Stripper's Guide

Here's Toyland by lady cartoonist Myrtle Held. This is one of the first daily-style strips ever produced as a special offering for the Christmas season. The closed-end Christmas strip would later become a syndicate staple, with King Features, NEA, AP and others offering one every year.

Toyland ran in the Christmas season in 1913 and 1914. In its home paper, the New York Evening World, the running dates were December 3 1913 to January 28 1914 (obviously they had some leftovers that had to run late), and December 5 to 17 1914.

The above sample is the first strip in the 1913 series, and has a rather un-Christmasy subject, a woman who didn't wait for her sailor beau to return from sea. This first strip has pretty awkward art, and the gag has nothing to do with the characters being toys, but Held improved quite a bit in her later offerings.

Labels: Obscurities, Women Cartoonists

How Would You Like To Be John ran in one of the McClure Syndicate Sunday sections (the one I've always termed 'section A', not that that means anything to anyone but me) from August 23 1903 to April 9 1905. The cartoonist was John A. Lemon, a fellow whose gags and style are serviceable if not particularly exciting. Lemon's claim to fame, if he has one at all, is that crazy signature of his. It took a lot of digging to finally figure out his name, though I'm afraid I don't recall exactly where or from whom the breakthrough came. To make the search even tougher, his weird squiggle looks a bit like George H. Blair's, another cartoonist of the era.

Lemon's only known newspaper comic strip work was in these early McClure sections.

Labels: Obscurities

Luckily for us comic strip readers, toys tend to go in and out of style fast enough that cross-marketing seldom reaches the newspaper comic page. However, the inexplicable phenomenon of the Masters of the Universe craze was one bullet we didn't manage to dodge.

McNaught Syndicate, close to the end of its existence, distributed this daily and Sunday strip for just less than a year. The Sunday ran from July 20 1986 to June 7 1987, the daily dates are unknown but presumably coincide.

The Sunday strip was written by James Shull for the first three months, then it was taken over by Chris Weber. Art was supplied by Gerald Forton. Credits were often missing entirely or too murky on the Sundays (they were often lettered in an area of dark purple - brilliant!) , so others may have been involved. For reasons unknown, the strip's colorist, Connie Schurr, who should not have wanted the limelight for this hackwork, received a credit line on the Sundays.

Not knowing anything about the back-story of He-Man I don't know how the strip compares to the turd blossom-like marketing of these dolls in animated cartoons and comic books. For more information than you could possibly want to know about the subject jump on over to the Wiki page. Oddly enough, though the toys have a large fan base and many websites are devoted to Masters of the Universe lore, I couldn't Google a single site that seemed to acknowledge the newspaper comic strip series.

Labels: Obscurities

All Over Coffee
by Paul Madonna
City Lights Books, 2007
ISBN 0-87286-456-1
175 pages, hardcover, $24.95

If your taste in comic strips runs to the more literate, introspective and subdued side, the pickings are pretty slim. There's Krazy Kat, of course, and Mutts, and perhaps Pogo. Beyond that you're pretty much out of luck.

One feature that takes that genre to a whole different level, in fact that pretty much defines its own genre by going so far beyond those other strips, is Paul Madonna's All Over Coffee. Madonna's strip (well, he calls it a strip but it's almost always a single panel) runs only in the San Francisco Chronicle. The feature combines beautiful freehand watercolor drawings of San Francisco cityscapes with little snippets of conversation, short narratives and haiku-like declarations.

Madonna's texts are often quietly funny, sometimes bittersweet, occasionally forlorn. Some of the most successful are those that read like conversations overheard in a coffee shop (and thus lending some logic to the name of the feature). And while the texts celebrate humanity, our foibles, passions and prejudices, the drawings, at least on the surface, reject humanity completely. Madonna's dramatic portraits of the city are drawn without human figures -- his San Francisco is populated only with the works of man, not the builders themselves.

Madonna in the afterword to this collection explains that a great deal of thought goes into marrying the text and the images. Occasionally the connection is reasonably obvious, many times it is a match of moods that is only manifest to the author. Whatever the connection, the images are hauntingly beautiful. Madonna draws architecture without a straightedge, and the seemingly monochromatic drawings are often warmed with a subdued, almost hidden, use of color, lending the cityscapes a warmth that amply makes up for the lack of humanity.

All Over Coffee is, unfortunately, not a candidate for syndication, nor is it a likely model for other features that widen the bounds of the newspaper comic strip. Which is too bad, because it would be interesting to see what sort of public reaction there would be if a few such strips showed up on the nation's funny pages. Is there room next to Cathy and Garfield for such things?

Following are a few representative samples from the book.

Labels: Bookshelf

Two for one Monday here at the ol' Stripper's Guide blog. Both these panel series, which appeared in the Boston Post, ran on Sundays in their magazine section. The first, Miss Rose Lily's Vacation Days at Shady Hook, ran from August 3 to October 26 1913. The second, The Courtship of Eunice and Eric, replaced it on November 2 and ran until sometime in 1914 (I'm still indexing this paper).

