Thursday, December 07, 2006

 

Obscurity of the Day: Easy Papa

Gustave Verbeck's first known comic strip series, pre-dating his classic The Upside-Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo, was Easy Papa. It was a rather undistinguished effort despite the delightfully kooky art. Easy Papa sported the standard issue pair of noisome kids playing pranks on an unflappable pater familias. (Sorry for the high-falutin' verbiage, but I'm running out of ways to say "Katzies rip-off").

Easy Papa ran 5/25/02 - 2/1/03 in the New York World. Not too curiously, it was missed by no one, including Maurice Horn who fails to list its existence in the World Encyclopedia of Comics, where he claims that Verbeck only penned three comic strip series. The number is actually five, but I'll leave the fifth as a mystery until some later date.

Oh, and if the above strip has you baffled, the dish called Welsh rabbit has nothing to do with our wascally friends of the animal world. It is actually a melted spiced cheese sauce served over toast, more properly called Welsh rarebit. This lower class delicacy was popular back in the day as a very inexpensive meal. The corruption of rarebit into rabbit was meant sardonically as an indicator that if you were eating this goop you probably couldn't afford the price of a proper supper with meat in it.

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Comments:
Oh, my... what a great quality linework. How did you get that? Have you yet been contacted by the manager of the Lambiek site about using some of your stuff? I am sure they'll want to add this to their Gustaf Verbeek info.
 
Don't recall being contacted.

--Allan
 
Thanks for the link, Marco. I've added it to the link list on the blog.

--Allan
 
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Wednesday, December 06, 2006

 

The Last Hurrah for Little Nemo


The best drawn comic strip of all time had an ignominious coda in 1947, when Winsor McCay's son took a last stab at revitalizing the Little Nemo franchise. In association with the Richardson Feature Service, Junior created 'new' Little Nemo comic strips by reformatting and recaptioning old panels from the original series.

The American comics section in 1947 would devote at best a tabloid page, or a half broadsheet page, to the feature, certainly a slap in the face to McCay's original glorious Sundays. Junior tried to rework his father's masterpieces, using just a few panels to tell a highly curtailed and simplified version of the story in the original strips. The result, while still breathtaking regardless of the maimed artwork, was a mere shadow, and an unfit tribute to the glory that was Little Nemo.

The strip didn't sell well, and it debuted on March 2 1947 in a mere handful of papers. The last known appearance was in the Long Island Press on December 28 of that year.

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Was it this same stuff or something different that Bob McCay did for the comic books of the 1940s?
 
Hi DD -
I'm not really trustworthy on comic book questions, but I do know that the material in Cocomalt Comics was new art by Bob (who really could ape dad's style pretty well). As for other appearances, I dunno.

--Allan
 
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Tuesday, December 05, 2006

 

Obscurity of the Day: The Angel Child


Kate Carew was quite the big-time New York celebrity in the first decades of the 20th century. In addition to her cartooning, she did a lot of feature writing for newspapers, and her byline was always displayed prominently (much as today's sample strip does). The multi-talented Carew specialized in feature stories about celebrities and bigwigs, usually accompanied with Art Nouveau-influenced caricatures.

Carew's only continuing comic strip series known to me is The Angel Child, though OSU also credits her with a 1903 strip titled Handy Andy which I've not seen (anyone have a sample or know where it ran?). The Angel Child was a fairly typical mischievous kid strip, with the minor deviation that the little girl always ended up getting praised for the unintended positive consequences of her pranks. The final panel always had the child being offered a treat by her parents, and our sample strip is particularly interesting because the treat tendered is a can of sardines -yum! No chocolate cake for me, thanks, I'd rather have the salted chum.

The Angel Child had a healthy run in the Sunday comic section of the New York World. The feature ran 4/27/1902 - 2/19/1905.

Here's an excellent page that has a capsule bio and interview with Carew.

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Comments:
I looked all over your blog and it says in more than a few places things like " I'd love to hear from you!" and "please contact me." but I can't find an email address anywhere.

