Stripper's Guide

It's back to politics on this Herriman Saturday. The above cartoons were printed in the LA Examiner on September 6th and 7th 1906. The subject of the cartoons is California's Republican convention, where a fellow by the name of Gillett, apparently seen as yet another tool of the Southern Pacific Railroad, was nominated for the Governor race. I'll hope for the indulgence of our historically knowledgeable readers for further explanations.

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

From a 1927 issue of Art & Life, here's Nate Collier commenting on the very popular mail order cartooning courses of the day:

In response to several requests, here's a comic strip by Larry Semon. Semon was a comedian in silent films, and you can read an extended bio and appreciation of him here, here and here (the bio is in three parts), his IMDB filmography here, and an extensive research site here.

I won't presume to talk about his film career (haven't seen a single one of his movies, sorry to say), but I'll venture that he was a much greater artistic success on the screen than in the funny papers. Despite the hype that some movie historians give to his cartooning career, Semon was never more than an itinerant penman in the newspaper field. His first comic strip series was for the Philadelphia Record in 1908, then he switched over to the North American in 1909-10, then on to New York for stints at the Evening Telegram (1910-12) and finished up with a brief appearance at the New York World.

Marcus the Boarding House Goat was his only World series, and if it represents the apex of his cartooning career, the mountain surely wasn't Himalayan in scale. The strip ran about once a week from December 24 1912 to March 29 1913.

As a cartoonist he made a darn fine movie actor, if ya get my drift.

PS - this post also a tip of the tam for film and comics historian Cole Johnson, who today forsook email and favored me with a marathon phone gabfest. Did we really talk for three hours? Geez, what a couple of hens we are. Seriously though, it was a terrific pleasure to talk with someone who so perfectly mirrors my lunatic fascination with all the minutiae of newspaper cartooning. What a bit of nirvana to be able to pow-wow about the vagaries of WNU, Associated Editors, Roger Bean, C. Toles, Eddie Eks etc etc with a kindred spirit.

Labels: Obscurities

Here's another of DeVoss Driscoll's strips from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. You may recall from previous posts that Driscoll was essentially on his own to cartoon their whole Sunday funnies section.

This one goes by the working title Papa and Winning Willie - the strip wasn't named in any consistent manner, but these were the two main characters. It ran from November 22 1903 through January 31 1904. The strip traded on the Buster Brown bad boy theme and is pretty forgettable stuff, though Driscoll's slightly askew art is always worth a look. I did get a chuckle out of the roadmap comment in this one, and Willie's expression in the final panel is priceless.

Labels: Obscurities

One of Jimmy Swinnerton's longer running series when he first came to New York was Mount Ararat, a raucous comedy starring a motley crew of jungle animals. The series ran for a few years but was phased out in favor of Swinnerton's big hits Little Jimmy and Mister Jack.

Yet Swinnerton, either because of restlessness or editorial demands, usually had at least three series running at any given time (though rarely would all three run in the same Sunday section). So it was on October 22 1911 that Swin brought back his Ararat players for another turn on the stage. Miss Kitty Tiger, Mister Jaguar and the rest all returned, but their reprieve from cartoon purgatory would not last long. The series lost its biblical title after March 3 1912, ran under various one-shot titles for awhile, then a new title, And Her Heart Was True To Harold, was settled on with a revised cast of characters.

To call the series a delight would be mere repetition -- I did mention that it was by Swinnerton, right? The gags were repetitions on a theme, but the slapstick (as in the example above) was top-notch stuff, and the dialogue was snappy and laden with double entendres (it's often forgotten that Swinnerton had a gift for snappy patter).

A History of Webcomics - The Golden Age:1993-2005
by T. Campbell
Antarctic Press, 2006
ISBN 0-9768043-9-5 / 978-0-9768043-9-0
$14.95

I must confess that I've never been an online comics reader. There's just something about reading comic strips on a pixelated screen that doesn't quite measure up to the comfort of good old ink and paper. I know that there's a vibrant community of online cartoonists, and some of the material I've stumbled across over the years is not only professional, but on occasion superior to the stuff we find in our daily papers. Without the 'benefit' of syndicate editors and the Victorian attitudes of newspaper editors about comic strip content, the online cartoonist has the elbow room to explore subjects outside the extremely cramped box that syndication allows. The online cartoonist also has the freedom to let their creations grow and change, an entirely natural and healthy process that is rarely condoned in the buttoned up world of the newspaper cartoonist.

