Stripper's Guide

Reg Manning is usually associated with postcards about Arizona (like this one), but during World War II he also produced popular cards for use by the armed forces. This card, Travelcard #16 from 1943, published by Curteich and distributed by Lollegard Specialty Company of Tucson Arizona, offers a whole cardful of good laughs, and a quick way for GIs to touch base with the folks at home.

Labels: Wish You Were Here

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 0 comments

May 6 1910 -- Can you imagine if a police department today publicized the names of the cops who were over and underweight? 

This is one of the rare few microfilm copies I made from the Examiner that included the whole article. Unfortunately it's not written by Herriman.

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 2 comments

In 2019-20, to celebrate Popeye's 90th birthday, King Features offered an online-only comic strip titled Popeye's Cartoon Club. The strip was written and drawn by various cartoonists, all given free rein to spin Popeye in whatever direction appealed to them. It was great fun, and much enjoyed by comic strip fans.

While the strips were new, the title clocked in at about 85 years old. E.C. Segar offered a few secondary toppers to Thimble Theatre in the 1930s in addition to the long-running Sappo main topper. The original Popeye's Cartoon Club debuted on April 9 1934 and offered advice on learning cartooning. Much of it was of the type, "if you can draw this simple shape, then you can turn it into ..." Segar gave the feature a little more than a year, ending it on May 5 1935, after which he eschewed secondary toppers entirely for the rest of his days on the Sunday strip.

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 1 comments

Although the headline says this is a mystery strip post, this one's not so much mysterious as just so exceedingly rare I don't really know what to do with it.We're going to cover the whole range of a syndicate's offerings today, the comics of Argonaut Entertainment.

Never heard of them? Well, you're not alone. I'd never heard of them until Charles Brubaker stumbled upon a whole page's worth of unfamiliar comics in a 1994 issue of the Gaffney (SC) Ledger. Here's a sample:

The lineup consists of Bots by Ron Matzov, Dagney by Kelly Kennedy, Franky and Ralph by Moira Manion, Grey Matter by London and Chianca, Hobnob Inn by Paige Anderson, Time Trek by Jack Warren, Pipo and Company by Tomé, Amber Waves by Dave T. Phipps, Off The Top by Carl Jung and David Evans, Everything's O.K. by O.K. Elkins, Clancy by John Brundige, Carlos by Roy Delgado, Lunatic Fringe by Wardo, and Leadbellies by Thomas Burton. 

The only feature with which I was familiar was Phipps' Amber Waves, which was later syndicated by King Features Weekly Service, and continues to this day as far as I know.

This lineup stayed consist through the entire run in the Gaffney Ledger. And here's where we get to the problem. The Gaffney Ledger, a thrice weekly paper, ran the page from November 6 to December 4 in their 'experimental' Sunday edition (the longstanding Monday edition moved to Sunday and added a few extra features) -- a total of five times. The paper announced after this five week trial run that the Sunday paper had not been the big seller they were hoping for, so they moved it back to Monday and dropped the extra features, including the page from Argonaut Entertainment. 

So not only did I have a mysterious page of ultra-obscure comics, but with a five week run I had to ask myself whether it qualified for listing in my Stripper's Guide database. After all, I have said in the past that features that appear only in 'test runs' don't qualify -- they have to be used as regular features. They might have really, really short runs, but they can't just be mere samples. 

So, more digging, and I eventually came up with another run, this time in the Charlottesville (VA) Observer. This was a year earlier, and lasted ... hmm, what a coincidence ... five weekly appearances. The page ran from August 5 to September 2. The line-up changed slightly each week. Here's a sample page:

Now with a second sample run in hand, we at least also had a syndicate name and the headline "Tomorrow's Comics." That was the clue that helped answer the big question, "Just what the heck is this stuff?"

