Popeye was my favorite cartoon when I was four or five years old. The ones I remember best—and love most—are the early one’s made by Max Fleischer Cartoon Studio. These are the ones in which Popeye wears a black shirt and the characters all mumble a lot.

The drawings have a solid feel to them, like they’re three-dimensional, but everything is stylized in very a cartoony way, including the movement. You can see a similar sort of style in the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.

I’ve been making my way through the “Popeye The Sailor: Volume One, 1933-38” DVD set (which, coincidentally, uses my Mostra fonts on the package). Here are some things that have crossed my mind while watching these classic cartoons:

• “A Dream Walking” is one of the cleverest animated cartoons ever. Popeye and Bluto fight over who will save Olive as she sleepwalks through an under-construction skyscraper. There is a lot of complicated timing and tricky animation in this, and the humor comes out of it.

• The dance scenes in “Morning, Noon, and Nightclub”, in which Popeye and Olive Oil are nightclub performers, are beautifully cartoony—and funny. I also love the way Bluto walks in this one.

• “Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor”, the earliest of the three two-reel Popeye color cartoons, has to be my all-time favorite. It’s too bad the Fleischers didn’t do any feature-length Popeye cartoons in this style.

• Several of the cartoons in this period (including “Sinbad”) utilize three-dimensional set for backgrounds. They are built to look like the usual painted backgrounds—until the camera moves, and the characters seems to be walking through a three-dimensional world.

• When I was in kindergarten, Olive Oyl was my dream girl. I’d forgotten about that.

• I was so into Popeye when I was little, I asked my mom to buy canned spinnach for me, which I ate—it was actually kind of good if you put enough butter on it. Had to be the first time I ate something because I heard it made you healthy.

• Every one of the title cards is beautifully hand-lettered. This was routine back when these shorts were made. It was much easier to use lettering than type for movie title cards, and less expensive. It affords much more variety of treatment as well, including illustrated effects.

A week or so ago, I had a phone call from a guy from St. Petersburg, Russia. It wasn’t clear from his preliminary emails what he had in mind to talk about. I assumed it was something about type, or an iPhone app he was working on, or both.

Turns out, he is a fan of my blog. It was an interview about blogging. Blogging!

I felt a little embarrassed. I’ve posted only eight items here in the last two years. And most of those were to promote something. Some blog.

But talking to him rekindled my interest. I like what I used to do here, and I really want to get it going again.

So, here’s my first post of the year. No promises, but I’m going to try to post at least one item every day from now on. We’ll see.

My new Bookmania fonts are now available at my own site, and Fontspring. More vendors will be added to this list as they are ready. Update: Bookmania is now available at nearly all my distributors. For a complete list, see the Bookmania page, under Where to Buy.

For the last four years, I’ve been working on a revival of the classic ATF Bookman Oldstyle and the Bookmans of the 1960s. But it’s not a slavish replica. It’s my own idea of what Bookman could be. It’s the revival I always wished someone would do.

I thought about doing a cursive italic, like others have tried, but in the end I decided that the original slanted roman should be preserved. Bookman has always been known for its swashes, so I also made a superset of the dozens of swash characters that have been added to Bookman over the years.

I wanted to go beyond its past and make something new. I added things that Bookman never had like small caps, old style figures, alternate characters, ligatures, stylistic sets, extensive language support, and more.

The family is composed of five weights—Light, Regular, Semibold, Bold, and Black, plus italics.

It’s my love letter to the classic Bookman: Bookmania.

Coming soon to all the places you can get my fonts.

Follow @marksimonson on Twitter for updates on availability.

Update: Now available at Fontspring. Other distributors to follow.

I’ve also updated my website and added a page for Bookmania here where you can download a PDF specimen booklet.

Love this whole idea. This is how I set headlines when I was a young graphic designer. No way would I use a pencil, though. Too much risk of warping the sheet. I had a nylon-tipped burnisher, specially designed for the job of rubbing down transfer type. (Via Draplin)

Field Notes: Dry Transfer Edition Instructions from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.

LetterMPress is a virtual letterpress app for the iPad—at least that’s the idea. The project is using Kickstarter to raise funds to complete the app and to acquire wood type fonts to include (virtually) in the app. More info on Kickstarter.

I think it’s a neat idea. Not only will you be able to make compositions on a virtual press bed with virtual wood type, mix and apply virtual ink, and make virtual prints, if all goes according to plan, you will be able to send them your design and have it all done for real, with real wood type, ink, and paper.

Some letterpress purists may scoff, but I think it has the potential to introduce the joys of letterpress printing to a much wider audience.