As you may well have noticed, spam has rendered my MessageCenter completely unusable. Less obvious: There are also ongoing spam attacks against my blog. The spam-comments themselves usually show up in old postings, but when I weed them out, it’s tough to avoid killing good commenta, too. (I accidentally deleted one from Mark Mayerson this [...]

I’m tickled to report that the Scrappyland archives now contain their first piece of original art. It may well be one of the few extant examples of a Scrappy original anywhere, and it’s a doozy: a Dick Huemer drawing of Scrappy attempting to sell some fish to an elderly gent. Huemer was among other things [...]

Good piece on Mark Newgarden and his splendid collection We All Die Alone in today’s New York Times…

For as long as I’ve had a Web site, it’s had a name (Harry-Go-Round) and a domain (harrymccracken.com) that haven’t been the same. I’ve finally gotten around to registering HarryGoRound.com, which now takes you to…Harry-Go-Round.

At some point, HarryMcCracken.com might evolve into a different sort of site. But it’ll always link through to Harry-Go-Round.

You have been [...]

Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report marked Al Jaffee’s 85th birthday today. I tried to find online video of the bit, which was funny (it may be on Comedy Central, but I can’t tell: Its videos won’t work on a Mac). Suffice it to day that Colbert waxed eloquent about the Mad Fold-In, then brought out [...]

Like Mike Barrier, I went to the massive Masters of American Comics exhibit in Los Angeles recently, but am only now getting around to reporting on it, on the day it closes. (It will show up in Milwaukee and New York later this year.)

Mike saw both halves, at the Hammer Museum and the Museum of [...]

On Saturday night, San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum held a benefit at Pixar in Emeryville. (This was the third such event; I wrote about an earlier one here.)
Once again, I was in attendance–and once again, I had a good time.

This one was a bit different than its predecessors. The last Pixar night was held shortly [...]

When I wrote of a Fleischer-themed restaurant with a giant Betty Boop on its sign, some accused me of making it all up. Actually, I was completely accurate, just off by 69 years and 3,000 miles.

When I was in Union Square here in SF this evening, I discovered that a restaurant called Betty Boop’s Diner [...]

In 1930, the aging Winsor McCay did a Lucky Strikes ad (which I just found in an issue of the old, original Life magazine). The gist: Up until then, there’d been an ancient and irriational prejudice against cigarettes, which Lucky had just eradicated forever by removing harmful irritants. (Thank goodness!)

Winsor’s cartoon makes no direct reference [...]

How about some 1930s book art featuring cartoon characters other than Oswald the Lucky Rabbit? I recently picked up a copy of The Princess Elizabeth Gift Book, a 1935 tie-in with the Princess Elizabeth of York Hospital for Children. What it is, essentially, is an anthology of children’s stories, many of them by well-known authors [...]