It turns out that Argonaut Entertainment was primarily a creator of comic book inserts for college newspapers. The name of the comic book? Tomorrow's Comics, of course. There are apparently seven known issues, and you can see one of them here appearing in the Oregon Daily Emerald, and here in the Miami Hurricane. The comic books offered readers short runs of a big batch of daily style strips by what they billed as some of the brightest young undiscovered cartoonists. It was actually not a bad idea, and the publisher obviously had standards, because most of the strips are gifted amateur to semi-professional level. Learning the name of the publisher also led me to this advertisement in Editor & Publisher, from July 28 1990:

I found a few other interesting tidbits while trolling the interwebs looking for more information. First one concerns  the comic strip Franky and Ralph, by Moira Manion. The strip was about a fox and snake that end up living in encroaching suburbia when their native habitat disappears. This, of course, is the central thesis of Over The Hedge as well, and in 2006 there was a minor flap about whether Fry and Lewis might have been inspired by this earlier feature; the story was covered by Minnesota Public Radio.

Besides Amber Waves, I found one other feature that lived beyond Tomorrow's Comics. Hobnob Inn, in addition to becoming an early webcomic, ran weekly in the Virginia Gazette from June 28 1997 to October 10 1998. 

Thanks for much of this information from Charles Brubaker!

Labels: Mystery Strips

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 5 comments

In the April 28 1912 edition of Hearst's American Weekly the back cover was given over to a full page ad from Tuxedo Tobacco. Someone at that tobacco company must have been a big cartooning fan, because cartooning and cartoonists were frequent subject matter for their ads. This early one repurposes a Foxy Grandpa strip that has nothing to do with tobacco. Given how much a full page 4-color ad in a magazine section that ran in every Hearst paper must have cost, it's surprising that the Tuxedo advertising department didn't put some effort into finding a strip that had some connection to their product, or tobacco in general.

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 1 comments

One of the less seen of the Taylor Pratt series by Albert Carmichael was called "Anybody Here Seen Kelly?" The phrase comes from a popular song hit of the day, "Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?" The phrase was appropriated by Carmichael, and he came up with a whole batch of cartoons for which it could serve as the punchline. Here's the song (this is the second version, the one that made it big in the States):

Labels: Wish You Were Here

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 0 comments

May 5 1910  -- Yet another in the seemingly endless well of Herriman gags about the level of public interest in the upcoming Fight of the Century.

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 0 comments

The great W.E. Hill Sunday page, Among Us Mortals, debuted in 1916 to immediate success. The page offered a group of beautifully drawn cartoon vignettes all about one common subject which changed weekly. While that doesn't sound like an earth-shattering new idea, Hill's page was also a little different in that it was offered for use primarily outside of the Sunday comics section, the impressive drawings looking especially handsome when run in the rotogravure section. Newspaper cartoonists who fancied themselves to be somewhat more artistically advanced than their brethren saw that this could be a showcase to show off their chops. Imitations of Among Us Mortals began to pop up all over the place.

One of those me-too features was Character Sketches, by A. Russell (I've not been able to discover what the A stands for). This feature ran only in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and started there on January 21 1917, just eight months after Among Us Mortals debuted in the New York Tribune. While I would give Mr. Hill the nod for a greater achievement in art, Russell's version was quite impressively drawn, too. Character Sketches did not get prime placement in the rotogravure section; instead he was afforded a color page in the magazine section. Russell wanted people to focus on his linework, so though the page was run through a 4-colour press, he used it sparingly for spot colour.

As best I can tell Character Sketches was not offered in syndication, so it was enjoyed only by readers of the G-D. They got to enjoy it for a long time, too. The feature ran for just short of a full decade, ending on April 18 1926. On April 6 Russell suffered a stroke, from which the paper said he was expected to recover, but evidence seems to indicate the contrary. 

[EDIT: EOCostello has lifted the veil on A. Russell, see comments below.]

Labels: Obscurities

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 4 comments

What to do if you are a newspaper editor wanting to add a little Hollywood glamour to your paper, but you don't have the resources to buy a feature like Seein' Stars, Screen Oddities or even a celebrity gossip column? Never fear, Mr. Editor, just check your in-box. There you'll find freebies from some of the major Hollywood studios that fit the bill. 

While most of these freebies, ads disguised as entertainment, tried to hide their origin, you've got to give Columbia Pictures points for being forthright about Unusual Facts Revealed. It carried a 'syndicate stamp' for Columbia Feature Service, a nom de plume about as transparent as Hemming Ernestway. 

