Stripper's Guide

Here's an interesting Paul Terry article on animation decorated with delightful cartoons. This was printed in a 1925 issue of Cartoons and Movies magazine. Usually I do the OCR thing on such articles so that you can read them more easily (and feel like I'm earning my keep), but the decorations on the article were so nice that I wanted to print it just as it appeared then. To see each page of the article at a good readable size just click on each image.

Labels: News of Yore

Here's one old mystery and a couple of new ones.

G. Whiskers
First we have a 1940 E&P advertisement for a strip called G. Whiskers. I've never seen this strip, credited to Geoffrey Foladeri, but it supposedly had a nearly two decade run from 1940 to 1958. Has anybody seen it?



















Tokyopop
Next up is a current strip called Tokyopop. This strip appears to me to be printing manga comic book pages. Brilliantly, the creators aren't coloring the pages. I hear there's there's a great new concept in Sunday comics - it's called COLOR!

Anyway, I've got a few samples, but from what little I can find on the net about the strip -- Tokyopop has a website but it is just about the most confusing mess I've ever seen -- there have been various stories by different creators. Does anyone have a list of titles, creators and running dates?

Continental Features
There is a syndicate called Continental Features that offers columns, news stories and a rather extensive array of comic strip and panel features. The comics, with the exception of Frank Hill's strip, are all pretty obviously amateur work. Frankly the columns and stories aren't exactly top of the line either.

I ordered a sample packet from the syndicate and got the samples below (and many more) from them. My question is whether anyone has seen any of these features actually running in a newspaper somewhere.

By the way, many of the comics, though included with the packet of current material, have old copyright dates on them. And they really are printed as badly as you see here in what I assume is supposed to be proof sheet form.

I don't know that I really am knowledgeable enough about British cat artist Louis Wain to do the man justice, but let me hit the few high points I know. Wain first made a name for himself in the 1880s for his cat drawings and paintings, a subject he chose out of grief for his late wife. His wife succumbed to cancer, and he had entertained her in her sickbed by playing with their pet cat.

Wain's career as a cat artist bloomed. His works were extremely popular in England, and eventually the cat-mania even spread to the US. Unfortunately, Wain's entire family seemed to be somewhat prone to mental illness, and by 1916 the always somewhat unbalanced Louis was getting bad enough that he was confined to a mental hospital. Wain was in and out of hospitals for the rest of his life, putting his commercial career to an end, though it never stopped him from painting cats. Wain's later works, though still putatively cat drawings, are bizarre representations of the sort that delighted psychologists, if not the public.

For a much better bio of Wain see his Wikipedia entry here. Also, check out his later cat drawings here - wild stuff!

Wain apparently spent some time in America and while here made some deals with syndicates to distribute his cat drawings as comic pages. Wain's work appeared sporadically from 1897 to the mid-teens in Hearst sections (except for a brief appearance in the World Color Printing Sunday section in 1910). I'm assuming that the material printed in US newspapers was adapted from earlier British appearances, but that is purely a guess. Is there a Wain enthusiast out there who could answer that question? And, for that matter, can a Wain fan tell me if "Miss Cam", supposedly the writer of some series, was a real person or just an affectation of Wain?

Seldom did these series have consistent names, so it can be a bit perplexing to figure out when one series ends and another begins. The sample shown here is from Wain's next to last series in the American Sunday papers, and it ran from December 7 1913 to July 26 1914. This particular series started out using a set of distinct series names, specifically Adventures of Billy Kitten, Adventures of Toby Maltese, Adventures of Tom Scratch, Tom Catt (pictured), and The Velvetpaw Family. When this run began each of the series titles ran for a certain number of weeks and concluded before another title would take over. Later in the run the series titles were reused but with any random title being used each week.

Labels: Obscurities

Magazine cartoonist Gahan Wilson, best known for his work in Playboy, branched out into the newspaper cartoon biz with the rather unimaginatively titled Gahan Wilson Sunday Comics feature. Marketed by the Iowa-based Register & Tribune Syndicate, the feature never caught on despite the obvious appeal of Wilson's wild artwork and off-kilter gags.

The feature began on March 3 1974 and succumbed on May 29 1977 (at least that's the last Sunday I have). When Wilson started the feature his pages included a mix of unrelated gags. About six months in, though, he switched over to having all the gags on a single subject.