Frank E. Davidson's only cartooning work that I know of ran in the Boston Post exclusively. These two are his first features for that paper, the last appeared in 1921. He had a severely angular and spare style, an odd choice for these panels that often ran at a pretty large size, up to a quarter page sometimes. He seems to have had little interest in drawing backgrounds, and his figures are positively architectural, constructed mostly of straight lines. It's the sort of style that is interesting if not necessarily appealing.

Labels: Obscurities

Labels: Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics

This week's Herriman cartoons are from September 29 and 30, 1906, two from each date.

Our first cartoon today, a commemoration of the Angels losing 3-1 to Oakland, is a pretty funny cartoon though a bit slapdash artwise (helped not one bit by a too light photocopy). The only player mentioned that I can find information about online is Eli Cates, who had one year in the majors with the Washington Senators in 1908. Despite racking up a very impressive 2.5 ERA, Cates went 4-8 for the lowly Sens.

Herriman's editorial cartoon on the 29th is far more accomplished art-wise, and continues hammering on the Southern Pacific's role in California government. Note the design on the skirt of the GOP cage - this sort of design detail would become a Herriman trademark in later years.

On the 30th we have a caricature of Henry Huntington, a real estate and trolley baron in the LA area. You can read about him on this Wiki page.

Finally a story illustration, this one from the ongoing column "Confessions of a Grafter". As I've mentioned before, Herriman was producing these on a regular basis, but most, unlike this one, are small spot cartoons.

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

The 80s and 90s saw a bumper crop of new features penned by editorial cartoonists. Although there's been a long history of comic strip cartoonists starting out in the political cartoon genre, in the old days if they made the leap they typically did it early in their careers and dropped their editorial work if they met with any success.

In the past score of years though, a lot of well-known editorial cartoonists have tried their hands at strips while retaining their editorial cartoon posts. Tom Toles, Jim Borgman, Bill Schorr, Mike Peters, Bruce Beattie, and many others all tried strips with widely varying degrees of success. One of the very least successful, though, was one of the biggest names in editorial cartooning, Patrick Oliphant.

Sunday Punk starred Oliphant's trademark penguin character from his daily editorial cartoons, and the character was pretty much used in the same way in the Sunday-only comic strip -- making wry comments on politics and current events. The strip debuted on March 18 1984, and the latest I've been able to find is from September 16 of the same year, a run of just a little more than six months.

The strip was reasonably good, so it's unclear why it had such a short run. Perhaps Oliphant lost interest in the project, perhaps the sales weren't good, I dunno. I like to think it's just desserts for Oliphant's earlier attitude toward comic strips. He was the guy who yelled foul the longest and loudest when Doonesbury won a Pulitzer in 1975. Oliphant belittled the feature and the form of being unworthy for such recognition. Now less than a decade later he was drawing a comic strip with political content. What goes around comes around?

Labels: Obscurities

The Early Years of Mutt & Jeff
Edited by Jeffrey Lindenblatt, introductory historical essay by Allan Holtz
NBM, 2007
ISBN 1-56163-502-2
$24.95, hardcover, 192 pages

Don't expect a completely dispassionate review of this book. As you can see above, I wrote the introduction for it and I'm frankly pleased as punch to have my scribblings appear in hardcover for the first time. So if you're on the fence about buying the book, jump on across if only as an appreciation for this blog, which I hope has given you many hours of ad-free, fee-free comic strip enjoyment over the years.

Okay, end of begging. On with the review.

Mutt and Jeff wasn't a very good comic strip for much of its existence. Let's get that straight from the outset. If you read M&J from the 1930s onward you were seeing a strip that ran on autopilot. Not to take anything away from Al Smith, the fellow who churned it out year after year, but the strip was obviously out of step with the times, and relied on slapstick humor that went out with vaudeville.

But, oh, those early years! With Bud Fisher, that flawed, lazy, money-grubbing genius, at the helm, this strip was a firecracker. Topical, acerbic and witty, it was a strip written for and read by adults. Sure there was slapstick humor, but Fisher, unencumbered in these early years with newspaper editors who expected kid-friendly material, had his anti-hero duo in the thick of current events. He had them gambling, he had them stealing, he even had them taking drugs!

The selection of strips, a generously huge melange of material from 1909 through 1913, tends toward the non-topical. Probably a good thing for most readers if a little disappointing to me. Editor Lindenblatt does give us some excellent sequences, including Mutt and Jeff going to Mexico to fight in the revolution, and a hilarious run lampooning patent medicines. There's also a good selection of strips covering Mutt's occasional forays as a pro baseball player on real New York teams.

The reproduction, all obviously from excellent source material, is crisp and perfectly legible, a small miracle considering the scarcity of source material from these early years, and the huge size in which these strips originally ran. Nothing in the book, save a few real rarities I supplied in my introduction, had to be retrieved from microfilm, thank goodness. My only nitpick is that the retoucher failed to remove the inevitable flyspecks from the strips. It's not something the typical reader is likely to even notice, but it's a pet peeve with me, and it mars an otherwise gorgeous presentation.

