Malcolm Whyte (1933) is an author, editor, publisher, and founder of the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. He has produced nearly 200 books, 45 of which he has written or co-written. His taste is for unique, offbeat ideas with a sense of good humor and produced with an eye for color and beautiful graphics as represented by The Original Old Radio Game (possibly the world's first trivia book) from 1965 to Maxon: Art Out of Chaos, [1] FU (Fantagraphics Underground) Press, 2018.
Whyte lives in Marin County, California with his wife, author Karen Cross Whyte.
Whyte founded Troubador Press in 1959 as a job printer and designer/printer of greeting cards. In 1967 the press published its first book, The Fat Cat Coloring & Limerick Book with art by Donna Sloan and verses by Whyte.
Troubador incorporated in 1970, ceased greeting card manufacturing and became a full-time book publisher, producing scores of critically acclaimed educational books for children (game books, activity books, elaborate color-and-story books), specialty cookbooks (Complete Yogurt Cookbook and The Original Diet, both by raw vegetarian pioneer Karen Cross Whyte), and art books (The Scrimshander and the initial edition of Great Comic Cats). Whyte worked with licenses from Harry Abrams & Co. (several Gnomes books), TSR, Inc. ( Dungeons & Dragons ), and Edward Gorey (Gorey Games,Gorey Cats Paper Dolls).
In 1982 Whyte sold Troubador, which is now a subsidiary of Penguin-Putnam, and continued to produce Troubador books for the new owners until 1994. Whyte wrote educational text for many of the books.
The artist of Beasties Coloring Book (1970), Vernon Koski, was posthumously selected to have his ashes incorporated into a painting, which is in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. [2] [3] [4] Winston Tong did the artwork for The Dinosaur Coloring Book (1969). [5] Other artists include Ruth Heller, Maze Craze, Color & Puzzle; Greg Irons, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons; William Gilkerson, The Scrimshander; Elizabeth Miles, Mother Goose Coloring Album; Morrie Turner, Black & White Coloring Book; Phil Frank, San Francisco Scenes, Travels with Farley; and Andrea Tachiera, [6] Tropical Fish Coloring Album, Color of Nature Series.
Whyte, with the assistance of some fellow comics enthusiasts, founded the Cartoon Art Museum in 1984. [7] [8] He wrote and produced exhibition catalogs that featured the art of Walt Kelly, Charles Schulz, Edward Gorey, and Charles Crumb, Robert Crumb, and Maxon Crumb. Additionally, he wrote and produced two catalogs for touring exhibitions: "Draw Me A Story", "A Century of Children’s Book Illustration" and "Walk In Beauty, Discovering American Indian Art".
Whyte retired from the museum's board of directors in 1995. [9] In 2008, the museum presented Whyte with a "Sparky" award, named after Charles M. Schulz, who was also given a caricature of himself by artist Zach Trenholm. [8]
In 1994 Whyte founded Word Play Publications to publish limited, signed illustrated books, among them Goreyography, the bibliography of the works of Edward Gorey, photo-documentary of underground cartoonists The Underground Comix Family Album, [10] and Maxon’s Poe illustrated by Maxon Crumb.
Edward St. John Gorey was an American writer, Tony Award-winning costume designer, and artist, noted for his own illustrated books as well as cover art and illustration for books by other writers. His characteristic pen-and-ink drawings often depict vaguely unsettling narrative scenes in Victorian and Edwardian settings.
Robert Dennis Crumb is an American cartoonist who often signs his work R. Crumb. His work displays a nostalgia for American folk culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and satire of contemporary American culture.
Underground comix are small press or self-published comic books that are often socially relevant or satirical in nature. They differ from mainstream comics in depicting content forbidden to mainstream publications by the Comics Code Authority, including explicit drug use, sexuality, and violence. They were most popular in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s, and in the United Kingdom in the 1970s.
Fritz the Cat is a comic strip created by Robert Crumb. Set in a "supercity" of anthropomorphic animals, it focused on Fritz, a tabby cat who frequently went on wild adventures that sometimes involved sexual escapades. Crumb began drawing the character in homemade comic books as a child. Fritz became one of his best-known characters, thanks largely to the motion picture adaptation by Ralph Bakshi.
Mad Libs is a phrasal template word game created by Leonard Stern and Roger Price. It consists of one player prompting others for a list of words to substitute for blanks in a story before reading aloud. The game is frequently played as a party game or as a pastime.
Syd Hoff was an American cartoonist and children's book author, best known for his classic early reader Danny and the Dinosaur. His cartoons appeared in a multitude of genres, including advertising commissions for such companies as Eveready Batteries, Jell-O, OK Used Cars, S.O.S Pads, Rambler, Ralston Cereal, and more.
