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Arnold, one of my favorites

Every once in awhile, I think of the "Arnold" comic strip that I loved in the 1980s. It ran from 1982 through 1988. Arnold Melville and his friend Tommy Jordan were the stars. The cartoonist was Kevin McCormick. If you click on these strips, they'll open larger.

I read it daily in The Miami Herald. I loved it. Arnold was this big nosed guy and lots of the action took place in his school. His long suffering teacher was Mr. Arnold.

Almost daily, Arnold would screech out AIEEE! at the most inopportune time. Is there every an opportune time? It always made me laugh, it just came out at the right moment.

Most of the other characters spoke from outside the panels, you wouldn't see them.

I think the strip ended too early, Kevin ended it, the syndicate didn't drop it. Kevin had a big hawk fly in in the final strip and eat Arnold. Kevin regretted ending the strip and said it was too late, "the big bird swallowed."

But again, look at Bobby Ewing and the shower bit. Maybe Arnold can reappear one day and the big bird sequence could just be a dream.

The syndicate listed on the strips are News America and Field Enterprises. In 1984 it was renamed News America after Hearts bought Field in 1984 and then in 1986 renamed North America Syndicate. Now it is all part of King Features Syndicate.

There are a bunch more comics at this site here and here.

Morning Joe it alls

I started doing these "live tweet drawings" and Instagram drawings. While I watch tv, I make a quick cartoon, like I did with Morning Joe this morning.

I've been going back and forth between my Surface Pro 3 and my iPhone.

I think I like the Surface Pro 3 better for this. 

Follow along at my Twitter Page here or my Instagram at Tomversation. 

And of course, Thomas Roberts on MSNBC and the Groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day.  Or Ted Cruz.

Park Row

Park Row in NYC, 1869. You can see the New York Times building right there in the center. If you click on the image, it will open larger.

I visit Park Row often in New York, some of the old newspaper buildings are still there. If I remember right, this Times building is now part of Pace University.

The New York Sun (it shines for all) is up the street a bit, next to City Hall. The old building was just restored and you can see The Sun engraved on the building and on each corner sticks out a clock with the Sun logo and "shines for all" motto engraved on it.

Park Row was right across from NY City Hall and in the 1800s/early 1900s, most if not all of the newspapers were up and down Park Row, all in one area. 

Above is another view. You can see The World newspaper (with the cupola) at the left, and the Tribune building in the center and The NY Times again at right. This photo is from The Times archives. The Times building here is now part of the entrance to the ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Today's New York Daily News

Today's New York Daily News got a lot of play all over tv because of the front page. It's been on every news program and all the talk shows from The View to The Talk.

My goal is to get my Tomversation comic in the Daily News. It's where I learned to read comics as a kid and it's my goal, on my Bucket List.

Making it pleasurable to fly again

I've been traveling often and I'm trying to make it easier. The last few times I took Uber to the airport, it was only $13.99! I tip the driver five bucks, but people tell me I shouldn't tip, because that is all part of the process; in other words, it's included, but I feel weird just getting out of the car and not exchanging money. But it's nice to know that a $35-$40 yellow cab ride from my neighborhood in Miami, is only $13.99 with Uber, when there is no traffic. I usually fly early Saturday mornings, so of course, there is no traffic at that time.

For a couple of years I had TSA Pre-check. It was just given to me. What a pleasure! That's where you go back to the days of just walking through the gates at the airport - no taking shoes off, you don't have to take your computer out of the luggage or display your liquid stuff or even take your jacket off. You speed right through, but just like that, they took that away from me. I read that it's a random thing or you can do something to piss them off like look at them crooked, so for some reason, I lost it.

That's why today, I have an appointment at the TSA at the airport. You can sign up for TSA Pre-check for five years at a time. There is an $85 fee and some credit card companies cover the fee, they will refund the charge once it's made. But even so, it's worth the $85, to avoid the hassle of airport check-ins. I was just in New York for Thanksgiving,  a messy time to travel, and not having the Pre-check made a difference.

I do have to give up some freedoms, like my fingerprints, and share my birth certificate or passport and other things, but I don't have anything to hide and in this day and age I'm assuming the authorities know everything about me already, especially my computer surfing habits, and since they had given me the Pre-check in the past, without me applying for it, I'm sure they know what they need to know about me,  I'm just making it official now and trying to make flying a pleasure again.

#firstworldproblems 

Sticking with Max's Tape Art

Miami Art Week during Art Basel can be daunting, hell, just the fact that I have to leave the Grove is a chore in itself. It's a lot to digest - the noise, the art, the people, it's a non-stop week that is a lot for the senses. Most of the art begins to look the same after a bit, there is a lot of pop art and a lot of classic, there are sculptures as well as collages and paintings and they all get jumbled together, but this year, one art style and one artist stuck out to me. Literally. That's Max Zorn, Tape Artist, shown here.