My introduction, which runs twelve pages, tells the amazing story of Fisher's rise in the comic strip biz, including anecdotes and material from hitherto unplumbed or long-forgotten sources. I also discuss the whole A. Piker Clerk issue, coming to some conclusions at variance with the accepted wisdom about that fabled strip. The introduction is illustrated with a goodly number of rare items never before reprinted, including Fisher's very first published cartoon in the San Francisco Chronicle and the final strip of the ersatz Mutt and Jeff version done by Russ Westover.

Some reviewers have complained that the strips in the book are undated. For the record, Jeffrey Lindenblatt is a real stickler for such things, but he had a problem with this book. These early dailies, after Fisher went to New York and the strip was syndicated, were printed at widely varying times in different papers, so there really were no hard and fast release dates to offer, especially when the source material was culled from a number of different sources. On the other hand, the year of issuance certainly could have been given, and if there are further volumes of Mutt & Jeff published (and they will be if the sales on this book merit it) Lindenblatt assures me that the strips will be dated with the release dates from the New York American, the strip's home paper from 1908-1915.

For many years I saw this feature as I was paging through old papers, but looking at the tiny panels one at a time like that I thought the art was boilerplate. The Stripper's Guide index doesn't truck with features that have unchanging art, of course, so I ignored it. It wasn't until I saw a bunch of these run together in a weekly paper that I finally realized that the cartoons do in fact change every day.

Eve's Epigrams featured endless variations on the above portrait along with pithy little sayings. The feature was by Agnes Hucke, who very rarely signed the feature, and it was distributed by Ledger Syndicate. The earliest I've found is from 1923, the likely starting year. The panel was advertised in E&P until 1933, but then, as with many Ledger properties, it seems to have been sold off to cheapo reprint syndicates, because I have samples as late as 1937.

Labels: Obscurities

From Art & Life, January 1927

Cartoonists Take Notice
Having taken care of the record­ing of the foibles and fancies of the world for thousands of years, the cartoonists and caricaturists laid off long enough on June 30, this year, to organize an association of their very own—the American Association of Cartoonists and Caricaturists— possibly the first of its kind in the history of mankind.

Eugene Zimmerman, dean of the profession in this country and one of the most powerful political cartoonists of his time, was elected president without a dissenting voice; Bud Fisher, first vice-president; Rube Goldberg, second vice-president; Ed­ward McCullough, third vice-presi­dent; and Freeman H. Hubbard, secretary and editor of the official or­gan, Cartoons Magazine.

In appreciation of the fact that she is the most prominent woman making a comic strip today, and the second to have entered the profession in this country, Albertine Randall, ("In Rabbitboro") was chosen head of the Advisory Board of the new organiza­tion.

Other members of the Board are: Clare A. Briggs, ("Mr. and Mrs.") ; M. M. Branner, ("Winnie Winkle") ; Winsor McCay, ("Little Nemo") ; Eddie McBride, sport cartoonist and art manager of The New York Herald-Tribune syndi­cate; Milt Gross, ("Gross Exaggera­tions") ; Pat Sullivan, ("Felix, the Cat"); Ed Whelan ("Minute Movies") ; Bill Steinke, editorial car­toonist, Newark Evening News; C. H. Wellington, ("Pa's Son-in-Law") ; Paul A. Broady, cartoonist and official photographer A. A. C. C., and Manuel Rosenberg, art edit­or of the Cincinnati Post.

The genesis of the organization came with the spread of the desire on the part of so many young men and young women to enter into the comic field and the pitiful dearth of ideas the majority of them exhibited. The older and wiser people in the game realized that something must be done to stem the tide - not of genius which is always sought - but of wasted time and energy by countless young people.

The flood of youngsters became so great in the big cities that they became an annoyance in every news­paper art department and syndicate office. Thousands and thousands of valuable hours were spent by car­toonists and art managers explaining to them that drawing is simply the means by which the cartoon or comic idea is carried to paper -- that draw­ing without new ideas was folly and a supreme waste of time.

During the past couple of years syndicate heads have had to surround themselves with all the secrecy that surrounds foreign potentates in order to conserve their time for the bene­fit of their employers. The big-time cartoonists and strip-makers -- men like Bud Fisher, Rube Goldberg, Clare Briggs, George McManus, and J. N. Darling—have had to live the most secluded sort of lives in order to avoid the thousands of calls on their time. Some of them refuse to see anyone, experience having taught them that their well-meaning advice was too often ignored by those who sought it.

The principal purpose of the new organization is to act as a clearing­house for the beginners and would-be beginners in the game—some of them having real talent but fumbling for want of proper direction. The Association headquarters, 244-248 West 49th Street, New York City, under the personal direction of Free­man H. Hubbard, will furnish mem­bers with all information and when possible connect them with oppor­tunities to get their chances.

Other reasons for the formation of the organization are to raise the prestige of this ancient and most use­ful profession—to pool the experience of old and young for the benefit of all—to encourage talent—to head off those lacking ability—to investigate reports of fraud or injustice in con­nection with the employment and discharge of cartoonists—to investi­gate fake correspondence schools and mis-branded art supplies and to at­tend to all other matters vital to the best interests of the membership.

