JohnnyEnzyme

Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed is a fairytale film by Lotte Reiniger. It is the oldest surviving animated feature film. The movie features a silhouette animation technique Reiniger invented that involved manipulated cutouts made from cardboard and thin sheets of lead, under a camera.

Here is what the thumbnail looks like animated.

The technique she used for the camera is similar to Wayang shadow puppets, though hers were animated frame by frame (at 24fps), not manipulated in live action. The original prints featured color tinting. Reiniger also used the first form of a multiplane camera in making the film, one of the most important devices in pre-digital animation. Work began in 1923, and the film was finished in 1926. --WP & Johnny

Here's a little trailer of short sequences:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_9L7r8NIBc

Having watched a bunch of early Fleischer, Disney and other cartoons, I was impressed by how unique this style is. While the movement is fairly simple (even crude at times), I found it refreshing how things moved independently of each other instead of being 'synced up and bouncing together' as with all those Disney & Fleischer shorts. Also, the silhouette animation style, while allowing very limited character detail, was somehow surprisingly modern in aesthetic IMO.

>>>HERE<<< is the whole 65 minute film, remastered in 4k and with a great, classical soundtrack. You'll get a much better taste of things than via the trailer, altho I don't blame you if you let it run in the background while you check your portable.

The story itself is based on elements from One Thousand and One Nights written by Hanna Diyab, including Aladdin, The Story of Prince Ahmed & the Fairy Perī-Bānū, and The Ebony Horse.

From the Thorgal universe, one of my very favorites in all of comics, featuring lovely, painted art, memorable characters, tense plotting, impressive world-building, and even an interesting historical look in to Viking customs and society.

Thorgal of course is the central character in the series, child of the stars adopted by Vikings. Wolfcub is his young daughter, who has the unique ability to communicate with, befriend, and even command animals to do her bidding.

For swords, sorcery & science fans, this is some must-read stuff, in which the characters are excruciatingly put through the wringer time and time again by the brilliant sadist of a writer, Jean Van Hamme (Largo Winch, XIII, Wayne Shelton, Lady S).

There's a pretty good fandom overview of the series HERE, and you can expect more Thorgal material to be shared here in future!

These appear to be raw covers, in which you can still see marginal annotations.

Claudio Villa, Angelo Stano, Bruno Brindisi, Corrado Roi, and Claudio Castellini are all artists who worked on this surreal, noirish, long-running Italian horror series.

I've read four of the 100-page books so far. An introduction, plus my thoughts are here.

These pieces were found at a nice Tumblr blog which covers BD, manga, and animation genres.

This is an underrated series, altho it can be hard to find.

The Adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko is a BD series by Hergé, best known for Tintin. The heroes of the series are two young children, brother and sister Jo & Zette Legrand, and their pet chimpanzee Jocko. Mr Legrand, their father, is an aerospace engineer and designer, --WP

Altho we don't get to see the familiar, beloved faces of the Tintin characters, I found this a surprisingly likeable series, certainly better and more well-polished than the first ~three Tintin albums. There's only five albums in the series, two of them being two-parters.

I found the sequence above to be strongly reminiscent of wonderful but dangerous Buster Keaton stunts from the silent movie era, such as these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOo_ZUVU_O8

Unfortunately, Buster tore himself up pretty good doing these stunts himself. For example, in grabbing on to the hurtling car from a standing position, he dislocated his arm. And then when the house facade fell down around him, with Buster 'luckily' standing in the outline of a window, in fact the house grazed his left side, causing him serious injuries. It certainly was a different era in movie-making(!)

The premise here is light as a feather-- a Dungeons & Dragons-type character is in a videogame setting, in which he's attempting to 'exit the game level,' presumably to take a nice rest. Frequently that involves attempting to rescue a princess along the way.

Altho he's rather dwarfish in stature, the problem isn't the hero's energy, fierceness or ingenuity, but rather that something's always going wrong. And by 'going wrong,' I mean that he typically suffers all variety of gruesome deaths at the hands of the dungeon's traps. He, the princess, the endless stream of monsters-- just everyone.

Game Over is technically a spinoff series of Midam's (Michel Ledent of Belgium) Kid Paddle series for kids, but one hardly needs any backstory, even though the full albums (and there are over two dozen) tend to be bookended with Kid Paddle context. To be clear-- these are largely wordless comics that can be consumed in any language.

