Listen up, people. After a few months work, we've finally gotten our project up on Kickstarter. We put a lot of work into this so far, as our handful of pictures and brief movie will attest. Hopefully, we can generate the $60,000 we need to get our video game off the ground and start earning some real revenue.

For those of you who don't know, Kickstarter is a crowd-funding platform, where people with ideas seek many small donations from a large numbers of backers instead of (or in addition to) large donations from a small number of backers. If you've never been before, I'd advise you to take a look around after you throw a few bucks my way. But be sure to throw a few bucks my way.

(Consider a donation as a reward for me for all the hard work I've done over the years in entertaining you with this blog. Football recaps, deer conspiracies, and poodle cartoons. Surely they've got to be worth something.)

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I recently came into possession of some reproductions of lithographic editorial cartoons by Joseph Keppler from his portfolio A Selection of Cartoons from Puck by Joseph Keppler (1877-1892). (Book names were a little more more on-the-nose back then.) The art and craftsmanship of editorial cartoons has changed significantly in the century-plus since the heyday of Puck magazine, and not for the better. It's enlightening to compare how modern audiences would interpret Keppler's work compared to his Gilded Age peers.

At first glance, what do you see in this cartoon original published on August 28, 1889? Is this homeless tiger in rags demonstrating that Obamacare will drive the once proud from house and home? Or maybe it's a commentary on the Occupy movement that hid its "fierce" intentions under a cloak of "peace"?

To Keppler, who was quite adept at drawing silly looking animals other than elephants and donkeys (though he drew those, too), the cartoon above was a criticism of how New York City's infamously corrupt Tammany Hall political machine -- iconized as a tiger by America's greatest editorial cartoonist, Thomas Nast -- disguised its political ambitions on the Mayor's office with fake piety by aligning itself with the Catholic Church. These days if political cartoonists draw Catholic Church references, it's almost always a pedophilia joke. That's not an improvement, Pope.

On December 7, 1887, fifty-four years before Pearl Harbor, this cartoon dragon wearing the dress of "surplus" challenges the do-nothing United States Congress to settle the hot-button issue of post-Civil War Protectionist tariffs on imported goods that had resulted in stagnating trade and a staggering fiscal surplus. At least that's what the cartoon would have meant to its contemporary audiences. However, modern audiences will simply see a do-nothing Congress scared to inaction by an imaginary beast: government fiscal surplus. These days, it's sadly easier to believe that a giant dragon will appear in the Capitol Building than to believe that the government will ever run a surplus again.

This is my favorite of the bunch. The seductive tentacles of the octopus of "gambling" find their way to entrapping ordinary citizens across the social spectrum on May 28, 1890. To the contemporary eye of nineteenth century readers, it was a cautionary tale about the entangling menace of gambling. To the modern eye, it's still a cautionary tale about the entangling menace of gambling. Good art may come and go, but some things just don't change.

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I'm not the only one celebrating Superman Month. From yesterday's Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Like Rhymes with Orange, about half the comics in the AJC seem like they should be in college papers or The New Yorker. Even the Peanuts reruns are far more modern and erudite than the majority of comics run in the local Times-Herald, including the editorial cartoons. I don't generally care for the new-look AJC, but I have to rate their comics page an A+.

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Hanna-Barbera's The Flintstones went off the air in 1966. Its last spin-off series, Cartoon Network's Cave Kids, aired it's last new episode thirty years later in 1996. The most recent original Flintstones content aired in 2001, so it's been a decade since The Flintstones has been culturally relevant as anything other than nostalgic reruns. That being the case, why do they still make Flintstones-themed Fruity Pebbles?

Introduced in 1971, Postâ„¢ Fruity Pebbles weren't introduced to the public until after The Flintstones were canceled thanks to free-falling ratings. Their entire, long-running success has endured without the support of the very product from which they were licensed! That's pretty amusing given that Fruity Pebbles is credited as the first breakfast cereal brand built from the ground up around a licensed property. Since then countless licensed cereals have come and gone, including E.T. Cereal, Mr. T, and Urkel-Os, which had hte the benefit of support from their licensed properties.

My point -- assuming that I have one -- is that I suspect that at this point the merits of the cereal, such as they are, must speak for themselves. Surely no one is buying Fruity Pebbles because of the Flintstones ties anymore, so there must be something in those Fruity Pebbles to enable 40 uninterrupted years of sales longevity. Nothing that The Flintstones actually actively endorsed on their show could have sold this well, right?

