Cartoons

Coolest Mom Ever Last month we blogged about the coolest dad ever, David Laferriere, who for the last 4 years has been drawing on his kids’ lunch bags.  Well David, we found your counterpart.  Meet the coolest mom ever, Nina Levy! Nina has been drawing on her sons’ lunch napkins for the past 6 years!  She has over 2,000 mini works of art! A professional artist by trade, Nina brings a piece of pop-culture to her kids lunch by drawing well known fictional characters that traverses the nerdistsphere onto napkins.  Sci-fi, cartoons, gaming, comics … pick your poison, Nina covers them all! I usually get requests, although they are sometimes hard to fulfill- “I want Nightwing and Kid Flash blowing up the Brotherhood of Evil while Batman and Superman watch.” Check out some of my favorite nerd-approved lunch napkins, then head over to Nina’s napkin blog and check out her other work on her website. Source: Laughing Squid

The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe It or Not” Ripley Neal Thompson recounts the life of Robert Ripley, the enigmatic cartoonist-turned-globetrotting-millionaire who won international fame by celebrating the world’s strangest oddities, and whose outrageous showmanship taught us to believe in the unbelievable. New Ripley bio will be released May 7, 2013 A shy, insecure, bucktoothed boy, Robert Ripley willed himself to become a man of the world: a talented artist, an athlete, a rabid traveler, an unlikely ladies’ man, a heavy drinker, a playboy-millionaire, a shrewd businessman, entertainer, and media pioneer. We recently caught up with the author, Neal Thompson, and asked him his take on the man who was once voted, “The Most Popular Man in America.” GET YOUR COPY TODAY Q: What sparked your interest in Robert Ripley?  Why write a biography on him? Neal: For starters, I was shocked and psyched to learn that no full-fledged biography of Ripley had even been written. I discovered this one day in 2007 when I read a New York Times article about the opening of a Ripley’s museum in Times Square. The story included only a brief mention of Ripley, but it was the first time I had given any thought to the real man behind the Believe It or Not franchise. Ripley in Honolulu, HawaiiThat’s the day (August 24, to be exact) that Ripley’s overlooked story became my obsession. I also became hooked on the fact that Ripley had such a lasting influence on pop culture. You can see it all around: America’s Funniest Home Videos, Mythbusters, Jackass, Fear Factor, Survivor, The Amazing Race, even Oprah and Dr. Phil. As I argue in A Curious Man, he was sort of the godfather of the reality TV phenomenon of recent years. Ripley with two shrunken headsQ: Do you have any personal history with Ripley’s? For instance, did you read the cartoons growing up or have you been to a museum? Neal: The first 15 years of my writing career were spent as a newspaper reporter, so that was my first exposure to Ripley. I had also read the occasional Believe It or Not books as a kid, but I had always been a fan of the funny pages – even before my journalism career – so I had kind of soaked up the Ripley vibe: the appreciation for the strangeness of the world, and for the weird things people do for kicks. Q: Your narrative is so rich and full of small details. What was your research process like? How did you capture of the essence of his era in your writing? Neal: Again, my journalism background came in handy here. I really enjoy the research part of a book project. I love playing detective and digging for clues. And I strongly believe that aggressively and meticulously researched stories allow a writer to do more with the storytelling. I received a lot of help in this regard from the Ripley Entertainment company, whose archive of Ripley materials was a treasure trove. I spent many hours there, reading Ripley’s own handwritten notes and travel journals. I read his first impressions of Baghdad and his remorse after a drunken night in Johanessberg, for example. Getting those intimate, first-hand details was invaluable when it came to the writing. As for my process, I’m a big fan of the three-ring binder. I think I filled about fifty of them for this book. I’ve since donated them to the Ripley archives. I still kind of miss them. Ripley surrounded by a throng of fansQ: You studied every facet of Ripley’s life.  What was your favorite story or fact about Robert Ripley? Neal: Oh, there are so many, it’s hard to narrow it down. I have a few favorites, though. For example… Ripley traveled more than 100,000 miles in 1933-34 alone, but never drove a car. He once bumped into Will Rogers at a bazaar in the middle of the Syrian desert, en route to Baghdad. Though shy and bucktoothed, Ripley became a renowned ladies man who sometimes had a few girlfriends living with him at one time—an actual harem. At his private island a