Labels: News of Yore

Labels: Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics

This week's images come from the LA Examiner of September 24, 25, 27 and 28, 1906. We start out this time with another savage political cartoon excoriating the Republicans for being in thrall to the Southern Pacific. Ya know, I just never realized Herriman had it in him to be so mean. I guess his gentle soul could be stirred to fire when necessary.

Next we have a delightful baseball cartoon -- this one even includes a strip! Unfortunately we're missing part of the cartoon because some bozo cut it out of the paper prior to microfilming. Thanks buddy! A little research on the subject matter reveals that Oakland is/was noted for their Greek community, so that's the reason the fellow's wearing a foustanella. I would have bet money I'd never get the chance to use that word in my lifetime.

The strip running down the right side concerns Clifford "Gavvy" Cravath, a star player on the Los Angeles Angels baseball team of the Pacific Coast League. Cravath was a home run hitter of the dead ball era, and even held the title for most home runs in a season briefly until Ruth came along and blew all the old records out of the water. Cravath was a big fellow who pretty much had to hit home runs because he was slow on the basepaths. This garnered him another nickname, "Wooden Shoes" Cravath, which Herriman exploits for this sequence. You can read a very entertaining bio of Cravath by clicking here. Some of the text on this cartoon is hard to read; you'll find a transcript at the end of this post.

The third cartoon, a caricature of visiting theatre bigwig Al Hayman, is one of those dreary jobs that newspaper cartoonists got stuck with back in those days. Caricatures of visiting celebrities and local businessmen were good for community goodwill, but a time-consuming bore for the cartoonist. Herriman apparently didn't know that such caricatures were supposed to be of the complimentary type -- this one cuts a little close! Or maybe Herriman just wanted to make sure his editor would think twice before giving him another caricature assignment.

Our final cartoon commemorates a pretty amazing event in boxing history. "Philadelphia" Jack O'Brien (note the Pennsylvania Dutch getup), a nationally ranked light heavyweight fighter has just agreed to fight twenty rounds against a pair of boxers, Fred Cooley and Jim "Injun Joe" Trimble. It would take O'Brien just three rounds to KO Cooley, and another nine to do the same to Trimble. For a good bio of O'Brien click here. We'll be seeing more from Herriman on this spectacle.

Here's the text of cartoon #2:

Top Left
Caption: Yep, the Grecian archipeligo is with us once again.
Black suited guy: And winter coming on, too.
Man talking to cop: Yaah, widout any pants on.
Cop: Wal see Comstock about it.

Strip on right, panel 1:
Various comments:
Disaster
Impending doom
The tocsin the tocsin
Earthquake hey?
Has the comet struck?

Panel 2:
Nightshirt guy: The worst on record

Panel 3:
Caption: Mr. Cravath can be traced through the metropolis. Yes.
Cop: Foiled (illegible) !! It is Wooden Shoes Cravath
Cravath: They tell me J.O'B's in town (Jack O'Brien, see above commentary)
Man in cellar: Woddy ye mean by mashin me on de coco, hray?
Nightshirt guy: Heavins the second shock

Lower left cartoon:
Balloons: Nice!, Very Very Nice
Tags on players: Fresno, Oakland, Seattle
Safe marked Portland has pennant inside.

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

Nick Cardy: Comics Strips
by Sean Menard and Nick Cardy
Frecklebean Press, 2007
No ISBN listed
$14.95

I know Nick Cardy mostly from his comic book work of the 1970s (those dark days before I discovered newspaper comic strips), and though I recognized at the time that he was an excellent artist, there was something indefinable about his style that I found offputting. It just didn't hold any appeal for me.

So I ordered this book with some reservations, but I was very curious to know about Cardy's earlier comic strip work. I knew he had few credits - a six month run on Tarzan and a short while ghosting Casey Ruggles, and I wanted to know if there was more that had escaped my research. I also understood from the description that the book included an extended interview with the artist, and I'm always up for getting some behind the veil information on syndicates and comic strip production.

First the good news. Cardy's work on the comic strips presented here is wonderful stuff, far superior, I think, to his comic book work. At his best (unfortunately on strips that were never published!) he seems to be influenced by Hogarth and later Raymond and it is slick stuff indeed.

The bad news is that you better really like the art, because nothing else about the book has much merit.

Let's start with the Tarzan reprint section which it says is Cardy's complete run. First of all the quality of the source material is wildly uneven. Some of it looks to have come from beautiful proofs, other strips are muddy enough that they must have come from microfilm. Tarzan is not a particularly rare strip so I really think the people responsible could have looked a little harder for good source material. Second is that we get the end of one story and the beginning of a second. This makes for a pretty uninvolving, if not downright confusing, read. I understand that the idea was just to print Cardy's Tarzan strips, but the author should have either reproduced the stories from beginning to end or at least provided synopses of the portions not reprinted.