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It appears that ACT Fluoride Rinse has a new licensing agreement with Nickelodeon allowing them to put SpongeBob Squarepants on their products. In their commercials they proudly proclaim "ACT Fluoride Rinse, now with SpongeBob Squarepants, is up to 40% more effective than brushing alone!" If adding SpongeBob makes mouthwash 40% more effective, just think what else could SpongeBob could be added to for improved results!

There's nothing new about SpongeBob licensed products. Debuting in 1999, SpongeBob was reportedly the number one licensed property in America by 2007 according to bulk vending supplier A&A Global Industries. A&A also credits SpongeBob as being the number 1 selling Social Expressions brand pinyata of all time; nothing proves a brand's popularity like letting a mob attack it with sticks.

ACT further advertises on their website that the ACT Anticavity Fluoride Rise Kids featuring SpongeBob Squarepants tastes "like an underwater explosion of flavor." I assume that means it tastes like salty seawater. Though given that SpongeBob lives in a place called Bikini Bottom, it could taste much worse. Hopefully SpongeBob will not affect the flavor of his new Ortega SpongeBob Whole Grain Taco Kits. Yuk.

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I've had this commercial stuck in my head all day.

Call me crazy, but I've decided that Barney is really rapping about raping Fred's daughter, Pebbles. Fred must think so, too, for he sure freaks out over the minor theft of some delicious "cereal."

One would think that an archaic cartoon character rapping about child molestation is probably not the best way to sell sugar to children, but Post Cereals doesn't care. Post blatantly uses drug themes to market Golden Crisp, a cereal with so much sugar it gives Sugar Bear hallucinations, and Honeycomb, a cereal that acts as a nutritious sedative for dangerous feral creatures. It's no wonder that after a childhood of ingesting roofies, reds, and tabs, Post wants me to buy boxes of 100% Bran to cleanse my system.

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In between networks promos and local cable advertisements during The Penguins of Madagascar (clearly they've run out of good names for cartoons these days) on Nickelodeon, I encountered two the most senseless commercials I've seen in recent months.

The first was an ad for Honey Nut Cheerios featuring their animated mascot, Buzz. The only problem with this commercial was that it didn't make any sense. Honest-to-goodness transcript as follows:

BEE: Buzz, everybody's at the Honey Geyser to make Honey Nut Cheerios!

BUZZ: Yeah, 'cause here comes the honey!

Honey Geyser erupts, but then is drawn back in on itself in a honey vortex.

BUZZ: Where's it going? Come on!

No one follows Buzz into the vortex.

BUZZ: Where am I? And the honey... It's being sucked into that mummy's tomb!

Cue glowing, growing, growling sarcophagus.

BUZZ: I've only got one shot at this!

Buzz points his wooden honey dipper like a magic wand at the sarcophagus. The honey dipper releases electricity which topples nearby obelisks, damming the honey stream, causing the sarcophagus to shrink.

SARCOHPGOUS: Nooooooooo!

BUZZ: Yes!

Buzz leaves as the geyser starts flowing again.

BEE: Buzz, you're safe!

BUZZ: And so's our honey, so everybody can have delicious Honey Nut Cheerios.

VOICEOVER: It's the honey sweet part of a good breakfast. From the hive that's nuts about honey.

Lessons learned: honey comes from honey geysers, is coveted by bee-mummies (who present only a mild inconvenience), and honey dippers are electrical in nature. None of which makes me want to eat cereal.

The very next commercial broadcast was done infomercial style for Touch-N-Brush, "the hands-free toothpaste dispenser that works with just a touch!" The highlight of this ad is the series of images of apparently physically or mentally handicapped people frustrated by messy, hard-to-use, and difficult to understand toothpaste tubes. "You squeeze. You roll. You press. Now your bathroom looks a mess!"

Maybe this commercial is speaking to the portion of America I've never visited, but I don't recall seeing any bathrooms where dried toothpaste was on all the countertops, sinks, and walls as depicted by the users in this commercial. If that's how these people squeeze toothpaste tubes, I'm interested in watching them squeeze ketchup, shake hands, or hug their children.

Lessons learned: Squeezing a tube of toothpaste is hard. Can't someone else do it for me?

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G.I.Joe's latest relaunch, G.I.Joe: Resolute, aired on Cartoon Network this weekend, and it suffers from all of the same problems as modern comics, I'm sorry to say. (No surprise: it was written by Warren Ellis, once of the writers most responsible for the modern bloodlust of mainstream comics.)

