Stripper's Guide

 

Here's a literally steamy Valentine's Day card from the pen of Richard Outcault, part of the phenomenally popular Tuck's line of offerings. Buster may be about to be in awful trouble, because I'm not sure that's Mary Jane! Thanks to Mark Johnson who provided the scan.

Labels: Wish You Were Here

 

I've never really warmed up to either of the Glackens brothers, Willam or Louis, as cartoonists. Their work seems rather stiff to me. But William made an important mark in fine art -- he was one of the founders of the highly influential Ashcan School of art; a school originated by a number of artists who kept their bread buttered as cartoonists. Good on ya, Will.

Here's a full pager by William Glackens that ran in the New York Sunday World on March 27 1898. Befitting springtime, Glackens pokes fun at the inevitable appearance of new fashions that bloom along with the flowers that time of the year.

Labels: One-Shot Wonders

 

Politicians are such a deep and rich vein of comedy that it's surprising how relatively few of them have starred in their own features. They tend to be secondary characters, like Senator Belfry in Shoe, Senator Snort in Grin and Bear It and a whole parade of demagogues in strips like Pogo and Doonesbury. Maybe newspaper readers, faced with the horrors of the front page, aren't really happy for politicians to be the stars on the comics page, too. 

Senator Caucus tried to buck that tradition by having a blowhard corrupt politician as the star of a daily panel, which debuted on October 6 1958* through the auspices of General Features. The strip was drawn by Pete Wyma and gags were supplied by George Levine. For both creators this was to be their first and last syndicated feature. Of Levine I know nothing, but Wyma was a prolific gag cartoonist, specializing in risque to outright adult material. He was also a prolific postcard cartoonist in the 60's. When the feature began Wyma adopted a very generic-looking cartooning approach, but during the 60s he developed a much lusher style that really sets him apart from the run of the mill. 

Levine didn't last long as collaborator. He seems to have bowed out at the end of the first year, last being credited on October 17 1959. After that Wyma took a solo byline for the most part, but often shared credit in the panel itself with gag writers who went by "VTM" and "Mac Saveny". 

Senator Caucus was undeniably well done but it never really caught on. Whether that is because of the aforementioned allergic reaction of newspaper readers, or because of the weak sales ability of General Features, I dunno. But since General Features didn't really have any blockbuster properties, they were happy to keep Senator Caucus going for a full decade even with his short list of client papers. The feature seems to have ended on November 2 1968**.

* Source: Washington Star

** Source:Paterson News.

Labels: Obscurities

 

In 1937 the Hearst Corporation purchased the phenomenally successful women's magazine Pictorial Review, a magazine that had once boasted a circulation of 3 million per month. Granted, with the Depression the magazine didn't sell quite that well in the 1930s, but it was still a force to be reckoned with when Hearst bought it. Bizarrely, Hearst discontinued the magazine in 1939, citing it as being in debt up to its ears. The story reeks of a tax evasion scam of some kind, and there were whisperings of some sort of mob connection to boot. 

When Hearst purchased the ill-fated magazine one of the things they did was to create tie-in marketing with their newspapers. To market the Puck comic section, someone came up with the idea of a giveaway of 'flags' featuring some of the headliners from the comics line-up. I put flag in quotes because the actual item was just a flat sheet of muslin with no mounting hardware or eyelets. Kinda crummy even for ten cents in 1937. Arguably worse, though, is the design of the 'flag', which is nine comic panels seemingly taken almost completely at random from the strips, and just plopped down in a 3x3 grid. A flag with zero thought put into the design, in other words. 

Not surprisingly, very few people sent in their dimes for this promotional dog and the flags are now exceedingly rare. Rare doesn't mean valuable, though, since even today few collectors would really want to display the ugly thing. Hake's couldn't even get their minimum bid of a C-note for an example. To see a larger image of the flag you can visit WorthPoint, which claims a sale on eBay -- but you have to be a member to find out what it went for. I suspect it was no king's ransom.

Update: In a rather amazing coincidence, while this post was sitting in the queue what should appear on eBay but one of these flags! It went for the princely sum of 36 bucks, shipping included.

Labels: Marketing Madness

 

Silly Milly may be an obscurity to the vast majority of humanity, but to the mid-century readers of the New York Post this strip was a real star. Creator Stan MacGovern offered up some deliciously demented material -- he was sort of a Milt Gross minus the Yiddish accent. 