Winston Tong is an actor, playwright, visual artist, puppeteer, and singer-songwriter. He is best known for his vocals in Tuxedomoon and for winning an Obie award in puppetry for Bound Feet in 1978.
Crumb is a 1994 American documentary film about the noted underground cartoonist R. Crumb and his family and his outlook on life. Directed by Terry Zwigoff and produced by Lynn O'Donnell, it won widespread acclaim. It was released on the film festival circuit in September 1994 before being released theatrically in the United States on April 28, 1995, having been screened at film festivals that year. Jeffery M. Anderson placed the film on his list of the ten greatest films of all time, labeling it "the greatest documentary ever made." The Criterion Collection released the film on DVD and Blu-ray on August 10, 2010.
Penguin Group is a British trade book publisher and part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. The new company was created by a merger that was finalised on 1 July 2013, with Bertelsmann initially owning 53% of the joint venture, and Pearson PLC initially owning the remaining 47%. Since 18 December 2019, Penguin Random House has been wholly owned by Bertelsmann.
Weirdo was a magazine-sized comics anthology created by Robert Crumb and published by Last Gasp from 1981 to 1993. Featuring cartoonists both new and old, Weirdo served as a "low art" counterpoint to its contemporary highbrow Raw, co-edited by Art Spiegelman.
The Cartoon Art Museum (CAM) is a California art museum that specializes in the art of comics and cartoons. It is the only museum in the Western United States dedicated to the preservation and exhibition of all forms of cartoon art. The permanent collection features some 7,000 pieces as of 2015, including original animation cels, comic book pages and sculptures.
A coloring book is a type of book containing line art to which people are intended to add color using crayons, colored pencils, marker pens, paint or other artistic media. Traditional coloring books and coloring pages are printed on paper or card. Some coloring books have perforated edges so their pages can be removed from the books and used as individual sheets. Others may include a story line and so are intended to be left intact. Today, many children's coloring books feature popular cartoon characters. They are often used as promotional materials for animated motion pictures. Coloring books may also incorporate other activities such as connect the dots, mazes and other puzzles. Some also incorporate the use of stickers.
Roger Price was an American humorist, author and publisher, who created Droodles in the 1950s, followed by his collaborations with Leonard B. Stern on the Mad Libs series. Price and Stern became partners with Larry Sloan in the publishing firm Price Stern Sloan.
Ronald Ray Cobb was an American–Australian artist. In addition to his work as an editorial cartoonist, he contributed concept art to major films including Dark Star (1974), Star Wars (1977), Alien (1979), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Conan the Barbarian (1982), Back to the Future (1985), The Abyss (1989), Total Recall (1990), and Southland Tales (2006). He had one credit as director, for the 1992 film Garbo.
Price Stern Sloan or PSS! was a publisher that was founded in Los Angeles in the early 1960s to publish the Mad Libs that Roger Price and Leonard Stern had concocted during their stint as writers for Tonight Starring Steve Allen and also the Droodles. Along with their partner Larry Sloan, they expanded the company into children's books, novelty formats, and humor. Some of the books they published include movie tie-ins for films such as Happy Feet, Wallace and Gromit, Catwoman, and Elf, How to Be a Jewish Mother (1964), and other properties such as Serendipity, Mr. Men and Little Miss and Wee Sing. Today, PSS! still publishes approximately ten Mad Libs books a year. Mr. Stern and Mr. Sloan went on to found Tallfellow Press in Los Angeles.
Mervyn "Skip" Williamson was an American underground cartoonist and central figure in the underground comix movement. Williamson's art was published in the National Lampoon, High Times, the Realist, the Industrial Worker, the Chicago Seed, Encyclopædia Britannica and others. His best-known character is Snappy Sammy Smoot.
William Stout is an American fantasy artist and illustrator with a specialization in paleontological art. His paintings have been shown in over seventy exhibitions, including twelve one-man shows. He has worked on over thirty feature films, doing everything from storyboard art to production design. He has designed theme parks and has worked in radio with the Firesign Theatre.
Maxon Joseph Crumb is an American artist and the younger brother of underground cartoonist Robert Crumb and Charles Crumb, and the uncle of Sophie Crumb.
Craig Yoe is an author, editor, art director, graphic designer, cartoonist and comics historian, best known for his Yoe! Studio creations and his line of Yoe Books.
Lloyd Lawrence "Larry" Sloan was an American publisher of Mad Libs and co-founder of the Los Angeles publishing company, Price Stern Sloan, which opened in the early 1960s.