As with most of these freebies, determining start and end dates is pretty well impossible. Even if they came with release dates on the proofs, you can be sure any newspaper that was on the skids enough to use them ran them when they needed to fill a hole, even if it was ten years late, or running a whole page's worth of them in a single edition. I suppose if we wanted to make a life's work out of Unusual Facts Revealed we could examine the movies being flogged, check their release dates, and .... no, it's just too depressing to think about a time sink like that.  

My best fix on a start date, December 1 1933, is from the Moorhead County Press. The feature seemed to be available on a more or less weekly frequency through 1943*, I'm guessing with some gaps. It's not as if Columbia Pictures was overly concerned with guaranteeing papers an installment every single week.

The feature was credited as "by Movie Spotlight", and I'm going to go out on a limb and declare that's not someone's real name. Seldom was the art signed, and there were definitely a number of different artists involved, but Barrye Phillips did sign some early episodes (the top sample here is signed by him), and he occasionally admitted his involvement through sometime in 1935. I don't know much about him, but his work appeared on some paperback and magazine covers in the 1950s and 60s. He also did a stint on the Sunday strip Famous Fiction from 1944-46.  

After Phillips' departure the panel was unsigned for a long stretch, but then in 1939-40 Erwin Hess signed some. After that the feature was unsigned until its apparent end in 1943.

* Source: end year from Covington Virginian.

Labels: Marketing Madness

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 0 comments

To the admittedly slight extent to which I have considered Ginger, a daily panel about an impish little girl, I always assumed that the creator, Orla Gettermann, was female. Oops! Turns out that we better call him Mister Gettermann, or better yet, Herr Getterman, since he was Danish. 

Ginger was just one of many Dennis the Menace competitors who ran rampant on the comics pages starting in the 1950s, and for the life of me I can't see what might set Ginger apart from all the others. The art is okay but nothing to get excited about, and most of the gags feel like they could have been recycled from all the other panels of this type. My problem with these features, generally, is that I sense no actual personality in most of these kids -- they are just automatons, programmed to produce a wearisome formulaic gag every day.

Ginger debuted in Denmark in 1958*, and got picked up for American distribution by United Feature Syndicate the next year, debuting on September 7 1959. The panel was not picked up by very many U.S. papers, but UFS stuck with it, presumably because they were paying a low re-run rate for the work. 

Ginger had a surprisingly long run in the U.S., almost twenty years. It was last advertised in Editor & Publisher in 1977, and the latest sample I can find is an appearance in the  Gettysburg Times dated September 23. That places the earliest possible end date as September 24 1977. The Times, who evidently felt that impish kids were a necessary ingredient in the paper, replaced Ginger with yet another of these panels, Gumdrop, also from United Feature.

* Under the title "Gitte" I think, though there is very little information out there, and most of it is of course in Danish. Any Danes out there to tell us more?

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 2 comments

A great bust of Happy Hooligan on this 1904 Kaufmann & Strauss card, #62. Most of this series was Outcault cards, but there were a few from Opper, including this one that I failed to recognize at the time. It was correctly IDed by Mark Johnson, though, so thanks Mark.

Labels: Wish You Were Here

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 1 comments

May 4 1910: Everybody, and I do mean EVERYBODY, is in the know about the upcoming Fight of the Century.

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 0 comments

Here's a feature whose reason for being is arguable more interesting than the feature itself. 

Thornton Fisher, a mainstay at the New York Evening World in the 1910s, took a break from his usual strip work to create the panel series Preparedness, which debuted on January 31 1916. Reading samples today you may be forgiven if the theme of the panels is anything but apparent. The key, it turns out, are the captions, all of which use militaristic terminology to describe the activity going on in the cartoon. 

In 1916 the U.S. was still sitting out the war in Europe, officially neutral though leaning heavily toward supporting the Allies. The more hawkish contingents in the U.S. were itching to get involved, and they came up with a proposed national policy called 'Preparedness'. The idea as it was put forth was that to keep us safely out of war we need to immediately develop a strong and highly prepared military -- no one would dare attack us or risk our involvement if we are seen as an unbeatable juggernaut. The concept was pure misdirection and everyone knew it, but the notion did catch on as the war in Europe ground on. Even President Wilson, originally a vocal critic of the idea, cozied up to it in 1916, evidently realizing that our involvement was just a matter of time and that we should indeed start getting prepared.  