Max's work appears to be photographs, but the whole image is made from brown masking tape on acrylic glass sheets with light behind it! As I passed by his booth at the Spectrum Art Fair, I noticed that there was tape on one of the images he was working on, I couldn't figure out what was going on at first, I thought he was putting tape on various areas of a photograph, then it dawned on me that the whole image was made from masking tape!

Max got the idea one night when he put tape on top of a street light, he then stared playing with the tape and as he added more layers, it changed coloring, getting darker as he added tape on top of tape. And his Tape Art was born from that. 

"The European tape is different than American tape and I find it interesting and challenging at first when I change tapes in the different countries. The thickness is different," said Max, who lives in Amsterdam and shows his work around the world.

One big tipping point for Max was when the famed artist Bansky shared a video of Max on his social media sites. The video went viral. It shows Max using the masking tape and a scalpel to create his art, as shown below. He calls it "street art," but to me it is fine art that belongs in galleries.

Max will be at the Spectrum Art Show all weekend, until December 6, which is at 1700 NE 2nd Avenue (new location this year, along with the Red Dot Fair). There is parking across the street, it's easy to get to and park.

A gallery of Max's art can be seen here at his website.

The Sunday Comics - just like they used to be

The Sunday Comics is a new project - a  return to yesteryear - where the Sunday comics section was the focus of weekend mornings. Millions of people - grownups and kids - spread the comics pages out and spent quality time reading their favorite comic strips and panels. I can't forget Dick Tracy being the front page of the New York Daily News. The color comics wrapped the whole newspaper. Dondi was the back page. Inside was Little Orphan Annie and Smokie Stover, Moon Mullins, and so many more.

Well, Golden Bell Entertainment announced recently that they will launch their first collaborative arts project called The Sunday Comics. The start of this project begins with "The Sunday Comics," a monthly 15" x 22" inch newspaper publication reminiscent of the comics sections we grew up with. A nice large broad sheet you can lay out on the floor and enjoy, just like when you were a kid.

The Sunday Comics includes work from over 300 artists with hundreds of pages of full color content. This project officially launched on Kickstarter on November 24, 2015 with astounding success, the goal was surpassed by 300% on the first day.

Where The Sunday Comics truly shines is in its partnerships with creators throughout the entertainment industry. With writers of “LOST” and “Batman: The Animated Series” Paul Dini, Oscar Nominated animator and Cannes Grand Prize Winner Bill Plympton, Eisner Award Winner Bill Sienkiewicz, Glenn McCoy storyboard artist for “Minions," Director of the Netflix series “Dragons” John Sanford, Storyboard artist of “Doctor Who” Mike Collins, and Director of “The Book of Life” Jorge Gutierrez, The Sunday Comics plans to empower creators through a unique, new platform to showcase innovative stories in a well known, timeless format.

Additionally, Golden Bell is working with The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum to bring original copies of comic strips such as Little Nemo in Slumberland, the Passing Show, and many more back to their original format. The Sunday Comics will also be collaborating with various syndicates to bring classic titles such as Garfield, Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, Archie, Tarzan, Dick Tracy, Prince Valiant, Rugrats, and many others back to their original publication platform, like this 1960 New York Daily News Sunday comics section.

The Sunday Comics sees itself as a hub for cutting-edge comic ideas and intends to honor the rich history of comic books by merging what’s become entirely separate industries back to one. It's a great way to receive the comics delivered right to your home in a large style format.

Golden Bell Entertainment has received the rights from Jim Davis and Paws, Inc. to create original Garfield comics, which has never been done before. Additionally, Playtonic Games, creators of Banjo-Kazooie, has given Golden Bell Entertainment the rights to create the official companion to their game. The “Yooka-Laylee” comics will debut in The Sunday Comics.  The Sunday Comics plans to empower creators through a unique new platform to showcase innovative stories all under one publication. All of the amazing artists are working hand-in-hand with The Sunday Comics to express themselves in a way never seen before in the industry.

Marc Goldner, Founder of Golden Bell Entertainment has said that, “To create a renaissance in comics, you need to look outside of what’s being done today. You must not only go abroad, but look at other mediums and see the most creative and effective way to bring people together. Creating timeless masterpieces doesn’t come overnight, it’s something you must work for constantly. With every new idea, you need an equally creative way to execute a vision." 

I am happy to say that my "Tomversation" comic panel is part of this project. To follow "The Sunday Comics" on their Kickstarter please visit them here. 

Celebrating the ghosts of the L train

I just got off the L train. I met my cousins in Ridgewood and took the L from Union Square to Myrtle-Wyckoff Avenues. Ridgewood is the new up and coming neighborhood in New York. There was SoHo, then the Lower East Side, the Meat Packing District and Williamsburg and now it's Ridgewood. The L train is the train into Hipsterland, but not so long ago, it was the link between Manhattan and a working class Brooklyn.