Coming up with that many gags every week for the Sunday page in addition to his magazine work may have been a strain on Wilson but the end-product didn't seem to suffer. The Sunday page gags, while perhaps not all gems, had plenty of hits to compensate for the misses. As a bibliomaniac, my favorite of the Wilson Sunday pages is the first example shown here. The one with the giant book, especially, hits my funnybone.

There are lots of websites with interesting Gahan Wilson content, of which Wilson's own site is a good first stop. Here's one with a pretty decent bio, and here's an archived NPR interview with the cartoonist.

On a side note, Wilson's apparently all but forgotten National Lampoon cartoon series "Nuts" is, to me, by leaps and bounds Wilson's greatest work. It was collected in a long out of print book that is still available, though a bit pricey, on used book sites like ABE.

Labels: Obscurities

These E&P articles refer to comic strip features that I've been unable to find. Do you have information or samples you can share?

Tigers Fly Again
E&P, October 1946

If the first two weeks' continuity is a fair example, Bell Syndicate's new comic strip, "Flying Tigers", will have plenty of action, from street fights to intrigue to live tigers. Source of the material, chief character in the strip, and co-byliner is Capt. George (Pappy) Paxton, who was a member of one of the first groups to join the Flying Tigers, who served as a flight leader and member of Chennault's staff and who was shot down over the Burma Road in January 1942.

Charles Clarence Beck, a professional artist since the age of 15 and supervisor for three years of all comic magazine script preparation for the Anglo-American Publishing Co., is the artist. For 10 years he was a staff artist at Fawcett Publications, but for the past two years has headed with Peter Costanza a rapidly expanding art studio of their own. The strip is due for daily release soon.

New Feature
E&P, 1/18/47
A two-column weekly cartoon, "Oddities of Nature" is being offered by the A. S. Curtis Features Syndicate. The creator and author of this panel, Chuck Thorndike, has appeared in numerous newspapers in the United States and Canada and has written and illustrated 12 books. A veteran of both world wars, he had charge during the recent war of a department creating syndicated posters and visual materials.


Comic Strip Features Cute Baby Photos
By Helen M. Staunton (E&P, 12/14/46)

Because Constance Bannister was never satisfied to take only one picture of a baby but "had to take about 50 pictures," she originated a unique feature that has achieved considerable acceptance in daily newspapers and special use in Sunday roto sections--a photographed "comic strip" of incidents in babies' lives.

Her strips, syndicated by Consolidated News Features, consist of four pictures of one or two babies in action with imaginary baby monologues in balloons. The formula is deceptively simple: In each a baby deals with some object or faces some problem and reacts, while Miss Bannister dubs in some baby comments with an unexpected twist. Perhaps one baby is confronted with another baby who's yelling, tries to soothe it, then asks, "Hey, Mom, should I slug her?"

The trick, says the baby photographer, is "to get the expressions to say the words. I frequently have to take 50 or more shots. It's always very difficult to start out with a positive idea.

"We get the thought-and give it a little leeway." She has been trying to get a good football sequence for some time she told E & P, "but hasn't been able to get the babies to do it yet " Now when she manages those pictures, they'll have
to go in the file for next season.

A professional baby photographer - and so photogenic herself that many of the papers using the feature have played her picture alongside the other babies - Constance Bannister has been persuading babies to grab a toe, look interested, point, make faces, etc., for years for a wide variety of magazine covers.

Then her own interest in seeing babies in more than one pose convinced her that a feature showing babies in successive poses ought to capture wide readership. A number of newspapers agreed. The New York Sun runs "Baby Banters by Bannister" as a twice-weekly strip. Other newspapers use it stripwise or as a full page in Sunday rotos. The Milwaukee Journal, which belongs to this group, made a local feature out of it not so long ago by running a local man's imitation with his baby granddaughter underneath it.

Syndicate Policies Vary On Continuity
By Helen M. Staunton (E&P, 1/25/47)

To the syndicate the carryover of comic strip fans from daily to Sunday or Sunday to daily is an important consideration, especially in these competitive days when one syndicate's sale is another syndicate's cancellation. Syndicate policy on handling continuity from daily to Sunday varies greatly, and each has good reasons for its conduct of the comic's plot.