Okay, so with that in mind, we can reread these panels and see how they all tie together. The day's actors (there were no recurring characters) are in the midst of some sort of crisis, and they are preparing to meet the situation head on and with strength of numbers. The theme is carried through into the captions, where Fisher uses military mumbo-jumbo to drive the theme home. 

Preparedness ran in the Evening World until April 6 1916. 

Labels: Obscurities

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 1 comments

If you haven't read Jerry Robinson's biography of Percy Crosby (Skippy and Percy Crosby, Holt Rinehart Winston, 1978) you should -- it's one heckuva read describing a cartoonist's life of incredible highs and lows. In 1945 Percy Crosby was already depressed over a divorce, tax problems, the plummeting circulation of his strip, and the reduction of his Sunday from a full page to a lowly half. The final shoe dropped in December of that year when the Skippy comic strip was cancelled outright, a victim not just of lower popularity but of the syndicate being tired of dealing with its mercurial creator. 

Here is the final Skippy Sunday, dated December 2 1945. I've been seeking these late Skippy strips for decades now and finally stumbled across this one recently. It ran in the Ashland Daily Independent.

According to Jerry Robinson, the daily ran one further week, ending on December 8. But Jeffrey Lindenblatt has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that is not so. He documented a half-dozen newspapers that all ended Skippy on November 17. This date actually make s a lot of sense if the syndicate fired Crosby and the strip ended with the material they had on hand. Sundays have a much more involved production process to run through before they see print, so King would have had at least a few more weeks of them than dailies. With that in mind, I have changed my end date for the Skippy daily based on Lindenblatt's proof.

Labels: Firsts and Lasts

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 0 comments

Among the women cartoonists of the earlier part of the 20th century, Sara Moore (aka Sara Moore Eastman) stood out for not having what I would call a 'frilly' or feminine style. She was a darn fine cartoonist/illustrator, and although her subjects were often touching on that female cartoonist staple, romance, I think she rose above the sterotypical material. What she lacked, though, was the instantly recognizeable style of the top echelon of her sorority. Although she had a long and prolific career, she never became a household name by any means. She even stayed under the radar to cartooning historian Trina Robbins, not rating a mention in any of her books on women cartoonists. 

Moore created several newspaper series over a span of three decades, including some that involved just as much writing as art. We're going to look at her latest known cartooning work today, the feature Maiden Meditations that she penned for the Chicago Tribune from December 27 1925 to March 27 1932. The weekly half-page feature, usually consisting of several vignettes, mostly hits the subjects of romance and fashion with cheesecake drawings for the fellas. Although the feature was offered in syndication, it is rarely found outside the pages of its home paper. 

As best I can tell Sara Moore retired after this feature ended, but it wasn't because she was elderly. Although I don't have a birth year, she died in 1969, some thirty-seven years after Maiden Meditations ended.

Labels: Obscurities

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 2 comments

Here's a Private Breger card, Graycraft #306. Usually I find these postally unused, but this one went through the mails in 1944. It has quite a message on the reverse:

Two-in-One witch overzealous to read leaves finishes job on pa's lid. Stickum is useless. Prices in sewer. Don't let two-in-one witch forget this. 

  --- The Three Cupids

Did I just uncover some Axis plot that was organized via Private Breger postcards?

Labels: Wish You Were Here

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 4 comments

May 3 1910: E.C. Lewis was in his cups and decided it would be hilarious to stage fake muggings with the pistol he happened to have handy. He made the exercise more interesting for himself by commanding each victim to stand around him with their hands up as he gathered more butts for his practical joke. When a cop on patrol happened along he evidently lacked a sense of humor, and arrested Mr. Lewis.

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 0 comments

Another in George McManus' secondary toppers was Things We Can Do Without. The title pretty much says it all. This was the first of the Bringing Up Father panel toppers and ran from July 23 1933 to April 22 1934, after which it was replaced by How To Keep From Getting Old.

