The Ephemerist

I’m not much of a gamer - my favorite games are those little ditties that I can grasp in no time, that don’t take hours to boot up and configure, and that I can play whenever I have like five minutes. Lately, I’ve become quite addicted to Lazrhog’s iZoo, which is essentially a Bejeweled or Zoo Keeper clone for the Iphone and Ipod Touch. Gameplay is simple : just line up three animals and they disappear; a level is complete when you’ve made a specific number of animals disappear.

A nice touch to this game is the fact that it’s skinnable. So far, skins have been published using elements from similar games, like Chuzzle and the aforementioned Bejeweled, next to the original one (which is shown above on the left and, in all honesty, is a plain Zoo Keeper clone). They all follow the same path, with gamepieces that are easily identifyable by color and shape.

The Simpsons skin (shown on the right) is another matter - normally you would expect a typically branded skin of a good game not to add anything to gameplay. However, thanks to the fact that all Simpsons characters very much look alike (they are all yellow, they all have big eyes), finding three similar shapes in a row becomes just that nice little bit trickier

From Jeff Heerman’s collection of paper ephemera.

With their Exo-Force line of products, Lego aims at cashing in on global mangamania, and on the conviction that children these days will eat anything as long as it involves giant robots, evil empires and heroes named Takeshi. And so the building instructions of these mecha-clone kits are conceived as manga books, with Japanese lettering on the cover and a comic insert.

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While waiting to post some christmas cards, I picked up these new Duostamps from my local post office. Duostamps are typically standard value stamps that have a second stamp attached with a certain topical image. In this case, from left to right, the following themes are used :

• The smurfs, with elements from several Smurfs albums (rather shoddily cropped, if you ask me). It would seem that these stamps were issued just in time for the 50th anniversary of Peyo’s characters, which will be celebrated this year.
• A set of five stamps with characters by Hergé, branded with the “Une Vie, Un Oeuvre” logo. These stamps feature Totor, Leo et Lea, Quick et Flupke, Jo et Zette and Tintin, respectively.
• A second set of stamps with Hergé art (featuring Tintin and a portrait of Hergé himself. This set too is branded with the “Une Vie, Un Oeuvre” logo.

These stamps are available from Belgian post offices, and (most probably) also on the De Post Eshop. (Smurfs © Peyo; Totor, Leo et Lea, Quick et Flupke, Jo et Zette and Tintin © Moulinsart)

From Showcase #64, 1966. This semi-naive art makes me a bit melancholic.

(warning - no comics content whatsoever)

My eldest son is 11 years old and fascinated by machinery. He was thrilled when he “inherited” his uncle’s old Fleischmann HO railtrack, and he was particularly impressed by the locomotive that’s pictured above, which is almost a foot long and looks as cool as a steam loc can. Indeed, the aesthetic qualities of this streamlined machine from the thirties can hardly be denied. It would not be out of place in a steampunk movie, if you ask me.

However, there is a problem. This is a model of a German locomotive that was in operation in the nineteen thirties, i.e. slap bang in the middle of the Nazi regime, when everything but the kitchen sink (or quite possible, including the kitchen sink) was adorned by the Swastika, Nazi symbol of choice. After the Second World War, Germany introduced an absolute ban on the use of the Swastika, and this ban is enforced today (even when the symbol is used in an explicitly anti-fascist context, as this article from Der Spiegel explains).

And so, the Fleischmann people were faced with a dilemma : they pride themselves on very realistic models on a particularly small scale, but at the same time they really don’t want a run-in with the law or, even worse, be branded as neo-nazi’s. What to do, what to do ?

Luckily, HO scale is so small that you need a magnifying glass to actually notice small details. And so, they modified the arms adorning the locomotive and the tender, replacing the actual Swastika with what can only be described as some sort of carpet beater, as shown below.

(on the tender)

(on the locomotive)

The point to this all ? I don’t think there is any, since I don’t expect that, by using the image of a commonplace utensil, the Fleischmann people meant to imply a socio-historical criticism of the acceptance of Nazi excesses by the German public at large. Let’s just leave it at this : there’s no limit to the human talent for hypocrisy…

I’m sure I’ve seen this somewhere before, in an Association or Fantagraphics catalogue, but I’m not sure. Anyway, Worldwide Fred presents the Comic Blocks, a neat tool to create your own comic strip about daily office life and bring some variation in dreary daily routines.

Great graphics, too…

(thanks, Petra)

Here’s a little game for you all. The image above shows three very famous British comics writers. Can you guess them all ?

Update - as numerous people have told me, this is the work of David Oakes, who has a whole showcase of neat comic-related Lego stuff at his website, including the Watchmen, Hourman and Sandman (my favorite Golden Age characters) and The Endless. Do check it out !

Just to make a point clear - it was never my intention to feast on David’s inspiration. During this 40th Birthday Marathon, I mostly posted stuff that I had shared in my Comics Ephemerist Yahoo Group. I had simply forgotten where I got this, and googling for “neil gaiman lego figure” didn’t bring anything up either — oops, now I’ve given the answer away. Oh, well…

Here’s a neat activity for rainy days : create a Tintin puppet on a string ! Click for the full sized image, print on heavy paper, and have fun for, oh, at least half an hour…

(from the web somewhere, but I don’t remember exactly which site)

I may live to be a hundred, I don’t think I’ll ever get older than 11, maybe 13. Toys will never cease to tickle my fancy. Call me a big baby, but there it is. That said, here are two genius campaigns for toys. The Lego campaign is from Singapore, and the one for Matchbox from South Africa. I love them…

(via Twenty Four and Advertising/Design Goodness respectively)