The book also reprints two Cardy strips that were never successfully syndicated, Major North and Adam Pierce (three weeks of the former, four of the latter). Cardy's art is fantastic on both, but, hoo boy, were the syndicates right to turn down these stinkers. The writer of Major North had no feel at all for comic strip pacing and plotting so the story is an absolute unreadable mess. Adam Pierce, on the other hand, flows just fine, but the strip is about scientists and the writer had no grasp at all of anything scientific - a sixth grader with a D average could correct the embarrassing basic scientific gaffes made in this strip.

A third tryout strip, this one a pantomime titled Mr. Figg, is presented here from bad photocopies (the original art was long ago lost). Cardy says elsewhere in the book that he is no writer, and these strips assure us that he's correct in his estimation.

Six weeks of Cardy ghosting on Casey Ruggles follows, containing two separate story fragments with a six month gap between the fragments. Again, nice art but were we not meant to read this material?

The book is filled out with 16 pages of a "Lady Luck Gallery", a batch of miscellaneous Cardy pages thrown together. Why not a complete story? Didn't want to buck the trend I guess.

Okay, so the strips aren't really worth reading. How about that interview, though? Well, the interviewer obviously has very little interest in newspaper comic strips, so the discussion constantly veers off into Cardy's comic book work (which, I assume, was probably well-covered in a previous book, The Art of Nick Cardy). About the only really interesting tidbit we learn about Cardy's strip work is that he apparently pencilled the ultra-rare Batman strip in 1971-72, the one that was produced by Ledger Syndicate after their contract dispute with DC Comics. Could you tell us about that, Nick? Well, probably, but the interviewer couldn't care less. He'd much rather discuss Black Canary's fishnet stockings.

So if you're a big fan of Cardy's art this is a book you'll want. Everyone else might be better off to take a pass.

Labels: Bookshelf

Chester Gould - A Daughter's Biography of the Creator of Dick Tracy

by Jean Gould O'Connell
McFarland & Company, 2007
ISBN 978-0-7864-2825-0
$45.00, 225 pages with index

I come to a biography like this with trepidation. Biographies by the progeny of the famous are often not worth the paper they're printed on. There's no guarantee that the author can write worth a darn, and often these books are badly researched or tell stories that are of interest only within the family.

Jean Gould O'Connell's book is very well-written, so no worries there. The research tends to be a little shaky in the early chapters (she has the U.S. entering World War I in 1915, and has young Chet reading Mutt & Jeff in the local paper in 1906) but improves once she gets further along. And there are plenty of interesting stories told in the book, though there is also a dose of material that could have been trimmed, like the blow by blow account of the renovations done to the Gould's home.

The author uses as her source material not only her own memories but some extensive taped interviews she did with her dad in 1983, two years before his death. The elder Gould had a lot to say about his early trials of the 1920s trying to get syndicated, which, for me at least, was the most interesting section of the book, a fascinating read.

I'm no Chester Gould scholar, so I'm not a good judge of how much new information is being brought to the table here. Certainly I learned a lot. One particular bit that I found particularly interesting was about Gould's infamous villain's graveyard -- turns out that the man wasn't nearly the creepy weirdo I took him for based on those often reprinted publicity photos.

I soured on Dick Tracy a bit recently when I read the reprints of the first years of the strip. I found the early Tracy stories to be sloppily plotted in the extreme, so much so that I'm amazed Gould's strip survived long enough for him to hone his storytelling skills. This bio, while not admitting that the early Tracy was pretty awful, does explain how Gould plotted stories, and it explains his strip's early awkwardness.

There's a lot of meaty stuff in here and I don't want to give too much away, so I'll just mention that there was also unexpected material on how Gould felt about his successors on the strip, and about the way the Chicago Tribune treated Gould and his legacy.

The big disappointment considering the high price of the book is the lack of any color material. There are plenty of family photos and some rare pieces of Gould pre-Tracy art, so I can't fault the quantity of illustrations, but at $45 I expected an extensive use of color.

Seems to me that the price tag puts this book out of range of casual fans, the ones who would most enjoy it. Serious Gould fans, I'm guessing, have probably already heard a lot of these stories. I hadn't, and I really enjoyed the book. But I doubt that many casual readers will shell out $45 on a thin book without any color material to justify the price.

Labels: Bookshelf

Here's the first in a series of posts I'm going to do as the muse hits me. We're going to cover the terminology of comic strips. Thankfully our beloved strips don't come with nearly the volume of esoteric buzzwords as you'll find in other collecting disciplines, but there are some terms that you really ought to be familiar with, especially when buying and selling strips. I'm not going to go into any tremendous depth in this series, just hit the high points -- this is mostly for those of you who are novices to comic strip collecting.

Today I'm going to cover Sunday strip sizes, with maybe a detour or two here and there.

Let's start out with a quick look at the size of Sunday comics pages over the years:

Obviously there's been quite a size reduction over the years, so keep that in mind. When we get into formats remember that the actual sizes of the printed strips, even when they are the same format, will vary considerably over time. Note also that newspapers haven't gotten much shorter since the 40s -- the big loss has been in the width.

