Stripper's Guide

Order Jim Ivey's new book Cartoons I Liked at Lulu.com or order direct from Ivey and get the book autographed with a free original sketch.

Labels: Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics

I'm back in the saddle again, with a nice new power supply humming along happily at the service of the blog. So now, we belatedly arrive at Herriman's second continuing comic strip done for the Examiner, Mayor Harper On Tour.

Los Angeles had a long-standing problem supplying water to its rapidly growing population. Most of the nearby sources had been tapped by 1907, and the city was getting desperate to find new sources of the elixir of life. The Owens River up in the Sierras some 200 miles from Los Angeles had long been considered as the most likely answer to all the city's needs. In April 1907 Mayor Harper along with a number of city council members made a pilgrimage to see the area for themselves. Although lip service was paid to scouting other possibilities (as will be seen in upcoming episodes) the trip was really just an excuse for a junket of cronies to have a little adventure and be wined and dined by many landholders who saw dollar signs in selling their plots to Los Angeles.

Although I haven't been able to figure out the identities of everyone mentioned in the strips, here's a key to those I have figured out:

(Isidore) Dockweiler - Mayor Harper's attorney

Anthony Schwamm ("Tony") - LA Fire Commissioner who was apparently a confidante of Harper's

Barney Healy, Edward Clampitt, Reuben Dromgold - LA city council members

I haven't been able to further ID Joe Margolis, or "Scotty".

The first two episodes of Mayor Harper On Tour appeared on April 19 and 20 1907.

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

Hi Folks -
Tropical storm Fay didn't hit us very hard at all, but intermittent power outages zapped the power supply on the computer I use as a holding area for all the Stripper's Guide material. The computer was on a UPS but apparently it had exceeded its useful lifetime for power surges.

I pulled the computer apart to replace the power supply and it turned out to have sort of an oddball one -- I always keep a spare, but my spare doesn't fit this silly HP machine. So there's either a trip to Orlando in my future or a mail order. It's rare to find anyone who sells power supplies locally anymore now that so few people are capable of maintaining their own machines. Newbies!

Fay dumped about 10" of rain on us (so far; it's still raining). In Florida the oak, sweet gum and cypress trees love to soak up all that moisture, but they get a mite greedy and they end up with overly heavy limbs that break off in the wind. So now I have tree limbs all over the yard that have to be cut up and dealt with. So don't worry about me -- I'll not be sitting on my laurels while the computer is dead.

Stripper's Guide posts will resume soon.

What you see above is the only reproducible sample I've been able to come up with for one of the greatest yet most mysterious and obscure cartoonists I've ever encountered. Even his name is a mystery -- is it C.E. Toles? T.E. Coles? Something else? From his signature you really can't tell for sure. Ohio State University's index of Bill Blackbeard's collection gives the name as C.E. Toles, but I don't know if that's based on anything more than a guess.

I first encountered this cartoonist's work in the early sections of the Philadelphia Inquirer, but chances are that his work there was reprinted from the New York Journal. Work by Toles is found in the pages of that Hearst paper in the late 1890s -- the sample above was from 1898 -- and he, as did many cartoonists of the times, specialized in one-shot work. And what work it was! Look at the tremendous but seemingly effortless perspective work above and keep in mind that this piece I'm reproducing is chosen only because it's the only one I have in hardcopy. Practically everything Toles did was a masterwork of this caliber or even greater!

The only series I know for certain he did was The Reverend Fiddle D.D. which ran for three months in the New York Journal in 1898. A later series titled The Reverend O. Shaw Fiddle D.D. ran in the Philadelphia Press for three months in 1901, but I haven't been able to compare the two side by side to determine if they are actually two separate series or if the Press version is just reprints with a longer title.

According to OSU's database Toles also did a lot of work for the New York Herald in 1896. Alfredo Castelli's Here We Are Again adds to our tiny knowledgebase with the information that he was doing editorial cartoons at the Washington Post in 1894. He also cites another series, Miss High Kick, in the New York Herald in 1896 but the info is pretty sketchy (not to mention in Italian). Here's a very minor effort, a spot cartoon, by our man Toles on Yesterday's Papers.

So who the heck was this guy, and what did he do with the rest of his life? Surely a cartoonist of his caliber didn't switch professions and spend the rest of his existence as a butcher! I know only of his work from 1894-1901 -- does anyone know anything more about the man or his work?