The strip began on June 8 1938* as Extra Extra, an addition to the formerly staid New York Post that was in the process of trying to loosen itself up a bit. That spring in its step would be increased greatly in 1939 when the paper was sold to Dorothy Schiff, who transformed it into a liberal-leaning sensational tabloid. 

The strip began as a wacky commentary on minor news stories, a theme that would remain popular throughout the run of the strip. But when MacGovern started using the recurring character Milly, a blowsy half-woman, half-doll who (as most of his characters) is missing her feet, she became the star of the show. MacGovern's use of minor newspaper headlines was no great innovation, but his downright deranged commentaries were what really set the strip apart from others of its genre, as did using himself as a thoroughly demented character in his own strip.

The strip was soon renamed Silly Milly, but various comics historians lay claim that the strip went through a period as "Swing On The News" (Maurice Horn), or "Swing With The News" (Don Markstein). Without having reviewed the Post microfilm for myself, I can only offer the samples you see above, some of which clearly show that the strip was sometimes titled Silly Milly Swings Out The News. I will of course post updates on this world-shaking point should anyone care to review the papers themselves.  

In the game of musical titles, I'll add another -- in 1946-47 MacGovern produced an adjunct large format strip on Saturdays and titled it The Yuk-Yuk Department.

As wonderful as Silly Milly was, the New York Post had no success in syndicating it, though they tried to for years. I have yet to see it running in a paper other than the Post. And that probably prompted MacGovern to decide that enough was enough after a decade and a half. Silly Milly bade goodbye to her readers on November 2 1951**.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

* Source: Ken Barker in Menomonee Falls Gazette #141. Maurice Horn claims it began on January 8 1938. Neither date is a Monday, so I wonder...

** Source: Jeffrey Lindenblatt based on New York Post. Maurice Horn claimed the strip ran until 1952.

Labels: Obscurities

 

For the second week in a row, we prove that Wish You Were Here cannot be buttonholed as a mere purveyor of postcard peculiarities. Here's another envelope from the collection of Mark Johnson, this one a communication from the Lancaster Shoe Company, maker of the Skeezix line of children's shoes. I can find marketing for this line as early as 1923, a mere two years after the character was found on Walt Wallet's doorstep in Gasoline Alley. Although not as ubiquitous as Buster Brown Shoes, the juggernaut of comic strip-based footwear, the Skeezix line did just fine for itself, petering out sometime in the mid-1950s. 

This envelope is dated 1932 and addressed to the Fred Rueping Leather Company of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, a major tannery. They were presumably a supplier to the shoe company.

Labels: Wish You Were Here

 

Walter Bradford was one of the greatest lunatic cartoonists, which I don't mean as a pejorative in any way. He just came up with totally crazy ideas, took his strips in bizarre directions and came up with unexpectedly out of left field gags. I can't help but believe that if he had ever gotten to New York he would have made just as big a splash as Rube Goldberg. Yeah, he really was that good, in my opinion. 

Bradford came to the Philadelphia North American in 1905 and began an incredibly fertile period where he created an amazing string of wacky series. He generally didn't go in for one-shots at the NA, but here's one that might have been in the running to become a series and just never happened. This portrayal of rooming-house life is just bursting with little gags numbering in the dozens, all in a throwaway half-page strip. 

This strip ran on Sunday September 3 1905 in the North American, but our version ran the day before in a Saturday issue of the St. Paul Dispatch in glorious black and white.

Labels: One-Shot Wonders

Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles

... Oskar Lebeck of New York, art director of the Whitman Publishing Company, has purchased the residence of Mrs. Phillp G. Jessup in Old Post Road. The property includes half an acre of lawns and gardens enclosed by a high stone wall and is improved with a field stone dwelling of nine rooms and three baths with attached garage. Like several other stone houses in the Post oRad [sic] section, both house and boundary lines are overgrown with English ivy and Virginia creeper.

The sale was made by Margaret Lane of New York City in cooperation with her Croton associate, Edward H. Briggs. Mr. Lebeck intends to make this his year-round-residence.

Lebeck’s “Letty” Takes 1st Place in Wood Pussy Race at Shattemuc

Guests and members at Shattemuc saw Oscar Lebeck, 126 Old Post Road North, Croton, skipper of the sailboat “Letty,” with his crew, William E. Haley, also of Croton, take first place in the Wood Pussy class, ... 

