Google Doodles Maurice Sendak

Google celebrates Maurice Sendak’s 85th birthday.

By Forrest Wickman

For what would have been his 85^th birthday on Monday, Google has drawn up a wonderfully imagined Google Doodle as a tribute to the beloved illustrator and children’s book author Maurice Sendak. As io9 points out, the Doodle has already appeared in New Zealand.

It begins, of course, with Max sailing to the land of Where the Wild Things Are, but soon also ventures to the surreal cityscape of In the Night Kitchen and ends, appropriately, with the birthday party from Sendak’s 2011 book Bumble-Ardy.

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Mark Twain gets birthday tribute from Google

Mark Twain's birthday doodle from Google.

   Pictorial homage to Tom Sawyer graces search engine on the author’s 176th birthday.

By Alison Flood

Mark Twain’s classic scene of boyhood one-upmanship, when Tom Sawyer tricks his friends into whitewashing a fence for him, has been immortalised online by Google’s home page.

The search engine marked the 176th birthday of the American author with a Google doodle today, showing his character Tom Sawyer tempting a friend into whitewashing over the Google logo that unknown and anachronistic hands have daubed over it. In the novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom is ordered to undertake the job by his Aunt Polly as a punishment. A “deep melancholy” settles upon him as he surveys the fence, “thirty yards of board fence nine feet high”.

When boys begin to approach and ridicule him, Tom persuades them the work is fun. “All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer”, he tells them. “I reckon there ain’t one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it the way it’s got to be done.” They take the bait and bribe him with their treasures to let them whitewash the fence for him, as “the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by … literally rolling in wealth”.

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An Unpublished Will Eisner Keynote Address from the ‘Will Eisner Symposium’

The following is a transcript of Will Eisner’s keynote address at the “‘Will Eisner Symposium: The 2002 University of Florida Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels.”

Will Eisner Google Doodle," by Google

I’d like to start this evening by talking about how important this gathering is. I think this is probably a turning point. I’ve been trying all evening to think of a decent metaphor to explain this wonderful thing that has been put together by Don Ault and his team. All I could think about is trying to explain to you how a Jewish boy feels being able to join a gentile country club.

This seriously is a moment in time for which I have been dreaming all of my professional life, as most of those who worked around me dreamt about but weren’t even aware that this was possible. We now, for the first time, we’re being recognized, not yet accepted, but we’re now recognized in major bookstores and in the rooms of academia – in the academic community. We’re now being discussed as a form of literature, and this is what I’ve been hoping for in all these years.

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Jules Verne, French science fiction pioneer, marked with Google doodle

Jules Verne, author of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days, celebrated with logo that mimics submarine portholes.

Ben Quinn

Jules Verne's Google doodle may induce sea sickness. Photograph: Google

Fondly regarded as the father of science fiction, who foresaw a range of technological innovations long before their arrival, Jules Verne can probably be forgiven for failing to predict the internet.

Or, for that matter, that his life would one day be honoured by Google’s latest doodle, which went live on Tuesday to mark the French author’s 183rd birthday.

In honour of Verne’s most famous novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the new doodle takes the form of the portholes of a submarine.

A lever on one side can be manipulated to plunge the submarine deeper into the sea, which appears to be populated by various forms of sea life.   …read more