TBH, I fear that I'm always going to be a bit weirded out by this series, which combines light, kid-like, gaggish elements right next to total gore, in which the characters are seemingly ready to burst in to total pools of eyeballs, bones & blood given the slightest impetus. There's also the fact that the comics (to me, anyway) are *completely* hit-or-miss, with a lot more duds than successes IMO. Still, it's a BD classic of sorts, and certainly worth a look as a BD hobbyist.

Btw, I see there's a big Imgur archive HERE, and happily, those seem to be a kind of 'best of' collection. Cheers.

So far I've been quite impressed from what I've read . Altho Franka is officially a PI (private investigator), she also reminds me a lot of an adventurous super-spy... very resourceful, dangerous, and strong-willed. She's also super-attractive, and Kuipers' LC (ligne claire) is some of the best I've ever seen. The pages and panel-flow are just wonderful to observe, and the stories, quite entertaining.

Note: I've mainly read the late 80's stuff and on. It seems like the 70's-era books weren't drawn as appealingly, FWIW.

Franka is a popular Dutch comic book series drawn and written since the mid-1970s by the graphic artist Henk Kuijpers. The principal character is a strong female sleuth who solves mysteries in exotic locales. The cases she solves often take place in the worlds of art, antiquities, fashion and film, and also often feature exotic locales full of smugglers, pirates and other shady businessmen.

Dominant women are a recurring theme of the series, similar to BD series such as Yoko Tsuno. A single woman for a long time, Franka acquired a male partner and love interest in the later volumes, the reformed art thief Rix. More often than not she is also accompanied by her dog Bars. --WP

The series has been translated into a variety of languages, including Danish, German, French, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Galician, Catalan and Chinese. As far as I can tell it's never officially been translated to English, but perhaps there are some 'scanlations' out there..

A vastly more extensive writeup of Kuijpers and Franka can be found here:
https://www.lambiek.net/artists/k/kuijpers_h.htm

EDIT: While searching around for scanlations, I did find a little English-translated sequence. below:

I like that mast & sail!

So from my findings, this is a collectible card / postcard, one in a series of ten, meant to mark the tenth anniversary of the Côte d’Azur* Comics Festival. It may also have been used as art for the premier BD festival of Cagnes-sur-mer.

* (The French Riviera)

The back looked like this:

Looks like it hasn't been posted here yet, so... I'll do the deed.

CONTEXT: the original version was evidently made for an ailing Gene Roddenberry's birthday, and later appeared on the Season 5 DVD. Later, it appears that a fan took the original and tweaked it up a bit, adding music, and producing the crazy masterpiece in the link. I believe there's also a 'behind the scenes' segment with more info, but I wasn't able to find that just now.

And... that's all I know!
Feel free, anyone else, to provide more context / background info. 😊

Here's a delightful Russian artist I just discovered whose work hearkens back to classic folklore and intricate folk art. Please do click / zoom in on these, as the thumbnails really don't do these justice:

First Drops Of Rain

In a Corner of a Shady Garden

To me, her ability to juxtapose a lush palette with diverse views, creatures, motiffs & design elements is just extraordinary. One other thing I found pleasing is her tendency to depict creatures & landscape objects at almost any size, most notably tiny trees growing like grass in the foregrounds.

A Giddy Gallop

Royal Grace

I didn't find a lot of info about her online, but she does list her interests as: "Painting, photography, architecture, graphics, illustrations, sculpture and video. All that is beautiful, attractive, dignified, elegant, gentle, amazing, new."

Blooming Mystery

Getting Off The Ground

Here's her gallery space:
https://www.gallerycoronado.com/oksana-baltic

And her Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/ivanikoksana/

In Dreamful Autumn

Moonlight Walk

NOTE: To be quite clear-- I unequivacably support the liberation of Ukraine.
Slava Ukraini.

The above art is "Le bain public," by Thierry Martin.

So, we just had a server / code glitch seemingly delay (or hide?) some content, but then when fixed, it looks to me like federation has actually been improved. For example: offsite instances and links (like WP, fandom, and even mindoki.com) had not been showing up properly in Windows' Chrome for me, until just now.

If anyone else has been through issues like these, I'd greatly appreciate that feedback.

Here we go:

Now as someone who grew up on Marvel's flickering vision* of Robert E. Howard's brilliant Conan the Barbarian series (well before publisher Dynamite), it was so fun to find this GN-- The Quest for Answers.

* that said, John Buscema & Ernie Chan are (or were) the best!