After pre-ordering this months (years?) ago, this finally arrived on my doorstep yesterday. Foreword by Jerry Beck. The matte paper is mediocre quality, but the book is actually printed in color with both color and b/w photos and artwork. The text on each page is formatted in three very narrow columns for some reason, which I find just mildly annoying. Looks/feels like one of these print-on-demand type books, but its nice enough. Hope to start reading this weekend.



Although Mighty Mouse still has some scant visibility, for most people Terry's cartoons have become all but invisible, including his more famous 40s-50s cartoons. But if you grew up in the 1980s or before these were still widely available in syndication packages that aired on weekday mornings and afternoons on local broadcast stations.

I'm not sure offhand if any other major animation books came out this year. I think I got Ray Pointer's Fleischer book about this time last year.

I've gotten 5 or 6 chapters into the Terrytoons book. I may say the author does go a bit far afield sometimes. If you enjoy general history or American history like I do you'll still find it interesting, but I've never read an "animation" book that so belabored the central figure's ancestry and early biography before. It literally starts in quite some detail going over 17th and 18th century ancestors of Terry's. At this point I'm still not anywhere near anything really having much to do with animated cartoons, other than young Paul's tenuous association with some famous comic cartoonists at some early San Francisco newspapers. The author clearly cares deeply about the topic, but for a general audience some discretion in some of the level of detail might be wanting. I personally don't mind though, but hopefully we get to something like animation in the next couple of chapters. There are nice color plates interspersed through the chapters, but sometimes have no contextual relationship with the text on the page.

Speaking of major animation books, there was at least one more this year, and I received it for Christmas.