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 3 comments

If Charmers didn't give you a case of sugar shock, Bears In Love didn't make your brain melt, and Kisses didn't send your glycemic index into the red zone, then prepare for guaranteed diabetic overload, here come the Dear God Kids. 

In the 1980s the cherubic children with adorably innocent questions for the Almighty graced everything from cards to mugs to calendars to books to coasters to statuettes to stickers to posters ... well, you get the idea. Creator Anne Fitzgerald of Limerick, Ireland, came up with the idea sometime before 1982, but the origin of this licensing bonanza is a little murky. Supposedly she attended a licensing fair and encountered a German firm that sold novelty phone pads. She suggested a pad that was headed with a "Dear God" aphorism; the firm tried it and the pads sold like a Biblical rain of frogs. Fitzgerald being an artist, she came up with the idea of adding cute kids as the speakers of these pithy lines, and a marketing bonanza was born. 

Fitzgerald might have been a marketing wunderkind, but to be fair, she did seem to take her religion seriously. She wrote many books in which the Dear God Kids get Bible-based answers to their questions, the goal being to help kids understand how the Christian deity thinks in a cute, non-threatening format. But to be clear, the dynamo that ran this fad was all the junk that took up shelf space at your local K-Mart.

A newspaper feature for the Dear God Kids started in an unpredictable venue, Britain's notorious tabloid newspaper, The Sun (the one with topless girls on page three)*. It came to the U.S. under the distributorship of King Features, debuting on February 13 1984. American newspaper editors, perhaps sensing that the feature was essentially an advertisement for Fitzgerald's cornucopia of licensed gewgaws, wisely stayed away in droves. 

King Features gave the feature a sporting chance, keeping it on the roster for almost four years. By then the craze for Dear God Kids had pretty much run its course, perhaps drowned under the mountain of over 1000 different licensed products dumped on the market. The kids were retired from American newspapers on January 2 1988. 

