palusbuteo

On Youtube I subscribe to a channel called Toy Galaxy (that is as far as I know, also locally produced), where they talk about the history and cultural impact of toys, comics, and cartoon series from the late 1970s to 1990s.

The episode that dropped today was about "Calvin & Hobbes"

It was mentioned in the history, that I was not aware of, that Watterson was initially (ordered) to draw a comic & toy design called Robotman from a British pop musician named Peter Shelley (more on him in a moment), and while watching the video about C&H I put in a search for Shelley to fulfill that ADHD curiosity afterwards.

Watterson flatly refused (good for him) and Robotman got sent to another cartoonist who eventually got to drop Robotman itself and is now just Monty.

After watching the video about C&H, I looked into this Shelley guy, who I never heard of.
Wikipedia mentioned some of his "hit" singles, that I also never heard of. (apparently huge in UK and Australia)
So naturally I went to youtube again and looked for the music. And. Holy fuck is it Terrible
He also decided his fame was getting too much so created a persona character named Alvin Stardust. And....the music was Worse.

The 1970s and early 80s was a really wild time. I'm glad I was but an innocent child then. I don't know how I would have handled it had I been a teen or adult. Yes, I love my ventures into Nostalgia-Land but it comes with consequences.

I barely remember reading the Robotman / Robotman & Monty / Monty comics. Our local paper never carried it (Peanuts and Garfield were the premiere titles, after Schultz died and the paper considered stopping the comic there were near-riots in the streets and death threats sent to the paper. I am not exaggerating too much.) , so I very rarely got to read it.

It's....OK I guess. I suppose thanks to the Internet I can go to the website and get caught up, but getting caught up over 30 years of comics I think is asking a lot of my time right now. I don't seem to remember Robotman's run all that fondly, and apparently it didn't hit the US as planned, with toys and other marketing ploys that Shelley had apparently banked on/promised.

In a comparative way, I do find it interesting how some Japanese Anime products and series managed to hit HUGE in the US, even the ones that were totally stripped of their original design and storylines, to the point where US audience got such a watered-down and hacked-up version if they ever saw the original Japanese version they would not recognize it. Whereas some other properties like where Transformers came from, was an absolute beast. (and one my brother and I were very caught up in...yes the live-action movies were terrible, although so was the feature-length cartoon movie in 1986, which helped define the genre of Fan Service); or Pac-Man. (which itself is probably worth its own post; and I don't think something like Nintendo would have hit the US the way it did had Pac-Man been unable to crack the market the way it did)

I guess what I'm trying to get at here with this post is about how shocked/disappointed I am at the horrific quality of the music of Shelley and how his Robotman product failed so badly. I know there is no accounting for taste but holy crap on a cracker that music is something rank.

The Beatles' Lucy in the Sky came on the radio earlier today and I decided to give it a listen all the way through. As weird as the song and album is, it holds a somewhat special place in my heart/nostalgic childhood memory because that was one where my brother and I found my Mom's LP collection and we had (permission) to play records to entertain ourselves when we were kids (we also had Sesame Street, Muppet Show and Disney records), and we took one look at the cover of Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour and were like "What the Heck is THIS About?!" so we just had to find out. Which is also kinda funny once we realized it was the same band that produced the heavy hitters we heard on the Oldies radio station like "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and "Twist and Shout".

Although I may be comparing apples to oranges here (aaahhaaa, Apple, see what I did there? unintentional), as the quality of the Beatles compared to Shelley seems a bit far apart.

I also remember somewhat recently stumbling across "traditional" pop music in Germany from the 70s and 80s and gosh I'm sorry i think I'd rather slam my fingers in a car door. (plus the sound of the door slamming has better music production).

I did not intend this post to end up becoming a take on pop music from the generation before my time, so I'm just gonna end that track here.

There were a few stills in the video about C&H where it could be very obvious it was an image of the comic as it was printed in the paper, with the color registration very slightly off or could see the dot-matrix pattern from the printing press.

There is very much a certain esthetic and quality of newspaper comics I'm not sure I can adequately articulate. Watterson's color pallet is something I think is/was terribly underrated, or just not really discussed much. Perhaps the color versions are just so vivid and "just right" they don't need to be analyzed or discussed. They just work, and work damn well.

There was I think a particular experience to reading comics on a newspaper page, as well as the papers/printing itself working around the limitations of the color printing process of the time. I'm not sure we will ever have a similar experience with media ever again. I'm not sure how I'm to feel about that. Good or Bad.

Even as print starts to eek back just a little bit into existence and relevance, the printing tech has changed drastically. Sure, inkjet has incredible vibrancy and image quality, lightyears beyond what photo-offset could ever hope to be capable of. But in some ways having to work with the press limitations and limited quality gave it a certain kind of look & feel you as the reader had to work with. I don't want to necessarily say it had its own "charm" (out-of-registration prints where the colors and lines are all blurry or misprints or splotches was rage-inducing), but when you got your hands on a quality page, especially the Sunday comics in color, there was something about it. I certainly took it for granted.

Perhaps as a 'tribute' to the prepress staff and press operators themselves, where the quality of those (color) comics was so good I didn't think about it, had I understood just how complicated and labor-intensive it was to print newspapers, even in the "modern" age until 20 years ago, maybe I would haven't been so enraged at getting a newspaper with blurry off-registration comics.

But now I feel like I'm grasping at straws to make some sort of significant deep philosophical point....When I should be in bed.