As I took the train this time and usually when I take the L train, I think of days past, days before my time, and I think of the ghosts of the subway and the Brooklyn neighborhoods that we pass through. Bedford, Graham Avenue, Lorimar Street, Montrose Avenue and so on. They are names from my past, you see my father and his sister and their mother (my grandmother) and a lot of our relatives lived here so many years ago. I picture them in Brooklyn 1945 and thinking of them on this same subway line. The trains of course, were different and they called it the BMT, (Brooklyn Manhattan Transfer), my aunt told me Saturday - they changed it later to the LL, rather than L, to differentiate it from the EL, which was the elevated train. But it was the same route, the same stops and even the same tiles on the wall that spell out the stations. Those same exact tiles were seen and perhaps touched by my father and grandmother 70 and 80 years ago. 

I had an old aunt, who in the 1980s, told me about the first day the line opened in 1905 and how that first week the rides were free to the public; they were a nickle after that. She told me of her first hand experience, remembering it vividly, she must have been seven years old at the time. I read a book once called "When Brooklyn Was the World." That's the time period I think of as I ride the L train today. To me the train is "The footprint of a lost world," a quote I got from Anthony Bourdain.


Now as I ride the line I see hipsters who have taken over the neighborhood. There they are with their ipods and iphones and skateboards and beards and manbuns and fedoras; acting all cool and as if they have discovered something new. Do they ever think about the people who were there before them? Probably not.

It's the same with all the train lines in the city, there is so much history, but visiting Graham Avenue and Lorimar Street and Bedford, as a child and hearing so many stories of my father's childhood, it makes me think of all those ghosts of times past. My mother grew up near Coney Island, so those train lines have meaning too, but I don't take them as often as I take the L train. I think of my father taking the train to Ebbets Field, or my grandmother taking him to the doctor's office or visiting relatives, in a time that was much simpler.

People have come and gone, but the subway lines are still running, on the same routes on the same tracks, among all those ghosts of happy times past.

Here is an old film of the 1905 subway in New York. It isn't the L line, but you can get the idea of the time period.

Will the real King Tut please stand up

I love history, so I jumped at the chance to visit the King Tut exhibit called "The Discovery of King Tut" on 5th Avenue. It's in the same location where the Saturday Night exhibit, is, which I visited this past summer. I had expected to see long lines which have always been the case with previous Tut exhibits; I had seen it in New York and South Florida before and it took hours to get in.

 But on Monday afternoon, walked right in and there were only a handful of other people there. Similar to the SNL exhibit, life-like sets (in this case dioramas) and videos were the theme. You first enter and see an interesting movie on how Tut was found; with the story of Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon. I read the story of them many years ago when I was a boy, and it's always fascinating.

From the movie we then moved from diorama to diorama. We had earphones and the story was told as we viewed the golden finds. The items were right there, you could touch them if you wanted. I really enjoyed it.


At one point, they showed the sarcophagi after showing a video on a screen which was blocking the sarcophagi and other items, I thought the screen would rise so that we could see it better, but it didn't, so I moved on to the next exhibit. When that ended, I asked the attendant present about the sarcophagi, I wanted to take a photo and I asked when it would be lit up and talked about again, she said any minute. I had told her that it was hard to get a photo with the screen in front of the items. She said, "Don't worry, you'll see them in better light again downstairs."

I asked her, "How can we see them again? They are here, how can they be there?" By then, a few of the other patrons came over to listen. She told me that they were recreations. Recreations? I was a bit stunned, I remember when I saw the exhibit last, about ten years ago, the golden mask was not there and we felt cheated, but now the sarcophagi were not there? These were recreations?

As I moved on, assuming that everything else was real, one of the other patrons asked about the whole exhibit, and to our horror, we were told that everything was a reproduction! Everything! We all gasped at once. We felt we were being punked. I felt sucker punched. I can't explain the feeling, but it was quite disappointing and a bit of feeling foolish at the same time.

The attendant thought she made it all better by repeating more than once that, "These items took six years to reproduce." SIX years, she stressed the "SIX" more than once. We all started at her. Was she kidding?

Again, she stressed the six year process of making the reproductions. I got angry and I told her we had come to see the 3000 year old version and with that, we all stopped what we were doing and headed toward the exit.

What a disappointment. I am assuming that people knew it was a fake otherwise the place would be crawling with patrons. It was just us few that fell for it. These would all be best featured at an art gallery, I'm thinking. Not at a museum exhibit.

My only excitement of the day was seeing the Weekend Update set from SNL as I exited. I must have missed it on my summer tour, so it was exciting to see. At least the SNL sets and props are real. Right? Hello? Right? They're real, right?