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Chicago – One of director Tim Burton’s great actor collaborators is the veteran performer Martin Landau. Landau voices Mr. Rsykruski, a science teacher who inspires young Victor Frankenstein in “Frankenweenie,” released on Blu-Ray on January 8th. This is part of Laudau’s magnificent 60 year career in film, television, stage and acting instruction.

It’s difficult to sum up Landau’s career because of it’s depth and breadth. The 84 year old actor was born in Brooklyn, New York, and had an early interest in cartooning for newspapers. He worked as an illustrator for the New York Daily News for five years, before the acting bug bit him. He was in an exceptional era and place for the craft, as Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio was being formulated, and out of the 2000 applicants for 1955 only two were selected – Martin Landau and Steve McQueen. From there he began a stage career in Manhattan,...

In May 2009, Nbm Publishing brings back one of the 20th century’s great comic strips. George McManus’ Bringing Up Father is the third and latest in Nbm’s Forever Nuts series of classic screwball strips. In 1913, McManus started a comic strip about Jiggs and Maggie, a lower-class couple who came into money. “While the snobbish Maggie and beautiful daughter Nora (referred to various times as Katy and Mamie in the strip's early days) constantly try to ‘bring up’ Father to his new social position,” comics expert Clark Holloway has said, “Jiggs can think of nothing finer than sitting down at Dinty Moore's restaurant to finish off several dishes of corned beef and cabbage, followed by a night out with the boys from the old neighborhood. The clash of wills that ensued often resulted in flying rolling-pins, smashed crockery, and broken vases, all aimed in the general direction of Jiggs's skull.