Peanuts by Bukowski, Pogo reprints

As Neil Gaiman said in his blog, I didn’t expect to like this Peanuts by Charles Bukowski over at ProgressiveBoink, but I do – good stuff in there. It’s like viewing Bukowski, and Peanuts, through a different lens, bringing specific qualities to the surface in both that may usually be a little more buried. Or something. Here’s Peanuts’ wikipedia entry, as the official site in 90% ads for merch and that rubs me the wrong way.

I’ve been carrying around an old, tattered copy of the first Pogo collection (1951) lately to read on the train, and if you haven’t read any Pogo I highly recommend it. Fantagraphics is planning a series of classy reprints of the strip, although a big heavy hardback of Pogo seems incongruous to me. I (and Eddie Campbell) love Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue Eyed Years With Pogo, and in my love for books you can put in your pocket, I like the other old reprints too (well, they’re maybe too big for your pocket unless you’re wearing cargo pants, but they’ve got personality and are lighter than the Fantagraphics things).

lolcats vs Laugh-Out-Loud Cats

It seems that from 1912-1913, Aloysius “Gorilla” Koford, an ancestor of cartoonist ApeLad wrote and drew a newspaper cartoon called Laugh-Out-Loud Cats. It’s funny and great, and makes me nostalgic for the great days of newspaper cartoons before they shrunk the cartoon pages and brought on the onslaught of crap we have now.

The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats were obviously ahead of their time by almost 100 years, as they predict (and some might say outwit) the LOLcats phenomenon currently infesting every corner of ‘teh internets‘. Indeed, if the cartoon were, say, a contemporary outgrowth of LOLcats, I’d be happy the trend has spawned something greater than itself.