Many thanks to Mark Johnson, who supplied me with the proof sheets seen above for the initial and final weeks of the feature.

~~~~~

* Oddly, this feature is not mentioned in the newly published book The A To Z of British Newspaper Strips by Paul Hudson, which otherwise seems pretty darn all-encompassing. It's also a captivating read for this comic strip fan, whose knowledge of British comics has all the depth of an Andy Capp gag.

Labels: Obscurities

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 3 comments

Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles

# posted by Alex Jay @ 7:00 AM 0 comments

This is yet another J.R. Williams card from Standley-May of New Mexico, Series 1 #W512 to be specific. This Out Our Way panel was originally published on February 24 1951.

Labels: Wish You Were Here

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 0 comments

May 3 1910: Yet another gag based on the upcoming Fight of the Century. This one features a character never yet seen in real life: the bookie who will give money back.

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 1 comments

Hapless Towser was a short-lived strip about a dog who can't catch a break; it ran in the New York Herald Sunday comics section from January 26* to April 13 1902**. The creator signed himself Ollendorff. 

At the time I was putting together my book, American Newspaper Comics, I weighed whether I was willing to assume this was Julian Ollendorff, an accomplished cartoonist who has series credits in the 1930s-40s. At the time I thought of that lengthy missing span of years and decided that chances were against it. I ended up listing the creator of this strip as just Ollendorff. 

But now that Alex Jay has done the legwork to do Julian's Ink-Slinger Profile, I can be pretty confident that the wet-behind-the-ears 20-year old did actually produce this strip. Ollendorff is on record saying that he was working at the New York World as early as about 1901, and so it's no long-shot that he was shopping his wares around to other Big Apple papers at that time. 

The art on Hapless Towser is a bit rough but it's easy to see that there's a wonderful cartoonist just at the cusp of mastering his trade. After this lone series Ollendorff would explore other venues for his art, mostly illustration and fashion work, for almost thirty years. Once he finally came back to the fold it was as an accomplished and confident cartoonist, producing wonderful series like Gloria and Olly of the Movies.

* Source: Author's collection.

** Source: Ken Barker's New York Herald index.

Labels: Obscurities

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 2 comments

The comic strip Dixie Dugan began in 1929 under the title Showgirl, and, just like the magazine serial and Broadway show from which the name came, it starred a heroine who looked like the breathtakingly beautiful young starlet Louise Brooks. In the beginning, the strip was about a beautiful young would-be star, her forays into the entertainment biz and her many ardent beaus. Art was provided by the team of J.P. McEvoy (writer) and John H. Striebel (art). Both men were holdovers from the original appearance of Showgirl as a magazine serial, which was the source of the Broadway play.

While the well-known creators, the Louise Brooks connection and the media-tie-in sold a lot of papers on the strip, for some reason, maybe the onset of the Great Depression, the strip took a a major change in direction. Dixie lost her showgirl ambitions and concentrated on earning a conventional living, and her looks were toned down so that she was attractive but in a much more girl-next-door style. She became quite family-oriented and earnest, almost to the point of being priggish. 

The newly conservative Dixie seemed to be just fine with readers, and a popular Sunday page was added on February 5 1933*. Along with the new Sunday came a one-tier topper strip called "Good Deed" Dotty (yes, complete with self-conscious quotes).  

In each strip little girl Dotty searches for some good turn she can do, and when she does one she writes it down in her booklet of, yes, "Good Deeds". Her good deeds are humorous but they are all, indeed, truly good deeds -- the example above is the tone set throughout the series. 

The strip was often pantomime, which was a favorite form for John Striebel. Before Dixie Dugan he had a wonderful strip feature titled Pantomime which ran for three years.  That makes me wonder if the topper was his baby, and that McEvoy wasn't involved.  

"Good Deed" Dotty was the only topper Dixie Dugan ever had, and it was dropped on October 17 1948**. From then on Dixie had the page to herself.

* Source: Milwaukee Journal.

** Source: Chicago Sun-Times.

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

Homer may have been a ghost, but he seldom inspired fear. His particular brand of haunting behavior was to play mild practical jokes, more lilely to inspire grins than screams. In fact, some of his tricks are beneficial, like warning movie-goers about a stinker of a film before they waste their money (above). Homer could even on occasion be downright prudish -- he had a penchant for slap-on-the-wrist punishments for even mildly bad behavior. 

Ray Thompson was repsonsible for Homer, a pantomime single-panel daily that debuted on July 2 1945* through the auspices of the New York Tribune syndicate. Papers that signed up often improved the title of the feature by renaming it Homer the Invisible, Hauntin' Homer, or Homer Did It. Thompson was a journeyman cartoonist who had a few of his own features in the 20s and thirties, collaborated as writer on Myra North Special Nurse and ghosted Somebody's Stenog for awhile. 

Homer had some high-profile newspaper clients, but evidently not enough to make Thompson or his syndicate happy. The panel feature was exorcised from newspapers on August 30 1947**, just a little more than a two year run. 

Later Thompson apparently found employment as cartoonist on bubble-gum comics The Dubble Bubble Kids, and then as a writer of non-fiction.

* Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

** Source: Oakland Tribune

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 1 comments