The first important bit of terminology is for the two standard sizes of Sunday comics:


On the left we see a FULL PAGE, usually shortened to just FULL. On the right is a TABLOID PAGE, usually shortened to TAB. These happen to be from the 40s, but the two standard formats are still used today. Keep in mind, though, that the actual size of the paper has changed over the years, and to make matters even a bit more confusing, some newspaper publishers vary a little bit bigger or smaller. The Baltimore Sun tabloid, seen above, is actually a little chintzy for a tab in the width.

There is actually a third standard size, but it came and went pretty fast. Here we see it, with comparison to the other two standards:


The one on the right is what we call COMIC BOOK FORMAT. It is so named because not only is it about the size of a comic book, it's actually bound like one (okay, not exactly - the binding on these was often glued rather than stapled). This format appeared about 1978, and after an initial rush by publishers to try the new format it pretty quickly fell out of favor. You'll rarely see these after about 1985 or so. My guess is that some printing company came up with the format and had some pretty sharp salesman talking publishers into believing they could lure kids by offering a comic book as part of the Sunday newspaper. This same gimmick was tried back in the 40s by several newspapers, and it didn't pan out then either.

Okay, that covers paper sizes. That's the simple part. Now we have to get into Sunday strip formats. Let's go back to our first sample:


These are all full page papers. On the left side we see a strip that covers the whole Sunday page. This format is known simply as a FULL, short for full page. The full is the most gloriously huge of Sunday comic strip formats. For the most part it had fallen out of favor with publishers by the mid- to late-1930s, bringing an end to the most wonderful age for Sunday comics. The reasons behind the change are many, and I'm going to keep this article simple, so we won't get into the whys and hows until some other time. Suffice to say that fulls from the 40s and beyond are few and far between.

In the middle paper we have two strips, each taking up a half page each, and each would be called a HALF. Pretty simple, wot? If you were selling this page you'd say that it has a Penny half and a Mr. & Mrs. half. Much the same as full pagers, half pagers have gotten less and less common over the years, though they do still pop up in current papers once in a while.

Before we get into even smaller formats, let's check in with those tabloid papers:



Here's a couple samples from the 1950s. The one on the left features a Steve Canyon in FULL TAB format. Notice that we mention the size of the page for tabs, but not for full size pages. Likewise on the right we have a pair of HALF TAB strips. When buying or selling it is important to note when a strip or a section is printed in the tabloid size. A full is worth more than a full tab, and the same for a half versus a half tab.

I noted on the Steve Canyon that it might be TRIMMED. Because there's a small ad at the bottom of the page, the newspaper may have trimmed a little off the bottoms of the panels to make it fit comfortably on the page. This practice is not all that unusual, and the loss is usually minimal (perhaps about 1/8" at the bottom of each panel in this case). Generally speaking it is nothing to get bent out of shape about, but there are some folks out there who positively freak out over a slight trim. Speaking of trimming, though, here's another form it can take:


On the right we have a full tab Li'l Abner page. On the left we have a version where the title panel has been dropped in order to put in an ad. You still get the complete comic strip so again, not that big a deal. Comic strip syndicates often had Sunday strips formatted specifically so that publishers could engage in such monkey business.


To go a little further on ways strips get trimmed, we have to introduce the TOPPER STRIP. The topper is a small extra strip that gets tacked on with a main strip. Here we have Kitty Higgins accompanying Moon Mullins and Snookums with Bringing Up Father. Topper strips got their start with the Hearst syndicates in the 1920s, and the practice was adopted by most other syndicates by the late 20s and early 30s. The idea was that the newspaper could elect to drop the topper in favor of an ad, or, if the topper was large enough, a whole extra 'main' strip. Toppers had their heyday in the 1930s, and some main strips continued to supply them into the 1960s, and in a few cases even the 70s.

The term topper can be misleading since sometimes they appear underneath the main strip. However, this is the name that the cartoonists used in the 1920s and it stuck in the business. Some collectors today, those without a sense of the history of the term, call them companion strips, or even call them bottomers (ugh!) when they appear at the bottom. I'm a traditionalist, though, and I prefer to call them all toppers.

Okay, so I had to go through all that so that you could recognize what happened to this next tab page:


Here we have Moon Mullins with poor little Kitty Higgins given the ol' heave-ho in favor of an ad. When we lose this much from a tab page we call it a 2/3 tab. When you see this term you should assume that either a topper strip is missing, or a large title panel has been dropped. Unfortunately many sellers like to call the above a full tab. Obviously it ain't.

Above on the left you see one of the worst strip formats there is. These are all THIRD TABS. When trying to complete a run of a strip you may spend years trying to winnow out all of these crummy little strips which, naturally, newspaper editors think are just the cat's pajamas because they can shoehorn a crapload of these into a section. Crap is right...

On the right we see a pair of half-tabs that include topper strips. You can see how easy it is for newspapers to turn these into thirds tabs by deep-sixing the toppers.

