Fleischer studios

Betty Boop #1, a new Dynamite comic from Roger Langridge and Gisèle Lagacé, brings an 86-year-old animated star to comics, and a whole world follows behind her. As a longtime fan, I'm excited not just to see Betty in a comic, but to see all her friends and co-stars. They're all products of Fleischer Studios, an animation house run by brothers Max and Dave Fleischer, which was also responsible for the original Popeye cartoons. If you've picked up this comic only knowing Betty Boop from T-shirts and tattoos, you may be wondering who all these characters are and why everything seems a little weird. As an expert on this subject (which rarely comes up), I thought I'd provide a quick intro to Betty and her friends.

Welcome to Give ‘Em Elle, a new weekly column that hopes to bridge the gap between old school comics fandom and the progressive edge of comics culture. This week I’ve been thinking about the comic adaptations of the past, long before the current superhero boom. There have been superheroes on our screens almost as long as there have been superheroes in our comics, and some of them stand head and shoulders above the crowd. But what were the very best superhero adaptations even before the Christopher Reeve Superman movies?

We make a regular practice at ComicsAlliance of spotlighting particular artists or specific bodies of work, as well as the special qualities of comic book storytelling, but because cartoonists, illustrators and their fans share countless numbers of great pinups, fan art and other illustrations on sites like Flickr, Tumblr, DeviantArt and seemingly infinite art blogs that we’ve created Best Art Ever (This Week), a weekly depository for just some of the pieces of especially compelling artwork that we come across in our regular travels across the Web. Some of it’s new, some of it’s old, some of it’s created by working professionals, some of it’s created by future stars, some of it’s created by talented fans, awnd some of it’s endearingly silly. All of it is awesome.

To what is certain to be the absolute delight of animation fans everywhere, Warner Bros. has posted nearly all of the Fleischer Superman cartoons to its YouTube channel. The animated shorts have been in the public domain for some time, Warner Bros...