What's new about this G.I.Joe? Not much. Despite a clear and present danger to the governments of the world by terrorist organization Cobra, only the G.I.Joe team does anything about it. It remains unexplained how Cobra thinks they can take control of the world when none of their soldiers can hit the broad side of a barn with a gun. The Joes stay in "uniform" at all times, even if that means that Beachhead wears his balaclava inside an aircraft carrier. No Joe performs the mission for which s/he is most qualified: (Scarlet, not Ripcord, performs a HALO jumps into enemy territory, and Tunnel Rat, not Payload, goes into space to jury-rig a satellite). And Duke is still a quitter and all-around douche.

What's different? Other than the anime-influced style: death. Exactly 10,362,756 die in the first 5 minutes. (How's that for a specific number, eh? That includes the onscreen death count when Moscow is vaporized by an ultra high-tech Cobra particle cannon.) Eighteen deaths later, we see the supposedly heroic Roadblock laugh maniacally as he guns down 7 Cobra guards from behind. And Duke, shortly after ordering his own subordinates to abandon him to die, decides that the solution to the episode's conflict is the assassination of Cobra Commander. (Take note, Duke; if you kill your principal antagonist, it's harder to sell accessory packs for all the environments that you didn't show in the episode.)

No matter how you slice it, that's a lot of animated death for television designed to sell toys. "The new G.I.Joe, now with more armageddon!"

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I've found another great television show: Superjail! Sure, the show's been airing on Cartoon Network since September, but if you hadn't noticed by now, I'm a little slow to accept new things.

It's super-violent, like cartoons ought to be. (I've long maintained that cartoons should always present something impossible in live action, and this show's got it in spades.) It's about crime-and-punishment, like all the best dramas. (Did you ever see Tom Selleck's jailhouse thriller An Innocent Man? Just thinking about it has me feeling a little logey.) It's filled with sci-fi and fantasy elements, like all the best comic book stories. (The Twins, recurring uni-browed characters of mysterious power and intent, dress as Sandmen from Logan's Run. That's enough to get my attention.)

However, I suspect that the real reasons that I like it are two-fold. A.) it is clearly hand-drawn, a rare commodity, indeed, in these heady days of computer-aided animation. (As much as I enjoy a heavy outline, I grow weary of the stiff and stylized Johnny Bravo style.) And 2.) It's always in motion. In many ways, it reminds me of some tortured cross between Itchy and Scratchy cartoons and Ralph Bakshi's work. If you've seen the bizarre, psychedelic action of Fritz the Cat, you know what I'm talking about. (Truthfully, I have to admit that I never really liked Bakshi's work, probably because he took himself and the world a little too seriously. I suspect that he could have used more pointless sight gags involving defenestrations and fewer topless lady-cats. But what do I know? He's a famous director with his own animation school and I'm just some schlub with a blog readership of 7 and falling.)

All in all, it's my favorite new cartoon since I discovered the The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack (also on Cartoon Network) earlier this year. Maybe I should be watching more Cartoon Network. Their programming of imaginary friends, Dial-H-For Hero rip-offs, and Family Guy re-runs is certainly more realistic than that of either Fox News or ESPN.

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The Brave and the Bold on the Cartoon Network may just be the best Batman cartoon ever. I love Batman Beyond, but it's always better to have Bruce Wayne under the cowl (hint, hint, DC).

In these new cartoons, Batman is simultaneously courageous, serious, and nearly omnipotent but still quite human. His guest stars, a who's who of mostly obscure DC Universe heroes and villains (Bwana Beast? Gentleman Ghost? Guy Gardner? Kiteman? Kick ass!), often steal the show without detracting from Batman's presence.

There's nothing new about The Brave and the Bold. If you were reading comic books before Crisis on Infinite Earths, it'll all seem pretty familiar. (That panel above where Batman and Flash have defeated Dr. Double X and the Rainbow Raider is from The Brave and the Bold #194, published over 25 years ago in 1983!) Several of the episodes have been lifts from previous comic stories, some even from The Brave and the Bold comic itself. But in a modern world in which every story has to threaten the end of humanity opposed by bickering, fallible heroes, it's refreshing to return to a more optimistic point-of-view in which the heroes always win, even if they sometimes need a little help from their friends.

I'm actually quite pleased that in the modern age, where DC's focus is frequently selling sensational stories to a populace demanding death on an epic scale, there are enough people in the business who remember that super heroes used to dress in bright costumes and dole out terrible puns as they overcame Goldbergian death-traps in order to catch common jewel thieves. All to provide readers with some simple, 4-color escapist fantasy for 22 pages. Realism? No. Fun? Yes.

If even Batman can crack an occasional smile, maybe there's still hope that DC comics can survive this modern ("DiDio") era without sacrificing too much of it's colorful classic roster to the bloodlust of it's current editorial staff.

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