EDIT: Sara Duke at the Library of Congress has solved the mystery! The fellow's name is T.E. Coles, as evidenced by a byline in an 1895 issue of the Comic Sketch Club. This appearance further tells us that Coles was being syndicated by the International Syndicate of Baltimore at that time (Comic Sketch Club was the 'periodical' containing the weekly press proofs of their syndicate offerings).

Thank you Sara!!

The Katzenjammers' Secret
By Helen Lawson (Circulation, September 1922)

I asked H. H. Knerr, the man who draws the Katzenjammer Kids, to re­veal the secret of the enduring charm and popularity of the famous comic.

"You ask me," said H. H. Knerr, "what is the secret of the popularity of the Katzenjammer Kids."

"Exactly," I said. " I ask you—what is the secret of the perpetual popularity of the Katzenjammer Kids?"

Presently H. H. Knerr said:

"I imagine the Kids preserve their ap­peal from year to year because they express to childhood the dreams that childhood feeds upon, and to maturity the dreams that were cherished in childhood but never came true because the dreams of childhood never do come true.

"As boys we set ourselves some goal or mark of achievement. As men we progress toward that goal, or some other one, limiting ourselves to three meals and a place to sleep until we step across a line some day and taste the thrill of achievement. And just a little later than that we recognize what we have achieved—three meals a day and a place to sleep. The food may be of a little better quality and the couch perhaps more deeply tufted and more yielding, but will be about the only measurable difference.

"Let my own case—since I know most about it—illustrate the point I am trying in illustrate.

"I wanted to be an aeronaut, or aviator as the term is now. Behold me shackled to a drawing board making pictures of the Katzenjammer Kids instead of up in the clouds, soaring at heights where strange birds fly and losing all sense of motion as you do when you journey through the air.

"Perhaps I am better able to draw child­hood effectively because my own, in the re­spect at all events of desiring to become an airman, persisted long into manhood and de­sisted only in the face of overwhelming dis­couragement.

"My first experience as an aerialist was on a roof, a hipped affair, such as you still see in cities where families live in houses instead of in three or four rooms nailed together and rented at three times their value as apartments. The roof was next to my father's home, with a galvanized iron gutter at each of its eaves to catch the rain. It was fine fun to sit at the peak of the hip and slide down the slate roof, catching with my heels on the gutter. I really had two chances before falling the thirty feet to the ground. If I missed with my heels, as I sometimes did, I could catch with my hands, which I always did. I never fell. but I was compelled to stop this childish prank by parental authority. Grown people are al­ways interfering with the amusement of children.

"Then I transferred my talents to the dumbwaiter. I would pull myself up to the top of the house and turn loose, thus secur­ing a swift ride to the bottom of the shaft accompanied by a terrific bump. Again my parents became nervous and I was forced to desist. Then I got a glider. It was great.

"We young chaps in Philadelphia had some of the first gliders in the country. They were big planes, without motors, which were attached by ropes to automo­biles. We would swing into them, using our bodies to balance the planes, and fly like kites when the automobiles speeded up. The trick was to keep from turning over.

"The gliders were followed by balloons. Those were days of real sport. Once the crew I trained with reached an altitude of 13,000 feet by the simple process of throw­ing overboard too much sand by mistake.

"Ballooning, gliding and all the rest of it ended when I came to New York to draw the Katzenjammer Kids, but that doesn't stop me from dreaming of the old life.

"The world is full of men like me. Citi­zens in a settled way of life who at one time wanted to be something romantic—police­men, firemen, sailors, taxi drivers or even an iceman. And how many boys do you think there are today who are dreaming the dream of themselves at the window of an engine cab, eyes on the track ahead, one hand on the throttle of a monster locomo­tive and the other on the air brake con­troller, master of a trainful of precious lives while the giant engine plunges through the blackness of the night.

"The secret then of the hold on human hearts of the Katzenjammer Kids lies with all the fat men who want to be thin and the thin ones who want to put on weight. I have no doubt that many a burglar dreams of the sermons he could preach if he only had the education to enter a pulpit, and probably many a harassed clergyman believes in his heart that he would have made the most efficient safe blower in the world if it hadn't been for the conscience that tied his hands.

"In other words only the cold necessity of three meals a day and a place to lay our heads down, has prevented the phenomenon of a world filled to overflowing with over­grown Katzenjammer Kids."

