Celimate Universe

Let me start by saying the quarantine is going GREAT. Super GREAT, in fact. Two kids, teaching class online, what could go wrong?

So, it's no surprise that I like books. Eh, love books. I write books, I read books. I celebrate World Poetry Day, whenever it was last month. See? Look at these treasures of global literature:

One is my son's favorite book, the other was in my car hidden away for whenever I got stuck in traffic. The even sides are the original French, the odd sides are the mirrors in English. That should clear up which book my son loves.

I'm also somewhat a connoisseur of sequential art, AKA, comics.

I've come across some different stuff in the last few years that I want to share. DC Comics has procured the rights to the Hanna-Barbara stable of titles, and started to update them. From the originals:

From, respectively, 1971, 1961, 1963

These were the titles that DC started with, updating Scooby Doo, then moving on to The Flintstones with an award-winning run of a dozen comics, and then updating The Jetsons:

I've heard good things about each of these. That Scooby Apocalypse lives in a funny place. That issue #1 has the older logo, while issue #2 has the newer logo, having spanned the "Rebirth" event.

But the title of this post comes from the vocabulary used about a universe that, I'm positing, was first discussed in the following movie:

As well as in this movie:

This is a world where animated entities exist along side regular humans, alongside the regular world. This is the "Celimates Universe."

The word celimate refers to animated beings that exist with different physical rules, but otherwise under the same rules of general existence.

The titles here are, originally:

From, respectively, 1958, 1970, 1962

Ruff and Reddy were a cartoon duo on prime time, usually acknowledged as the first such show, predating even The Flintstones. I remember Dastardly and Muttley from Saturday morning cartoons, and Snagglepuss was a favorite of mine.

Here are the updated covers:

 

The Ruff and Reddy Show, above, is a deep dive into the ridiculousness of Hollywood, a satire of the first order. Dastardly and Muttley, it seems like, since I haven't read it, is a satire of the military.

The Snagglepuss story above, the first comic I got in this vein, is set during McCarthy-era America. Snagglepuss, a popular writer and performer, is in a sham wedding and visits a popular gay bar in Greenwich Village. In this story, Snagglepuss is Tennessee Williams, and his friend Huckleberry Hound is Faulkner.

It's very clever and has tons of heart, and has honest things to say about 'Mur'ka in 2018, when it came out. It won awards also. It's worth your time. Maybe.

Did I mention that the quarantine is going great?