. Why couldn’t the same respect be extended to one of pop culture’s most tragically under respected creators?
A couple years ago a Harry Bliss cartoon appeared in your caption contest which was an homage to Kirby’s cover to Tales to Astonish #39. It features a typically lumpy and dumpy Kirby monster scaling the wall of an apartment building, and a typically upper-middle class New Yorker cartoon character talking on the phone and sipping red wine, completely unaware of his impending doom. There was a bit of a tizzy when the denizens of the internet pointed out that the cartoon was based mostly on a Kirby drawing, and Kirby wasn’t credited. Although I think an “after Kirby” note probably should have accompanied the new drawing, I’ll never begrudge a cartoonist for appropriating existing work. Especially when the very meat of his joke is taking a hokey comic book monster and putting him into the context of snooty, high-brow Manhattan everyday life. But this is different. This straight-up is a Jack Kirby drawing. Of Iron Man. Illustrating a review of Iron Man 3. With no credit.
The New Yorker has done so much for comics. You give cartoonists who think in terms of one-liners a chance to actually make a career of it. With the influence of Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman, you’ve helped to legitimize alternative comics among the literary elite. Please stop treating Jack Kirby, who those few of us who are more interested in comics than in superheroes call “King,” like nothing more than a finger in the hand of the corporate master he once served.
DISCLOSURE: I know some people who work at the New Yorker, and happen to be madly in love with one of them. I’ve also been madly in love with the magazine ever since I was a little boy flipping through each issue once it arrived in order to find all the cartoons, swears and boobs within.
Paddybono adds: Jack Kirby. Stan Ditko. Jim Steranko. My pantheon of Marvel comic artists. I would buy anything they drew. Respect.
“Nobody knows they’re young when they’re young.