Labels: News of Yore

Burt Thomas was the editorial cartoonist for the Detroit News from 1912 to 1951, and he produced a long-running syndicated Sunday strip, Mr. Straphanger, for them. As far as I knew until recently that was the only strip that the Detroit News ever syndicated.

I also had no idea that Thomas did any other strips, but then came across a small cache of Our Neighbors offered on eBay awhile ago, and further determined that this strip was also syndicated. Our Neighbors started on May 31 1915 and ran until at least July of that year (the dates of my samples). For all I know it ran much longer, a question I'll be attempting to answer, along with a thousand or so others, when I next visit the Library of Congress.

Burt Thomas was, at least by informal account of one cartoonist who met him, a consummate jerk whose very family couldn't stand him. I don't know about that, but gawd the man could draw. Fellow cartoonists may look upon the samples above and despair that they will most likely never learn to spot their blacks with such drama as Thomas.

Labels: Obscurities

Dick Clark's media empire decided to try extending itself to the Sunday comics with Dick Clark's Rock, Roll and Remember. The strip, which was actually a sequence of unrelated individual panels, traded in trivia and factoids about rock-n-rollers of the 50s-70s. The title was cribbed from Clark's biography and syndicated radio show of the same name.

The feature might have done well if it had been available about a decade and a half earlier in the midst of the 50s nostalgia boom, but the strip's debut on September 25 1994 was met with anything but a rousing round of applause from newspaper editors, even the fogiest of whom knew darn well that this craze had been tapped out.

The feature was crafted by good hands. It was written by Fred Bronson, the Chart Beat columnist for Billboard magazine who has an encyclopedic knowledge of rock music history. It was drawn by Don Sherwood, whose lovely clear line style has, unfortunately, graced an awful lot of short-run stinker strips over the years. This one wouldn't change his luck.

The strip was credited to Olive Enterprises, a Dick Clark company that handled his endorsements, but was actually distributed by the Chicago Sun-Times, which had otherwise gotten out of the strip distribution business in 1984 when Field Enterprises was sold off to the Darth Vader of newspapers, Rupert Murdoch. The strip lasted well into 1995 but I haven't found a definitive end date, and the 1995 E&P directory claims there was also a daily version which I have yet to locate.

Labels: Obscurities

Order Jim Ivey's new book Cartoons I Liked at Lulu.com or order direct from Ivey and get the book autographed with a free original sketch.

Labels: Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics

This time on Herriman Saturday just two images, cuz next week we'll be starting in on Herriman's second comic strip series for the Examiner. The series will be about Mayor Harper and I need a little time to see if I can decode at least a few of the many in-jokes about LA politics. I read the strips yesterday and I was completely lost. If anyone happens to know of a good information resource about Mayor Harper's tumultuous time in office I'd really love to hear from you.

Back to current business though ... today's cartoons were printed in the April 15 and 17 editions of the Examiner. The caricature of W.R. LeRoy accompanies an article about this fellow who invented some sort of "air motor" and struck it rich. The article fails to make clear just what exactly Mr. LeRoy invented but I find no references to the inventor on the web. Someone with deep pockets must have been impressed by his invention, though, because the formerly poor fellow returned to his old haunts throwing money around like water.

On the 7th we get a recap of the Angels-Seals game. Inexplicably Herriman makes no cartoon comment on the ironic twist related in the headline.

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

Cartoonist Uses Drawing Board As His Pulpit
Waco, Tex. - The biggest job and least remunerative for Jack Hamm, a member of the art facul­ty of Baylor University here, is syndicating free of charge a week­ly religious cartoon to more than 300 newspapers in English-speak­ing countries around the globe.

Mr. Hamm's life story is one of vocational conflict. He wanted to be a cartoonist and he wanted to be a preacher. He has done both. He preached in small churches in his native Kansas and in and around Chicago while he attended Moody Bible Institute.

But financial rewards in churches were not enough to meet expenses. He turned to art and filled several good jobs on syndicated strips. He illustrated "Let's Explore Your Mind" and also helped on such strips as "Boots and Her Buddies," "Alley Oop," "Horace and Babe" and "Bugs Bunny." When a syndi­cated asked him to start a detec­tive strip of his own. Mr. Hamm declined. He figured it would mean he would have to give up a drive to preach the gospel. So he packed his bags, resigned, went to Baylor to study religious work. He preached at a rural church near Waco. During World War II, he spent 18 months as edi­tor of the Army newspaper in the Aleutians. After the war he took his degree and joined the Baylor art faculty.

