The Ephemerist

Here are two more Tintin references from the 1980’s. Above is a cartoon from pop music magazine Fabiola (from 1985 or 1986, I think, since Fabiola didn’t have that long a run). It shows Elvis and Richard Nixon in a Blue Lotus pose, probably giving drug users, the Beatles, left wing activists and hippies the evil eye.

Below is one from a later date, commenting on the first war in Iraq, which was directed as if it was a movie (remember the embedded journalists ?). I think it is by Jan de Maesschalck, but I’m not sure.

Over the years, Tintin has inspired Belgian magazine cover designers to come up with references, parodies or paraphrasings of almost iconic images from his adventures. In this post, one from a Pourquoi Pas issue from 1988 and three Humo covers from 1985 and 1992. Pourquoi Paswas running an article on the difficulties of living as a Chinese in Belgium, and this take on the Blue Lotus cover, with a rather stereotypical Chinaman replacing Tintin, and a Belgian lion instead of the dragon, was a nice evocation of that subject.

The Humo images after the break are by Ever Meulen and Jan Bosschaert.

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Agence eureka has been running scans from an 1938 French comic on aviation and airplanes for about a month now. Beautiful stuff - it’s so vintage, it looks new.

Every day, this site welcomes about 200 visitors. That’s peanuts compared with the hordes that the likes of Yahoo or even aintitcoolnews.com pull in every hour, but for a humble one-man affair working on a shoe string, I think that’s mighty nice. Especially since I’ve never paid enough attention to promotion or anything remotely resembling marketing. For that : thank you.

But where do you all come from ? A quick glance at my stats that most of you find the Ephemerist through plain old, boring Google. 25 % of you is scavenging the net via a plethora of localized Google Images variants, and another 15 % is just searching around. StumbleUpon is also quite a good source for that kind of accidental hits. So, there goes the link love theory.

Anyway, after a year of blogging, I have the impression I’ve been able to build a good community of loyal readers (even though the majority of visitors were looking for my reports on my dealings with Quechup). Which is quite a nice feeling, I can tell you. I won’t let you down.