… The property at 126 Old Post Road, North, in Croton, formerly owned by Oskar Lebeck, was purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Alfred H. Tamarin, formerly of 66 Cleveland Drive, Croton, and New York City.

Mr. Tamarin is advertising director at United Artists Corp and Mrs. Tamarin is an M. D. with offices in New York City. She specializes in child psychiatry.

The property consists of a seven-room stone colonial on an acre plot with a free-form swimming pool. Featured is a large living room with hand-hewn beamed ceiling, natural stone interior walls, fireplace, two-car garage and a panoramic Hudson River view.

The Tamarins have taken occupancy of their home, which will be their permanent residence. The property had been held at $39,500. Mr. and Mrs. Lebeck have purchased land in Scarborough and have recently completed a new ranch house, designed by Mr. Lebeck, and are presently occupying their new home there. ...

Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles

 

Carl "Mort" Mortison (1910-1963) was reportedly a cartoonist-in-residence at the Waterbury Republican-American for over forty years. In addition to editorial cartoons, he penned a humor panel called A New Worry Every Day. Unfortunately beyond that my crystal ball gets decidedly blurry. 

The panel is mentioned in Mortison's obituary, so I assume it ran for a long time, but my only samples are from 1940. Based on the very flimsy evidence I have in my files, I think it might have been a replacement for a cartoon quiz feature Mortison did titled Lester G.'s Kartoon Kwizz, for which I have examples earlier that same year. 

Does anyone have access to online archives or the microfilm of this Waterbury paper to fill us in on Mortison's feature, or features?

Labels: Obscurities

 

Hey, that's not a postcard! We give a sideways skooch to Wish You Were Here this Sunday to bring you another form of mail communication, an envelope. This envelope from the collection of Mark Johnson was produced as a marketing gimmick specifically for wholesalers/distributors to shill their wares to retailers. To get those marks to pay attention they use (aka steal) the well-known Fred Opper characters Alphonse and Gaston to add eye appeal. Mark says this envelope was used by the William Cluff Company of San Francisco, a grocery wholesaler. The addressee, Winship-McQuarrie, was a wholesaler of produce based in Seattle.

Labels: Wish You Were Here

 

I'll be the first to admit that this isn't a particularly important work by Art Young, but in my humble opinion EVERYTHING Art Young does, even his tea stains on a placemat, are worthy of our attention. Here he is in an early colour comic section of the New York Journal, this the issue of January 17 1897. While the gags, all three of 'em, are nothing to write home about, check out the stylized action in the second panels of each two-panel series. There is a master class in these simple panels on how to depict restfulness and contrast it with activity.

Labels: One-Shot Wonders

 

Even Western Newspaper Union, probably the most prosperous of the syndicates that catered to weekly papers, started hitting hard times after World War II. Their comic offerings started bouncing around erratically, as opposed to before the war when they had maintained a mostly consistent and professional stable of features. 

Weekly Rib was one of their many experiments from this era. A panel cartoon with no consistent characters or setting, it was drawn by Roy Mathison, a decent enough cartoonist of whom I know nothing. The feature ran for just one year -- in other words, just 52 panels -- from April 15 1948* to April 7 1949**, and not many WNU clients used it. 

Given my bad track record on genealogical digging lately, I darent make any proclamations, but maybe this is our guy?

* Source: Pomeroy Herald

** Source: Graettinger Times

Labels: Obscurities

 

When E.C. Segar was battling leukemia and only sporadically able to work on Thimble Theatre the show had to go on, and other hands kept the franchise running. In much of 1938 someone other than Segar handled the Sunday much of the time, but Segar rallied and penned (or at least signed) the Sunday strip from July 17 to October 2. During this short period he came up with his last new contribution to the Sunday toppers, the Wiggle Line Movie. 

Unlike earlier activity panels like Funny Films that theoretically gave kids a moving picture but didn't really succeed, the Wiggle Line Movie actually offered a successful but extremely limited animation. In each installment you got a funny face and a wiggly line; put the two together in the prescribed method and you get a wacky face with moving eyes. Worth the effort? I dunno, but the feature didn't last long so maybe the syndicate wasn't too impressed. 

Wiggle Line Movie ran with the Sundays of September 11 through November 13 1938, during which time (on October 13), Segar died. After October 2, Segar's last signed Sunday, the art and writing may have been in the hands of King bullpenner Doc Winner, which seems to be the consensus opinion. But I wonder, given that the art and writing is a cut above what I would expect of Winner, if perhaps Bud Sagendorf or others were involved. In Sagendorf's book Popeye - The First 50 Years he says that he started working on the activity panels "after 1938," but maybe he jumped in a little earlier than he could recall many years later. Any Thimble Theatre scholars out there who can shed some light?