Before we finish our little survey with the current state of the art in mangling strips, let's take a peek into one of those comic book format sections:

We see Nancy printed as a COMIC BOOK FULL, and to her right a pair of COMIC BOOK HALFS. Although the comic book format is obscenely small, it does have one saving grace. The comic book half is often a miniaturized (full page) half, which for most strips from the 50s on is their best and most complete format. So if you're looking to get a run of your favorite strip in half page format, don't overlook the comic book half as a serviceable filler until you can find an upgrade.

The comic books even had a third page format. About them the less said the better.

Okay, time to look at some current comic sections. In the past twenty years syndicates and newspapers have found new and ever more horrific ways to shoehorn more strips into less space. We'll try and build up to some of the worst so that the shock isn't too great.


Above is a page with three different formats. We have a half (papers are contractually obligated to run Opus as a half, though some fudge by using the half tab version -- finks), a third and a quarter. Those among you with a bit of facility for math have already figured out that we have a problem here: 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 doesn't come up to a nice even integer. That's because syndicates have been shrinking their Sunday features so that newspapers can jam even more strips on a page. The old designations, though still used both by collectors and in the business, are today just comparative sizes -- they really don't have a whole heckuva lot of real world meaning. Here's another example:


This is back in the 90s, but we were already able to fit five quarters comfortably on a page. Sigh.

Speaking of quarters, for many strips today the quarter has actually taken over as the most complete format available even though it's smaller than the third.



Here we have an interesting juxtaposition of formats in one paper. On the right side we have two halfs, rarely seen these days. Notice that they had no trouble fitting a quarter between them, though. So the right page is pretty decent, but the left, yuck! We start off with a third, then everything goes downhill. We have four strips printed in their third tab formats (some call them SIXTHS when they run in full size papers, but the format used is in fact the third tab). Plus we get one of the most popular new ways to shoehorn in an extra strip, called the VERTICAL. There's actually two sizes of vertical available (the other runs down the entire page) but I haven't heard what the terminology is for the two formats. My take is who cares - verticals are awful and I don't even save the horrid things when I clip Sundays. The vertical takes advantage of the fact that many quarter page strips now run a large title panel that can easily be dropped (you can see one in use on Zits a few pictures up from here).

Okay, here's one last crime against comic strips:

I don't know what those ones at the top are called in the business. I call them squares, or to be more exact, I call them recycle, 'cause that's where they go when I'm clipping.

Okay, so that brings you up to speed on the basics of Sunday comic strip terminology. There is more to it, of course. There's the big question of just how exactly a comic strip can be supplied in all these various formats. The short answer is that the poor cartoonists have to practically have an engineering degree to design their strips to work in all these various configurations. But we'll save that meaty subject for another day.

Here's a delightful feature that somehow managed to avoid catching on. I guess in those days of Calvin & Hobbes it was pretty tough going for a competing kid strip. When I Was Short featured a kid named Mason with narration by him as an adult. The gags were delightful, and the art was outstanding. Putting on my amateur editor cap, I'd say the feature didn't make it because although it was very well written and drawn, the characters were all pretty generic. The kid was just a typical kid, the parents just typical parents. Readers might have enjoyed the strip, but there was really no big hook in which they could get fully invested. 

The writer, Michael Fry, has been syndicated since the early 80s with a number of different strips and panels. Though a far better writer than artist, he's had success in both jobs. Fry is now the writer of Over The Hedge, another successful venture that recently spawned a popular animated film. The superb art was by Guy Vasilovich, whose career has mostly been in the animation industry. You'll find an extensive list of credits for him over on imdb.  

When I Was Short started in December 1989 and ended on July 12 1992. The last months of the strip were obviously done with the knowledge that the feature had been cancelled. In an apparent cost- or time-saving move the strip's lettering was all typeset. First time I've seen that one...

Labels: Obscurities

Labels: Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics

A short detour today from our reprinting of Herriman's Los Angeles Examiner cartoons. I just scored this sample of Herriman's ultra rare series called The Amours of Marie Ann Magee. This two panel toon was syndicated by World Color Printing, one of their earliest and least successful attempts to expand their successful Sunday comics business into daily strips and panels. This Herriman feature , and the rest of their small batch of pretty darn awful dailies, ran in very few papers; in fact the only one that I've found running the material was the Washington Star.

The feature ran for just eight installments from July 11 through August 9 1906. I'd love to share more of this series with you but the microfilm of that paper is so dark I was unable to make copies that were much more than black blobs. Lucky for me I found this single sample tearsheet for sale on eBay.

Nate Collier had a regular column in Guy Lockwood's Art and Life magazine, and in his first installment he obliged readers with a career summary:

Art & Life November 1924

One correspondent asks if I had a hard time getting started.

