Brains he got nix. Percy debuted in 1911, comics first robot; a robot so early even the word wouldn’t be invented until a decade later:
Percy is as formulaic as a Punch and Judy show; it has one joke, endlessly repeated, as expected as the squirt of seltzer in the baggy-pants comic’s vaudeville routine.
[…]
Percy begins in fine form and never veers from his programming, no matter that he wreaks his havoc starting in panel six and reduces the world around him to flinders by panel nine. The end. Place Percy in a different situation and repeat, 67 times. Don’t scoff. The formula worked then and it works now.
Thank god for obsessive monomaniacs with blogs. I got curious about Percy because he was mentioned in Jerry Robinson’s 1974’s The Comics and Steve Carper’s Flying Cars and Food Pills blog was there to satisfy that curiosity. All 67 Percy strips can be found at the link above.
Why didn’t they try using Agile Scrum instead? Instruments of Destructions is Alexander Wales’ behind the scenes story of how the second Death Star got ‘built’:
The Executor , first of the Executor- class Super Star Destroyers, had been built in four months. Every ship after that had taken ten months. How did you shrink ten months down into four? You could start by doing all the things that Jerjerrod had done, eliminating words like “testing” and “safety” and “sleep” from your vocabulary. Yet that wouldn’t make up for such a shortfall. The real answer to how the Executor had been constructed in four months was that it hadn’t been. Instead, the men and women who built the Executor had simply changed their definition of done. The ship had left the shipyard on time, under its own power, yet that was virtually all that it was capable of. The rest of the construction had been done as “final touches” to the ship long after its maiden voyage, at a far greater expense than if the ship had simply been completed in the shipyard.
If you know about Noel Sickles, you know that his artwork on Scorchy Smith would inspire a long line of comic strip and comic book artists like Milton Caniff, Alex Toth and Howard Chaykin. For Panels and Prose Steve Smith looks at how quietly transformed the strip when he took it over:
When Terry fell ill, in ’33, Sickles was assigned to stand in and directed to mimic the artist’s anodyne style. But as in all things, Sickles had studied cartooning extensively and had ideas of his own about how to innovate the medium. And so, in one of the most clandestine but radical transformations of a strip style in comics history, Sickles slipped into Scorchy Smith a six month trickle of subtle stylistic changes that were designed to get his way without jarring editors or readers.
Found this because Sickles was of course mentioned in Robinson’s The Comics and I got curious. It’s amazing that such an important artist neither has an in print biography nor has his best work available other than in two 55 euro French hardcovers, but that’s all I found. There was a mnodern biography written in 2008 or so but that’s long out of print and expensive.
An excellent interview with Mike Ploog, courtesy of Comic Book Artist, which reveals Ploog didn’t realise how good he actually was at the time:
I was always amazed when I met someone who had actually read one of my books. I’d spent ten years in the Marine Corps, and I was just making a living. I can remember many times I’d be walking through Marvel, delivering pages, and people’d come up and say, “I saw that last issue; that’s great!?” And my opinion of that person would drop enormously. [laughter] I felt like I really wasn’t an artist; I was just faking my way through this thing. It wasn’t until later years that I realized how good I really did have it, and how wonderfully supportive those people really were.
Another excellent interview, this time with Jerry Robinson, from The Comics Journal:
Somebody tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Who did those drawings?” I thought I was going to be arrested or something. I might have had some nude girl on it. I turned and said, “I did.” He introduced himself as Bob Kane. That’s how I met Bob. He said, “Oh, those are very good drawings. I’m a cartoonist. I just started Batman.” I had never heard of it. “Come down to the village. I’ll get a copy to show you.” The first issue had just come out. We walked down to the village and found a copy. Frankly, I wasn’t very impressed. I was used to Caniff and Foster and that level of drawing. I didn’t know anything about comic books. But, he was published. He said, “What are you going to do?” Well, I was 17 and he was six or seven years older. Still in his early 20s, probably 22 or 24. Well, close enough that we were able to hang out.
Finally, going for that other meaning of ‘comics’, here’s another obsessive with a blog, John Hoare, writing 3000 words on edits to the Yes Minister pilot:
So it was slightly bizarre to watch that BBC Four broadcast, and be greeted not with the version of the pilot I’ve watched on DVD all my life, but a version with the standard title sequence used instead. And it was clearly created while the show was still in production, because it has a proper episode title at the end in the correct style, not a bodged-together version made years down the line