How do I contact you?

arnomation@verizon.net
 
You contacted me by posting a comment. I read and respond to all comments. I'm not crazy about putting my email address on the blog as it acts as a spam magnet, but I've added my email address (stripper@rtsco.com) to the "About Me" section. We'll see what effect it has on my junk mail volume...

--Allan
 
For a minimal (one panel) sample of Handy Andy, see http://cartoons.osu.edu/finding_aids/sfaca/html/401-500/0488.html. (Some?) publication dates are listed at http://cartoons.osu.edu/finding_aids/sfaca/pdfs/701-800/0701.pdf
 
Hi Fram --
Not much of a sample, and the cited dates don't appear to work for it being from the World (too bad their listings don't tell us the paper!). Although the film of the New York World is missing many 1903 Sundays, I was able to supplement the Pulitzer info based on a good run in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch film. That film had all the Sundays in September-October and none of them included this strip. So the problem remains -- where did this strip run?

--Allan

--Allan
 
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Monday, December 04, 2006

 

Obscurity of the Day: Buddy and his Wonderful Lamp

Here's another of the back page comics that were a regular feature of the Sunday Minneapolis Journal children's section. Tom Foley wrote and drew Buddy and his Wonderful Lamp October 9 1910 through February 19 1911.

In this first installment of the series, Buddy gets his magical lamp and manages to forget the genie's simple instructions in the space of one panel. I think Buddy may need to get on Ritalin...

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Saturday, December 02, 2006

 

Transfer Complete?

If you can see this post, I guess the transfer to Blogger Beta was successful.

Comments:
LOOKS GOOD charlie
 
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Switch to Blogger Beta

Over the past few months, since Google bought Blogger, there has been a lot of pressure on us Blogger accounts to switch to the new Google Blogger Beta interface. It's looking to me like it will soon become compulsory, so I'm going to go ahead and switch today.

I am assured that switching from Blogger to Blogger Beta will not result in my blog being lost, changed, or moved. But you know how these things go. If the blog disappears, look for me on strippersguide.com to learn where the blog has moved.

Wish me luck!

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Friday, December 01, 2006

 

Obscurity of the Day: Acrobatic Archie

When George Herriman started working for the New York World, essentially his first steady cartooning job, Acrobatic Archie was the third continuing series that he created. It ran from April 13 1902 to January 25 1903.

I'll be perfectly honest and say that I see no hints of future greatness in this early work; in fact, I'm flabbergasted that the World would let something this badly drawn appear on the front page of their comic section. The drawing is sloppy and amateurish, the lettering is atrocious and the gags are pretty well standard kid strip fodder.

About the only positive I can come up with is that Herriman's early drawings are nothing if not lively. His figures all look like they have no bones -- their limbs twist and curl and stretch like they were made of rubber. This quality disappeared in his later work, replaced with a stiffness in his human bodies that was more acceptable to the cartooning standards of the time, but looks awfully dated today. Not surprising, then, that Herriman's masterpiece Krazy Kat starred animals, while Baron Bean and Us Husbands are interesting more as curiosities than great strips.

A note about the sample. I scanned an absolutely gorgeously preserved 1902 World Sunday section for this post, but for some reason my scanner managed to find every little imperfection and magnify it. Sorry it doesn't look better, folks.

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What I find amazing with these early comic-strips is that the dialogues are written really tiny.

Obviously, the words have to be written larger because of the shrinking comics space, but I think even if comics were printed bigger, I would still have trouble reading them.
 
Hi Charles -
The captions are readable, if sloppy, at full size on the page, but pretty much any reduction makes it tough. The cartoonists had the advantage then of knowing the exact reproduction size they were working for, so the lettering was no bigger than necessary for the format.

--Allan
 
Some of those early strip creators were really sloppy with their lettering. McCay is infamous for his careless lettering. Were there professional letterers back then? Opper wasn't a great letterer but I find his style charming and appropriate for his strips and cartoons.
 
For cartoonists based at newspapers there were certainly people in the paper's art bullpen who were expert letterers (many photos and diagrams included hand-lettering in those days). But I guess the cartoonists were too low on the totem-pole to be allowed use of these guys. Why the papers stood for all this sloppy lettering is one of the great mysteries to me.

--Allan
 
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