News
Entertainment
Science & Technology
Life
Culture & Art
Hobbies
News
Entertainment
Science & Technology
Culture & Art
Hobbies
Rereading: PROBLEM PARTY by M. E. Atkinson - Todd's Blog
The tenth book in Atkinson’s holiday adventure series about the Lockett family and their friends is unusually complex, as it gathers many of the characters from the previous nine books to an elaborate house party over the Christmas holidays. It begins with Evelyn Standish, the girl met in “The Monster of Widgeon Weir” who wears […]
My Music: IF WISHES WERE - Todd's Blog
This is the first song for which I have a written composition date in my notebooks, it’s July 4th, 1971. At that time I was recently back from my first stay in Kansas City, working at a summer job at Freight Traffic Services in Far Hills, NJ, co-owned by the father of my friend Randy, […]
Rereading: THE BLACK STALLION REVOLTS by Walter Farley - Todd's Blog
By the ninth book of this series, author Farley was casting around for a new approach, and he found it here by sending Alec Ramsey AND his famous wild stallion The Black out west. Many writers might have begun simply with that premise, but Farley ups the odds by having their private plane crash in […]
And Then I Read: DUNKIRK SUMMER by Philip Turner - Todd's Blog
This is the only book in Turner’s Darnley Mills series I hadn’t read, so I recently paid too much for it to complete the series. The final book, Skull Island, was reviewed here some time ago. There are two intertwined threads in the Darnley Mills books, this is the final one in the historical series, […]
Rereading: THE FABULOUS FLIGHT by Robert Lawson - Todd's Blog
Lawson came up with some odd story ideas, but this may be the oddest. Peter Pepperell lives with his parents outside Washington DC, where his father works for the State Department. He’s a normal boy until age seven, and then an accident causes him to begin growing smaller rather than larger. A specialist says it’s […]
My Music: LET US REMEMBER and RONDO - Todd's Blog
Above are two new friends I made in Kansas City, more about them soon. First, an update on things in New Jersey. My friend high school Mike was attending the University of Missouri in Kansas City, living with relatives there, and he returned to his family home in Bernardsville, NJ for the summer of 1970. […]
Rereading: BEYOND LIFE by James Branch Cabell - Todd's Blog
I discovered the books of Cabell (rhymes with rabble) in the 1970s when several were issued in paperback as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. I became a fan of those fantasy novels, and learned that Cabell’s master work was a long series of about 20 books, depending on how you count them, written […]
Rereading: THE FOSSIL SNAKE by L. M. Boston - Todd's Blog
This is a short book of prose, 54 pages, with fine illustrations by Boston’s son. Rob’s father has a load of stones delivered to their home with which to build a wall, but one cracks open revealing a perfectly preserved fossil of a snake. Rob is allowed to keep it, even though a local museum […]
Incoming: DC FINEST, GREEN ARROW THE LONGBOW HUNTERS - Todd's Blog
When I received this from DC, my first thought was, “I didn’t letter that.” Looking inside, I realized what I lettered was the linked Annuals for Green Arrow, Detective Comics, and The Question. This new reprint series of thick trade paperbacks (542 pages here) is an interesting idea: chronological collections across a few titles where […]
My Music: THE TARRYTOWN POET AND THE ENGLEWOOD BARD - Todd's Blog
This is a story song perhaps suggested by some of the street musicians I saw around lower midtown Manhattan when I was going to art school there in 1969-70, the photo above, found online, reminds me of some of those folks. Here’s the song: The Tarrytown Poet and the Englewood Bard. Street music in New […]
Rereading: TAMSIN by Peter S. Beagle - Todd's Blog
As the story opens, Jenny and her mother, a music teacher, are living in a New York City apartment with Jenny’s cat Mister Cat, and she is struggling with the challenges of adolescence, but their lives are about to change. Jenny’s mother Sally has fallen in love with Ewan, from Britain, and they plan to […]
Rereading: TIK-TOK OF OZ by L. Frank Baum - Todd's Blog
The eighth Oz book by Baum has little to do with his mechanical man, though it was partially based on a play about Tik-Tok that Baum produced the previous year. The character doesn’t even show up until well into the story, and proves largely ineffective, though he tries hard. The book begins in the small, […]
Rereading: THE NEST OF THE SCARECROW by M. E. Atkinson - Todd's Blog
The ninth book in Atkinson’s Lockett series finds the three Locketts, Oliver, Jane, and Bill, involved in an elaborate contrived adventure that, as usual, goes wrong and puts them on their own. The children are introduced by an aunt to two older cousins, Mervyn and Gillian, young adults with their own car, also staying with […]
My Music: IT GOES BEYOND WORDS - Todd's Blog
The lyrics from my notebook, about 1970. This song was intended as a parody of the kind of bland, saccharine love songs that often appeared on the variety shows my parents watched, like Perry Como and Andy Williams. It was also, I think, making fun of my own inability to get anywhere with a real […]
Rereading: CAPT. KIDD'S CAT by Robert Lawson - Todd's Blog
This book was intended to attract the same readers who had enjoyed Lawson’s “Ben and Me” about the mouse behind Ben Franklin’s success, but the story is not as appealing. McDermot is a black and white cat with a ruby ring in his ear, a ship’s cat for the pirate Captain Tom Tew, who had […]
Rereading: THE BLACK STALLION'S FILLY by Walter Farley - Todd's Blog
While clearly a series, Farley’s horse stories have more variety and are better written than American series books like The Hardy Boys and Tom Swift. This one has some similarities to “Son of the Black Stallion” in that it’s about preparing a young horse for a big race, but there are many new and interesting […]
Rereading: POWDER QUAY by Philip Turner - Todd's Blog
There are two series by Turner about the northeast England coast town of Darnley Mills, one in the present day, and one in historical times. This one is historical, at the time of World War One, and like others in the historical series, it’s more serious and emotional than the lighter present day books. Young […]
Rereading: PORKO VON POPBUTTON by William Pène du Bois - Todd's Blog
This is another in the series of short books on bad habits, here gluttony. Pat O’Sullivan Pinkerton has a serious eating problem, and the last straw for his parents is when his weight destroys half their home, so they send him to a boarding school, President Coolidge School for Boys on Lake Brown Bear next […]
My Music: POT LUCK BLUES - Todd's Blog
Here’s another song probably written during my first year of art school, fall 1969 to spring 1970. Above is part of my bedroom from a year later showing the ambitious mural I started to paint on the wall. It was never finished and later painted over. That’s my desk under it. As a middle class […]
Rereading: THE SEA EGG by L. M. Boston - Todd's Blog
L. M. Boston is one of my favorite writers of novels for young readers, especially her Green Knowe series. Her other books are good, too, like this one, which is also illustrated by her son Peter Boston. Toby and Joe are on holiday at the seaside, on a hilly coast with cliffs, caves, and tide […]
Rereading: THE BASSUMTYTE TREASURE by Jane Louise Curry - Todd's Blog
Unlike the Abaloc books by Curry I’ve been rereading, this is a stand-alone mystery thriller that hits all the right notes for me. Tommy Bassumtyte lives with his grandmother and aunt in a small New England town, but is given the opportunity to travel to England to stay at his family’s ancestral home, Boxleton House. […]
Rereading: THE INNKEEPER'S SONG by Peter S. Beagle - Todd's Blog
After reading mostly novels aimed at children and humorous material, this heady, dense, complex novel was a nice change, and reminded me how much I like Beagle’s writing. The narrative technique is unusual, with about a dozen first-person narrators, each chapter (and some are quite short) having a different narrator. The central locale is The […]
My Music: SONG OF THE SEA - Todd's Blog
This is one of several songs I don’t have an exact date for, probably written between the fall of 1969 to spring of 1970, when I was a freshman at the School of Visual Arts, still living at home, and commuting by train from Far Hills, NJ. I recorded it around 1977 in Highland Park, […]
Incoming: BATMAN: BRUCE WAYNE, MURDERER TURNED FUGITIVE OMNIBUS - Todd's Blog
Man, I’m glad I didn’t have to design a logo for this awkwardly-titled monster, which is a massive 1,056 pages. The contents are drawn from all the Batman titles in the early 2000s, I don’t have the energy to list them, but they’re in the second image above. I don’t know which ones I lettered, […]
Rereading: THE PATCHWORK GIRL OF OZ by L. Frank Baum - Todd's Blog
The seventh Oz book by Baum is titled for one of his liveliest characters, originally created for a silent film he wanted to produce that was never made. Baum had tried to end the series with the previous book, “The Emerald City of Oz,” but perhaps his financial situation, and many fan letters, made him […]
Rereading: THE MONSTER OF WIDGEON WEIR by M. E. Atkinson - Todd's Blog
The eighth book in the Locketts series by Atkinson takes place on the Thames, and involves boats, but unlike the books of Arthur Ransome, none of them are sailboats. Oliver, Jane, and Bill, the Lockett children, have been allowed to camp on their own on a small island in the Thames owned by a family […]
My Music: MY WINDOW and AWAKEN - Todd's Blog
Two short tracks I decided to run together, the first is but 38 seconds, My Window. A fragment, really, but I liked it well enough to record it in 1977, adding bird sounds from an album of natural sounds, I don’t recall which one. It was probably written in the spring of 1969 when I […]
Rereading: CALL ME BANDICOOT by William Pène du Bois - Todd's Blog
Another book for young readers, 63 pages with many color illustrations by the author, in the same series as “Lazy Tommy Pumpkinhead.” Each of these focuses on a particular sin, and here the sin is greed. The author has a talent for writing charming con-men, and in this book that’s the teenage boy the author […]
Rereading THE TERRIBLE CHURNADRYNE by Eleanor Cameron - Todd's Blog
Tom and Jennifer are staying with their grandmother in the small northern California coastal town of Redwood Cove. Their grandmother’s friend, Mr. Looper, collects fossils and ancient artifacts, and is convinced that he once saw an ancient sea-going dinosaur in the ocean below the high hill of San Lorenzo, next to town. A few other […]
Rereading: THE ISLAND STALLION'S FURY by Walter Farley - Todd's Blog
Steve and his uncle Pitch are back in the secret valley hidden on Azul, an apparently barren rock island in the Caribbean, where last year they discovered many wonders. Steve’s favorite was the fiery roan stallion he named Flame, leader of a band of horses of Arabian ancestry left behind by Spanish Conquistadors centuries earlier. […]
My Music: WINDOW IN THE TOWER - Todd's Blog
There are few photos of me during the high school years when I learned to play the guitar and began writing songs, this one from 1967, probably taken by my dad in our Pluckemin living room, is the best I have. The hair is pretty long for me at the time, and note the heavy […]
Rereading: DEVIL'S NOB by Philip Turner - Todd's Blog
The sixth book in Turner’s Darnley Mills series returns to the Victorian era of the fourth book, “Steam on the Line” to continue the story of teenagers Taffy and Sarah. Taffy is now working as a carpenter for the railway that links the slate mine in the hilltop with the town’s port on the river, […]
Incoming: JOE THE BARBARIAN new printing - Todd's Blog
I enjoyed lettering this dark fantasy written by Grant Morrison, art by Sean Murphy that first came out as a collection in 2011. It’s an unusual coming-of-age story where a medically vulnerable boy and his pet rat are transported to a world where all his toys are life-size and doing battle with each other, a […]
Rereading: BEN AND ME by Robert Lawson - Todd's Blog
This wonderfully creative and funny book was written in 1939, the first authored and illustrated by Lawson. He tells of Amos, a mouse, who meets Benjamin Franklin, a somewhat bumbling writer, printer, and would-be inventor. As Amos tells it, many of Franklin’s best ideas came from him, though he allowed Ben to take the credit […]
Rereading: THE WATCHERS by Jane Louise Curry - Todd's Blog
The sixth book of Curry’s Abaloc series is the final one that takes place in the present time, and it’s full of exciting events, but also has unanswered puzzles, like the earlier ones. Ray Siler has come to the remote backwoods community of Twilly’s Green, West Virginia, sent there by his father because they were […]
My Music: NOVEMBER WOODS - Todd's Blog
Few people other than family members and close friends know that I’ve been making music since my high school years. I’ve decided to share some of it on my blog, about once a week, under the title My Music (also a page on the blog), so if this is something that doesn’t interest you, you […]
Rereading: LAZY TOMMY PUMPKINHEAD by William Pène du Bois - Todd's Blog
I have even fewer picture books for young readers than I do chapter books, but again, du Bois books are always great fun and worth having. This is part of a series illustrating bad habits and what might come of them. It’s 32 pages, almost all with illustrations. Tommy is extremely lazy, and his automated […]
Rereading: THE BEAST WITH THE MAGICAL HORN by Eleanor Cameron - Todd's Blog
For this chapter book (74 pages), Cameron has drawn inspiration from European fairy tales, and the illustrators Beth and Joe Krush adopt a medieval style that reminds me of British illustrator Pauline Baynes. Allison is a beautiful young girl living in the mountains, and one day she sees a unicorn being chased by robbers. A […]
DC COMICS 1940s STAFFER HENRI A. FLUCHERE - Todd's Blog
Recently I received emails from Peter Fluchere about his father Henri. He had found some information about Henri on my blog, and more on Alex Jay’s blog. I knew little about Fluchere other than his name, and some brief comments by Gaspar Saladino, who remembered him as “a Frenchman with an interest in fine art […]