Here is a Valentine's Day postcard from Dwig. It was published by Samuel Gabriel & Sons. We've seen a few of their Dwig Valentine cards before, but they were coded as series 402. This card is from series 403, so, apparently the previous series sold quite well and they decided to add more?

This card sports a faux wood frame effect obviously intended to make it look like a Tuck card -- sort of the Cadillac of postcards -- but they didn't go so far as to splurge on the metallic ink like Tuck usually did.

Labels: Wish You Were Here

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

April 30 1910 -- They sure did take the census seriously in 1910. 

A census-taker came to the Los Angeles residence of J.H. Todd, a man who seemed to be in his 60s. When asked his age, Mr. Todd replied that he was seven years old, due to the amazing properties of "The Elixir Of Life", a mineral water for which he is a salesman. He claimed that every time he partook of the water that his life would begin over again, and that he typically imbibed it every seven years -- he was about due for his next dose. 

The census taker found no humor in this, and called a policeman to witness Mr. Todd's obvious false witness to a census-taker. The deputy, also a man of no humor, arrested Mr. Todd, who was obliged to pay bail to get out of jail. 

You have to hand it to Mr. Todd for being a truly devoted fan of the product he sells. When called before the district court in October of that year, he stuck to his guns that he was seven years old. The judge fined him $100 (a quite substantial amount in 1910). Todd paid the fine on the spot. 

But maybe Mr. Todd was the smart one -- how much "Elixir of Life" did he sell because of all the free publicity he was given?

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 1 comments

Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles

# posted by Alex Jay @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

Maurice Horn described Elmer as "genial", which is probably the highest praise it is ever likely to receive. It seems to be one of those strips that stayed in papers due to inertia. The strip was about a 10-year old kid who got into relatively genteel comic strip boy troubles and escapades every Sunday. Under its original creator, A.C. Fera, the strip had a modicum of life, oddly benefiting from the cartoonist's flat, scratchy style. But when Fera for some reason left the strip and it was handed over to Charles "Doc" Winner in 1926, it became so formulaic that you can accurately extrapolate the entire thirty years' worth of Winner Sundays based on any one example. 

When all the Hearst Sundays gained toppers in 1926, Winner (who was still ghosting the page under Fera's name until late 1926) tried out a few candidates, but finally settled on Alexander Smart Esq., starting with the July 4 1926 page. The character was not an attorney, so I assume that Winner used the term "esquire" in the British sense of someone untitled but of social importance. The strip was just as formulaic as Elmer itself; Alexander tries to outsmart someone, or to attack some problem with his supposed high intelligence, and everything backfires. 

When other Hearst Sundays started adding multiple toppers, Winner added Daffydoodles on July 31 1932 It was a feature in which Winner would illustrate puns and other funny turns of phrase. Originally a single panel, it eventually grew to most often have four single-panel gags. Shortly after the feature began Winner began to credit the ideas to reader submissions. Given that he never told readers how or where to send in their submissions, my guess is that Winner made up a lot of the gags and reader names, but I must confess a spot-check of one unusual  name seen above, Dorothy Ann Starry, came up with an actual person. 

Soon after Daffydoodles was added, a second topper began, called The Elmer Game. This large panel was, I think, the best thing about the Elmer page. Each week Winner would explain a simple game that kids could play with a minimum of equipment and setup. For kids looking for something to do on Sunday afternoon The Elmer Game must have been a real boon. It ran from January 1 1933 to June 9 1935, losing out to an expanded set of weekly Daffydoodles. 

An interesting bit of trivia about Elmer and its toppers: while the main strip never merited a reprint book, and certainly Daffydoodles and Alexander Smart Esq. didn't either, The Elmer Game did. The book was titled Games Of Fun and was issued by K.K. Publications in 1934.

During World War II a lot of strips lost their toppers, or at least found fewer and fewer papers willing to give space to the typically second-rate material. Alexander Smart, Esq. and Daffydoodles seem to have succumbed to this trend. The latest I can find them running is on July 30 1944 in the Nebraska State Journal. But they could have been produced longer, and the papers that ran them became so few as to evade my radar. Anyone have any later dates?

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

Little Willie Gettit has one simple desire in life -- to procure a dime; said dime to be invested in candy and sweets. Willie's family feels that such investments are not worthwhile, yet somehow they always end up giving Willie the dime. Why? Because Willie has an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time. With his amazing sense of timing one can only imagine what heights Willie will one day reach as an adult. 

When George McManus moved over to Hearst in 1912 he began experimenting with new ideas in his weekday strips. Of course, the one that made him one of the most famous cartoonists in the world was Bringing Up Father, but among his other weekday offerings was this one, Little Willie Gettit. With a repetitive gag it didn't have the legs for a long life, but McManus made it delightfully fun while it lasted, dropping it as soon as the gag started to get stale. It ran from September 25 1913 to January 17 1914*. Little Willie Gettit has the distinction of being McManus' last weekday strip before he put all his eggs in one basket and concentrated on Bringing Up Father on weekdays.

* Source: Jeffrey Lindenblatt's New York American index.

Labels: Obscurities

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 5 comments