Two years and a half after I started my first correspondence course in drawing I sold my first comic to the American Boy for $6. That was in 1906. I had taken a correspondence course from the National School of Illustrating, In­dianapolis, Ind., and spent a few months at their resident school in 1904, also studied with J. H. Smith, contributor to Judge from 1904 to 1907. Took cor­respondence course in cartooning from Acme School of Drawing, Kalamazoo, Mich., 1905. Attended their resident school a few months at the start of 1906. In May same year obtained my first position as cartoonist on the Kokomo, Ind. Dispatch. In 1907 I sold a dozen or so drawings to Judge's amateur con­test and also freelanced comics to The Chicago Daily News. In 1908 took Lockwood's cartoon course and worked in a country print shop at $6 a week to get enough money to attend his resident school. Went to Kalamazoo in January 1909 and remained a couple of months, continued selling comics to Chicago News, and sold my first draw­ing for the regular pages of Judge.

Later in the same year went to Sandusky, Ohio, as cartoonist on the Star Journal of that place, remained there until November 1910.

Sold my first drawing to Life in 1910.

From 1911 to March 1913 I conduct­ed a humorous column, made sport car­toons, and illustrated the Sunday Mag­azine Section for the Duluth, Minn., News Tribune; also freelanced work to Hope, Coming Nation, News Times,and sold a few to Life and Judge.

In 1913, '14, '15 to May 1916, Car­toonist, Chicago Daily Journal and free­lanced a lot of comics to The Motion Picture magazine.

From October 1916 to October 1917 animated ads for a Cleveland Ohio Film concern.

Came to New York in October 1917.

1917, 1918 and 1919 Animated Katzenjammer Kids, Happy Hooligan and Jerry on the Job. Had comic strip put out by International Syndicate of Balti­more, Md., called "Our Own Movies" and sold a number of drawings to Life.

1920, Made "Our Own Movies," was cartoonist for The Associated News­papers. Freelanced to Life, Judge, Harpers, Brownings Magazine, Car­toons magazine, etc.

1921. Freelanced to Judge and Fun Book and animated Mutt and Jeff.

1922. Freelanced to Judge and ani­mated Aesop's Fables, and with Hearst Syndicate a while.

Since April 1923 have had my studio at home and am at present doing work for Saturday Evening Post, Life, Judge, Harper's, McNaught Syndicate, The World Color Printing Co., of St. Louis, and others.

From 1909 to 1919 I submitted over four hundred drawings to Life out of which I sold 14, and I have made enough comic strips, that never landed to keep a syndicate going a year or more.

Most students think that they are ready to hold a position long before they are. It takes years of study, persistence and a never-give-up attitude; and above all a love of the work for the work it­self to overcome all obstacles and dis­couragements.

I'll add that Collier was then doing the art on Kelly Kids for World Color, but would give it up in the next year. His only other verified newspaper credit is for Goofus Animals which he did 1930-31. He's listed in E&P for a few other later features I've not been able to find. Collier was much more successful selling freelance gag cartoons, which he placed in not only the A-list magazines but lots of trade, semi-pro and oddball publications.

I think this feature may very well take the grand prize for the longest comic strip title of all time. Edward Geller produced the Sunday strip for the Detroit Free Press starting in 1947 and continuing at least through 1951 if not longer. The strip told text-heavy inspirational biographies of industrialists and businessmen.

The strip was copyrighted to E. and I. Geller, but nowhere in my documentation of the strip is there any mention of the identity or role of this I. person. According to Geller the art, which was usually drawn anonymously, was by Frank Williams. However, I have samples (one shown above) signed by Max Rasmussen, and the uncredited strips are in at least two if not more styles, so others were also involved.

Here's an article about the feature that ran in a 1951 issue of E&P:

Prize Cartoon Feature Has 160 Sponsors
Edward Geller of the Detroit Free Press advertising staff is the creator of "The Story of An Ambitious Man," Free Press Sunday comic section feature which won sec­ond place in the cartoon strip cat­egory of the Freedoms Foun­dation Awards. (E&P, Feb. 24, page 13.) Mr. Geller received a medal and $300.

The organizer of Freedoms Foundation, E. F. Hutton, and Guy M. Rush, vice-chairman of the group, had this to say about Mr. Geller's feature: "We do not know who killed Horatio Alger but you have brought him back to life."

"The Story of An Ambitious Man who made jobs for thousands through free enter­prise," depicts in full-page color cartoons the lives of men who have progressed from rags to riches in the best American tra­dition. The series has appeared since 1947.

Mr. Geller has told the car­toon-stories of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, John D. Rocke­feller, Walter P. Chrysler, S. S. Kresge, Bernard M. Baruch, C. F. Kettering, R. E. Olds, K. T. Keller, William Knudsen, the Dodge brothers and many others.

He is working on a book of the cartoons which already have appeared. He said he will dedi­cate the book to C. W. Cosgrove, advertising director of the Free Press, because of Mr. Cosgrove's encouragement and aid.

"The Story of An Ambitious Man" now has 160 sponsors, most of them presidents or board mem­bers of Michigan concerns.

Mr. Geller, 57, has been a cre­ator of special pages for the Free Press for 15 years.

Note: the samples reproduced above are from the reprint book - the strip as printed in the newspaper also included a large title panel and was printed at full page size.

Labels: Obscurities