Labels: Topper Features

 The following post was originally written for the Cartoonist Cooperative newsletter, but I am allowing Allan to run it here as I am in need of help for the Arnold complete collection I am publishing. I have every daily published for the comic, and I have most of the Sundays, enough to cover the first two volumes of a 3-volume series, but I am having a hard time finding the Sundays that ran from June 1987 to April 1988 (when the strip ended). Most of the copies I have for those dates came from microfilm, but I would vastly prefer using newspaper clippings if possible.

If you have any leads on finding clippings of “Arnold” Sundays from those dates, I would love if you would get in touch. Alternatively, if there are leads on finding bound, printed copies of newspapers that ran the strip, that would be great as well. “Arnold” ran in vanishingly few papers towards the end, but among the papers that ran it to the very end are Detroit Free-Press, the Baltimore Sun, and (I presume) Chicago Sun-Times.

I can be reached at cbrubaker@gmail.com

 

Restoring Arnold by Charles Brubaker

I never expected to become a publisher. Oh, I’ve self-published my own comics many times through my Smallbug Press label (a name I registered because a printing company I used back in 2017 required I have one). But there’s a difference between self-publishing, where you print your own work, and publishing another creator’s work. That happened to me this past August, when I released Arnold: The Complete Collection Volume 1.

Arnold was a comic strip by Kevin McCormick that ran in a small number of newspapers from 1982 to 1988. The strip featured the bizarre antics of a middle-school boy and his friend, two weird characters in a world that's just as weird to match. Very few characters appeared on-panel. In addition to the titular Arnold and his friend Tommy, the only other character to appear prominently was Mr. Lester, their teacher. There were technically other characters, as well, like Heather (who disappeared like Lyman in Garfield), but they mostly just yelled from off-screen, never appearing on-camera.

Trade advertisement for Arnold comic strip

 

I didn’t grow up on the strip, having been born over a year after the comic ended its run, but I was (and still am) obsessed with newspaper strips. In addition to reading the ones in my local newspaper growing up, I also sought out any comics I could find online. I eventually found an old message board dedicated to comic strips (remember message boards?). One strip was mentioned by several members: Arnold.

The more I read about the strip, the more intrigued I became. Finding samples proved to be hard as the strip ended before the internet became commonplace, but I managed to contact someone who xeroxed newspaper clippings and mailed them to me. I was hooked by the bizarre strip that seems to defy common decency. Arnold frequently wrote letters to Miss Manners, asking questions such as whether it was rude to do an impression of an anteater during dinner (which involved inhaling meatloaf with his nose), resulting in him getting a response asking if he was ever dragged through a cactus. Arnold's antagonism towards the cafeteria ladies (who frequently refer to him as "Ratso") got to the point that the ladies grabbed Arnold and force-fed him mayonnaise, which he refers to as the "White Death".

That this was serialized in the 1980s also made it more hilarious to me. The strip came out when Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County and Gary Larson’s The Far Side were taking off in the mainstream, so there was clearly a market for strips that pushed the envelope. Perhaps Arnold went too far for the editors as it never made a huge splash in the world of newspapers.

Proof sheet for a week of Arnold dailies

Not that readers didn’t notice. The newspaper strip gained a cult following among college students. It was especially popular in Detroit, where it ran in the Free Press until the bitter end, when a giant bird grabbed Arnold and flew off, never to be seen again. Kevin McCormick even acknowledged his Detroit audience by creating a special drawing for the paper and running a short letter thanking his readers.

Over the years I managed to track down more and more strips, through microfilms, newspaper clippings, and scans, but to my disappointment the strip never received a proper book collection. I contacted a few acquaintances with experience in reprinting complete runs of newspaper comics, but they all told me Arnold was such a niche title they didn’t feel it would be worth the investment. Well, as the saying goes, “if no one will do it, do it yourself.”

I had contacted Kevin McCormick before for an interview that ran on my blog, but getting his blessing for a book reprint took some repeated inquiries. I eventually got his attention on the matter after his daughter expressed support for the project. After consulting Nat Gertler, who specializes in reprinting obscure comic materials (including those by Charles M. Schulz), I put a contract together and we signed an agreement.

As it turned out, that was the EASIEST part of the project. The actual hard part was finding the comics. I was able to acquire scans of the proof sheets (a set of sheets containing a week’s worth of strips for newspapers to cut and paste into their page layouts) from King Features Syndicate for most of Arnold, but not for every single strip from the original run. They had most of the dailies, but half of the Sundays were missing, and some of the dailies had missing weeks as well. I also got lucky and managed to find original art for three of the strips from different collectors on eBay. With each original costing $100, it wasn’t the cheapest of investments, but collecting comic strip original art is already a worthwhile pursuit of mine. Those three strips (dated 1/6/1983, 2/16/1983. and 6/21/1983) have the sharpest reproduction among the weekday strips.

Finding the missing dailies was considerably easier, thanks to microfilm I was able to scan and sufficiently clean, using Photoshop to remove any dust and artifacts along the way. In extreme cases I had to Frankenstein a single strip together by stitching parts together from different sources.

The Sundays proved to be the hardest to track down. I found old newspaper clippings of the Sundays on eBay over a better part of the decade, and Kevin McCormick sent me camera captures of Sundays from his original pieces, but he didn’t have everything. He had given some originals away over the years, and others had been damaged by squirrels that had snuck into his attic.

Typical Arnold Sunday tearsheet sample with awful print quality and color

Luckily I was able to get in touch with comic strip historian Allan Holtz, who possessed many of the early Sundays in his own collection. But even that proved to be a challenge because, as Allan explained, “the printing of the Sundays was truly awful. The word balloon text always seemed to be washed out and full of printing losses, and the coloring was a sickening miasma.” I knew that very well, from my own experience dealing with newspaper clippings, and applied many of my own. Photoshop techniques, including redrawing missing lineart and manually erasing artifacts. There was one strip that I spent an entire week cleaning up. Thankfully later strips didn’t suffer from nearly as many printing issues and I was able to get them presentable relatively quickly.

The first of three volumes came out in the last week of August 2023, after five years of attempts,, marking my official debut as a “publisher.” The reactions have been favorable, with many writing they’d been waiting over 30 years for this book to happen. This production was very much a labor of love. As I noted earlier, I had always wanted to have an Arnold book collection and ensure that this strip was preserved, so I took the initiative to make it happen. There are a number of other forgotten comic strips I’d like to see reprinted, and I wonder if I have the drive to do this further while keeping my own comics going. Time will tell, but first I need to get the other two volumes out.

You can get the book on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CGSPS2LL. Here's the cover of book two, not yet published:

 

Here's another card in the Raphael Tuck series of Little Nemo Valentines Day postcards. Can you find the original McCay panel on which this image is based?

Labels: Wish You Were Here

 

This one-shot strip that ran in the World Color Printing Sunday comics section of December 4 1904 generates so many questions. Why does the wizard turn a snake into a watermelon? Why does he finger a mysterious case labelled "Goo-Goo From India"? Why does the wizard turn George Washington White into a chicken particularly? I'm so confused... 

This one-shot is signed Morris. He was not an artist in World Color's regular stable; in fact this seems to be the only strip he contributed to the syndicate. Nice art, but that gag needed some polishing.

Labels: One-Shot Wonders

 

I rarely get to feature Maurice Ketten* on the blog because he worked on his daily panel, often titled Can You Beat It?, for the New York World pretty much for his whole newspaper career. But that's a shame because though his later style lost most of its allure, in his early days at the World he was a pretty incredible stylist. His work was so distinctive that the World billed him as "the Angle and Curve Cartoonist." His style at that time was so highly stylized I tend to think of it as Art Deco, or perhaps Cubist, and that's well before either of those were even things. 

As Ketten settled in at the World in 1906 his style quickly became more conventional, and to imitate T.E. Powers over at the New York Journal. However, in his only series that predates Can You Beat It?, The Hurry Up New Yorker, the vestiges of his "angle and curve" days are still in evidence. This series makes fun of Big Apple denizens, who always seem to be scrambling to make time. Of course in Ketten's series this always backfires to comic effect. 

The series ran from October 19 to November 17 1906**, predating Ketten's decades-long series Can You Beat It?  by a few months. As you can see from the samples above, which ran in other papers, the original title was changed to suit the local paper, sometimes made generic like these, other times by substituting the name of the newspaper's city.

* Ketten's real name was Prosper Fiorini; he changed it when he came to the U.S. 

** Source: New York Evening World.

Labels: Obscurities