Activities Varied
McClure's "Superman" may swoop out of windows and bait bank robbers each weekday, aid a veteran in successive Saturday colored pages (huh?) and carry on a third episodic story Sundays. McNaught's "Joe Palooka" carries on two continuities, one along personal lines and the other not far from the prize ring. AP Newsfeatures' "Scorchy Smith" works hard at adventures during the week, but pauses Sunday for a timeless gag incident. The Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate's "Dick Tracy" rushes madly about town or suffers under impending dooms during the week, but his problems come to a head Sundays.

Even the gag strips, which use little or no continuity, frequently change their characters for Sunday, but when they do the reason is the desire to appeal to younger readers. The diversity of syndicate practice is in the continuity comics, not in their humorous comics.

In the CT-NYNS list of comics "Dick Tracy" "Terry and the Pirates" and "Little Orphan Annie" of the continuity strips, use a single continuity for the whole week, but the "Gumps" and "Gasoline Alley" do not. The reason? Some artists have a flair for keeping a plot moving with the single and necessarily overlapping continuity, and some prefer to handle only a .single plot.

King Features - with a very few exceptions - does not coordinate daily and Sunday plots because so frequently the daily and Sunday comics are published by different newspapers and "because readers have become educated" to dual plots, according to Editor and General Manager Ward Greene. For good measure he threw in also the shipping problems in sending the daily and Sunday separately to foreign countries. "Steve Canyon," however, "Little Annie Rooney" and (recently and experimentally) "Buz Sawyer," have carried the one plot past the turn of the week. Other syndicates expressed their policies and reasons variously:

United Feature Syndicate- separate action preferred because daily and Sunday placed separately and "continuity of characters is more important as a tie-in than single plot."

McNaught - separate plots or action because the syndicate may sell dally and Sunday to different papers in same city and because artists, preparing Sunday pages eight or nine weeks in advance, find coordination difficult.

AP Newsfeatures - prefer daily continuity separate from Sunday action, but don't like a Sunday continuity to run more than three or four weeks and prefer it complete in one page because the "week's time lapse is too great" for a holdover of story interest.

Register & Tribune Syndicate - Single continuity is a pretty definite policy, arranged so that the Saturday story reads into the Sunday and also reads into the Monday strip, the Sunday action being an independent incident growing out of the main plot but not necessary to it and not requiring explanation.

Chicago Sun Syndicate - coordinated plot preferred, particularly on an adventure strip to avoid reader confusion and aid selling.

McClure - Separate plots for Superman, coordinated plot for ' Cynthia," using a side incident of main plot, because "Cynthia" is a true to life story and a double continuity would sacrifice authenticity.

NEA Service - No set policy. Four features have coordinated continuity and one, "Alley Oop" changed over to a single story some months ago.

George Matthew Adams Service - No coordination.

Labels: News of Yore

In one of World Color Printing's brief forays into the daily comic strip business, Little Julius Sneezer was produced from April 30 through at least September 1917. The art on the strip was pretty awful, in fact it bears strong indications that it was created mostly from pasted-up model sheet poses. Note the similarities of Little Julius' poses from strip to strip.

The gags, on the other hand, were often pretty snappy, using the latest slang and patter. In fact, in my reading of the strip I get a funny feeling that the cartoonist, a Mr. Baker, might well have been going to vaudeville houses and taking notes on the comedians. On strips 2 and 3 above try reading the patter supplying the voices of Groucho and Chico Marx. Not that these are necessarily Marx Brothers routines, but there were plenty of comedy teams at the time, I imagine, that would have been using this sort of off-the-wall stage patter.

Though Little Julius Sneezer had a relatively short run, World Color Printing really got their money's worth out of it. They continued to sell the strip in bulk lots to small papers for years, and also reused the strip in their Sunday children's activity pages from March 29 1925 to January 17 1926. Then the rights to the strip were sold to the International Cartoon Company, and these folks, the kings of the cheap reprint service, distributed plates of the strips to small papers for years. I have a sample of these plates and here is the label from the back that gives a snapshot of their business model:



EDIT: Alex Jay has since sleuthed out the identity of Mr. Baker. It is George M. Baker, but not the George Baker who created the long-running comic strip and comic book character Sad Sack.

Labels: Obscurities