So I was happy to stumble across this book by T. Campbell, with its promise to bring me up to date on the happenings in the vibrant world of web-based comics, a world that I've supported philosophically but ignored in practice. And in the opinion of this utter neophyte, Campbell does an excellent job.

The book starts out with prehistory, an entertaining bit of nostalgia about the days before the 'real' web. Lewis discusses Arpanet, and how that medium used for scientific communication quickly had its own humor back alleys. These were the days of the first 'net based art -- it was ASCII art at the time, kiddies! Lewis bounds past this point quickly, pretty much ignoring the days of the home-based BBS, and the pseudo-Web services like PC-Link, Compuserve and Prodigy. I'll reinforce my geezer-hood by admitting that I was disappointed by this omission.

Campbell goes on to discuss the early web-based strips, most of which fall into a category termed 'nerd-core'. These were the days when a net strip was a guaranteed fan-favorite if the jokes revolved around programming and computer gaming. But subject matter quickly branched out, though certain genres, including nerd-core, have remained fertile ground. Manga and fantasy-based comics have done well, as have autobiographical/journal comics, and even pixel-comics (a form where the characters are low-res images, often sampled from old computer games). One of these, Diesel Sweeties, has even made the jump to newspaper syndication against seemingly long odds.

The web allows cartoonists to experiment with the form and poses no restrictions on coloring and size, so Campbell discusses a lot of the experiments, both successful and unsuccessful, that have passed across the ether. A proper amount of space is also devoted to philosophical discussions about such experimentation -- Scott McCloud has apparently been acting as cheerleader and soothsayer in this movement, and his ideas, and reaction to them, are discussed.

But I found the most interesting aspect of the history was the business end. Every cartoonist on the web has two problems - how to get people to read their work, and when they do, how to convince them to pay for the privilege. Although the rank amateur can be happy just posting his or her scrawlings to a website visited only by a close circle of indulgent pals, those who have ambitions to be professional cartoonists, to actually make a paying job out of web comics, face the inevitable, and practically insoluble problem, of getting paid. Campbell's discussion of the business aspect of web comics is tremendously thoughtful, entertaining and well-researched. The soap opera-ish tales of the comic strip 'portals' and their creators is fascinating stuff, as are the stories of the individual creators who struck out on their own.

The book is a worthwhile and entertaining read whether you are a long-time fan of web comics, or like me, a sideline observer. I will, however, point out two problems. First is that Campbell is far too enamored of footnotes ... and more footnotes ... and yet more footnotes. There are pages in this book that look like a bingo card. Thankfully his notes are all at the back of the book, but with practically every sentence festooned with a numeric garland it gets downright annoying, especially when he doesn't restart his numbering in each chapter. The footnote numbering in this thin book finally tops out at 614 -- enough already!

Illustrations are the second problem. Many are too small to be comfortably read, and some are printed so dark as to make the images little more than ink blots. My guess is that the author intended the sample strips to be printed in color, and they should have been -- Antarctic Press was penny wise and pound foolish in going the black and white route. On the other hand, given that quite a few web comics include animations or infinite canvas techniques, some dilution of the material was inevitable. Perhaps Campbell should have arranged for all the illustrations to be made available on a website, maybe one that includes links to the creators' current output. Given the impoverished state of the typical web comic creator, I assume the authors of the sample strips would have been happy to oblige if it meant that they might gain some new, maybe even paying, readers as a result.

Minor quibbles aside, Campbell has done a fine job and he deserves our thanks for committing this history to print. The evanescent web, like a beach that quickly and efficiently erases the footsteps of all who pass, has no memory beyond what resides on the servers in the here and now. Without Campbell to chronicle these early days of web comics the stories would inevitably be forgotten, leaving those of us who value history with no record of the trailblazing days in this important new cartooning medium.

Labels: Bookshelf

Labels: Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics