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Showing posts with label Tintin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tintin. Show all posts

Friday, December 13, 2024

CARTOONISTS AND THEIR CHRISTMASSES

CHRISTMAS 
PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
FROM THE CARTOONISTS
by Rick Marschall




As this site's late, beloved founder, John Adcock, occasionally planned, in the run-up to Christmas I will share some seasonal and rare artwork by cartoonists, illustrators, and animators through the years. 

In a week or two I will share custom artwork cartoonists did for me, but today I got to thinking of "ghosts" (not ghost artists!) of Christmases past. Below is card that I cherish. I was on the Christmas-card list of Hergé. This is perhaps his last, with the handwritten salutation of him and his wife Fanny. 

It got me to thinking of cards I received through the years, that ceased, somewhat logically, when the cartoonists died. On the other hand, Jeannie and the Schulz family have maintained the list, and their greetings are gratefully received: Charlie Brown Christmasses live on. Dean Young, whose Blondie -- and himself -- magnificently flourish today, still designs and mails out custom, personalized (i.e., not Hallmark/commercial) greetings. I hope not amiss to share this year's:


My ol' friend Dean (our book Blondie and Dagwood's America was the second of my 75 books...) is loyal to the iconic strip's many fans. A merrrry Christmas indeed.

So as I plan to share some other vintage and precious treasures in coming days, I will share again the Tintin card from 1982. (By the way, by my calculation, these days and dates will apply again in 2033, if you can wait to hand this above your desk (for more than the great artwork!) I used to own three original Tintin pages, so I get nostalgic over such mementos...

Joyeux Noël!








 

                                   

Sunday, June 9, 2013

Comic strip reporter ‘Bourlekrane’ and his colleague ‘Tintin’

         
[1] Preview of Bourlekrane, with camera bag and pencil on the road to Morocco, 18 June 1925, les petits bonshommes.

This French comic strip character is from a forgotten children’s weekly with no capital letters in its title, les petits bonshommes (the little puppets), sub-titled ‘Paraissant tous les jeudis’ (appears every Thursday) in 1925. It was published in Paris by a company named Société Anonyme “Education”; perhaps it just set out  to educate reading — judging by the paper’s title payoff ‘…quand même!…’ which translates to: ‘even them.’
     
Artist-writer Aristide Perré (1888-1958) made several strips for this magazine in the early 1920s. Mildly humorous stories in a seemingly primitive but effective bigfoot and silly walk style.

[2]  Cover of les petits bonshommes, 8 October 1925.
Strips such as the adventures of Bourlekrane, reporter of Le Petit Bobard, for which the first announcement appeared in print in les petits bonhommes of 18 June 1925. The French ‘bobard’ means little lie. The French ‘boule crane’ means ball skull, although that may have nothing to do with the name of the comic character.

[3] Bourlekrane chez les indigènes.
  
A similar 1920s reporter featuring in comic strip adventures was Tintin, reporter of Le Petit Vingtième, created by Hergé (1907-83) on 4 January 1929. Belgian reporter Tintin (short for ‘Valentin’) started his career as primitive as his French colleague Bourlekrane. The strip appeared on Thursdays too, in Le Petit Vingtième, the weekly children’s supplement of a small Brussels newspaper, Le Vingtième Siècle (the twentieth century).

[4] Bourlekrane chez les indigènes (Suite).
Update: 

Jean-Claude Michel has provided a more exact meaning for the term ‘bourlekrane’. He explains 

In fact, Bourlekrane is just a name constructed about bourre le crâne, and this expression means something like brainwashing.

For instance, someone who tell (or write) false facts, but so well that many people finally believe what he says.

In other terms, the name Bourlekrane is very well adapted for a certain kind of journalists...