On the long road to becoming an Oscar-winning animation director, Gene Deitch became an intense jazz fan. At the age of 21, he discovered The Record Changer magazine, a jazz fan magazine filled with obsessive, scholarly, and purist essays about jazz as well as listings of hard-to-find jazz albums. Every jazz swinger in the '40s was called a cat (as in “cool cat”), so Gene Deitch created a cartoon feature for Record Changer titled “The Cat,” which quickly became a fixture of the magazine. He also started drawing the covers, which graced almost every issue from 1945 to 1951 along with “The Cat.” Deitch's stylistically virtuoso images exquisitely embodied the essence of the 1950s hipster, and was a visual paean to the joy of collecting records and appreciating jazz. The Cat on a Hot Thin Groove collects all of Deitch's Record Changer work in one gorgeous, coffee-table art book, with commentary and reminiscences by Deitch himself. Originally published in 2003 in hardcover and out-of-print for almost a decade, this first-ever paperback edition will delight a new generation of fans.

Looks at the lives and careers of more than three hundred animators.

Inspired by a real-life incident―getting his tie caught in a moving Moviola editing machine―Gene Deitch, cartoonist, animator, memoirist, renaissance man, created Nudnik, his Everyman character, a cross between Candide and Godot. The star of 12 Paramount-produced animated shorts that ran in theatres as an opening to the main movie in 1964 and 1965, Nudnik was one of Deitch’s most creatively personal and commercially successful creations in a long career of innovative and successful work, including the award-winning animated versions of Jules Feiffer’s Munroand Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. Nudnik is the well-intentioned, kind, cheerful, but bumbling naif, inspired by and reflecting such archetypal characters as Jackie Gleason’s Poor Soul, Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, and Charles Schulz’s Charlie Brown. He never gets a break, can’t do anything right, but somehow muddles through, dignity more or less intact. Nudnik Revealed! finally collects all of Deitch’s original drawings, sketches, model sheets, storyboards, and color “set-ups” that he drew during the Nudnik production season of ’64-’65, all reproduced from original art, showcasing his lively pencil line and his slick, authoritative pen and ink work. Deitch, a born storyteller and one of the great raconteurs of comics and animation, accompanies the copious examples of art with a running commentary―by turns, funny, spirited, and chock full of historical insights.

In 1955, Gene Deitch embarked on a daily comic strip for United Features Syndicate that he hoped would become his life's work. One of the most unusual strips of the decade, Terr'ble Thompson was about a very odd little boy who had his "Werld Hedd Quarters" in a tree house and was regarded far and wide as "the bravest, fiercest, most-best hero of all-time." Terr'ble Thompson collects the entirety of Deitch's short-lived inspiration for Tom Terrific, and a new generation will discover what could have been one of the great comic strips of all-time had it continued. The strip is drawn in a simple, modernist style that served as an antidote to the ubiquitous Disney look that had spread into all facets of popular culture. Terr'ble Thompson was a visual and verbal feast of fun that blended time and space, with Terr'ble going on adventures with great historic figures like Columbus, George Washington, and Davy Crockett. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial; color: #424242}

Early '70s Radio focuses on the emergence of commercial music radio "formats," which refer to distinct musical genres aimed toward specific audiences. This formatting revolution took place in a period rife with heated politics, identity anxiety, large-scale disappointments and seemingly insoluble social problems. As industry professionals worked overtime to understand audiences and to generate formats, they also laid the groundwork for market segmentation. Audiences, meanwhile, approached these formats as safe havens wherein they could re-imagine and redefine key issues of identity. A fresh and accessible exercise in audience interpretation, Early '70s Radio is organized according to the era's five prominent formats and analyzes each of these in relation to their targeted demographics, including Top 40, "soft rock", album-oriented rock, soul and country. The book closes by making a case for the significance of early '70s formatting in light of commercial radio today.

In 1976, a fledgling magazine held forth the the idea that comics could be art. In 2016, comics intended for an adult readership are reviewed favorably in the New York Times, enjoy panels devoted to them at Book Expo America, and sell in bookstores comparable to prose efforts of similar weight and intent. We Told You So: Comics as Art is an oral history about Fantagraphics Books’ key role in helping build and shape an art movement around a discredited, ignored and fading expression of Americana. It includes appearances by Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman, Harlan Ellison, Stan Lee, Daniel Clowes, Frank Miller, and more.

A unique perspective on a fundamental skill - Character Design is necessary for animators, game designers, comic book artists and illustrators.