Finally, he reached a decision to reconcile his desire to be a preach­er. He would use his drawing board as a pulpit. It costs Mr. Hamm and his friends over Texas about $100 a week to supply the newspapers with the free cartoons, all of which emphasize faith in God as a solution to all problems - personal, national and world. Sometime, he digs deep into his own income to meet the weekly expense.

Said Dr. Daniel A. Poling, noted clergyman in New York: "No bet­ter example of the cartoonist's art dedicated to faith in God and country has been seen in this gen­eration."

Mr. Hamm recently won $200 from the Freedoms Foundation for a cartoon to promote the Ameri­can way of life.

Why doesn't he charge news­papers for his drawings? Says Mr. Hamm: "If I charged newspapers for the service, many would be unable to use it, and I believe this tension-filled world needs any word of hope it can get."


King Features Offers Stalin Story Strip
4/12/52
"The Story of Stalin," a seven-part story strip originally re­leased in 1939, has been brought up to date and is offered for re­lease at will by King Features Syndicate. The original drawings by the late Clifton Crittenden have been brought up to 1952 by Alfred J. Buescher, and William Ritt, author of the series, has updated his text.

The series includes the com­plete life of the Soviet dictator up to his conjectured death, and may be used immediately or when the big news comes. KFS is also dis­tributing a matted picture page on Stalin for obit use.
[Note: I've been unable to find any examples of this short-run strip in either the 1939 or 1952 run. Anyone have samples? -- EDIT -- Found the 1952 version -- 1939 version anyone?]

KFS to Syndicate Walt Disney Page
4/19/52
"Walt Disney's Treasury of Classic Tales," a new color Sun­day page, is offered as a continu­ing feature for first release July 13 by King Features Syndicate.

The strip will feature a com­pletely new story every four or five months. Some of the stories will be realistic adventure stories, while other will be fantasies or fairy tales. First release scheduled is "Robin Hood," which will run for 25 weeks. Among other stories planned are "Peter Pan," "When Knighthood was in Flow­er," "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" and "Sleeping Beauty."

Eisenhower Story Strip From Mirror Syndicate
5/10/52
"The Life of General Ike," a 36-installment story strip, is offered for release on or after May 19 by Mirror Enterprises Syndicate, Los Angeles. Drawn by staff artist Bill MacArthur, the strip covers the life of General Eisenhower from his birth to the present day. Available in five-column mat form with manuscript text or in reproduction proof form with manuscript text.
[Note: another short-run strip I've been unable to locate. Anyone? -- EDIT -- Found in San Mateo Times, running 7/21 - 8/30/52]

Top Ten in Salina
7/5/52
The top 10 comic strips and panels in the Salina (Kan.) Jour­nal, according to a reader prefer­ence poll conducted recently, were:

Among men: "They'll Do It Every Time," "Blondie," "Dick Tracy," "Gasoline Alley," "Neigh­borly Neighbors," "Henry," "Li'l Abner," "Smilin' Jack," "The Nebbs" and "Jane Arden."

Among women: "Blondie," '•They'll Do It Every Time," "Dick Tracy," "Jane Arden," "Henry," "Gasoline Alley," "Neighborly Neighbors," "Li'l Abner," "The Nebbs" and "Little Orphan An­nie."

Cartoonist Is Dead
7/13/52
Phoenixville, Pa.-Cartoonist W. Kemp Starrett, 62, died July 9 at his farm, "The Grindstone,"
near here. His first cartoon was published in the Brooklyn (N. Y.) Eagle when he was 18. He drew the "Vignettes of Life," a feature which has appeared in many newspapers. He started his career as a political cartoonist on the Philadelphia Times about 1916. Later he held similar positions on the New York Tribune and on papers in Albany, N. Y., and Providence, R. I.


Ralph Yardley Retires After 57 Years
7/26/52
Stockton, Calif.-Cartoonist Ralph Yardley has retired from the Stockton Record after 57 years of newspaper work.

Mr. Yardley, now 73, was the Record's first car­toonist and has been on the staff for the past 30 years. Prior to his Record career, the artist drew for the San Fran­cisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Call, San Francisco Bulletin, New York Globe and Honolulu Advertiser, His first job was with the Examiner.


Offers 'Hell Bomb' Strip
9/27/52
Timed to tie in with newly-an­nounced atomic weapons tests at Eniwetok this fall, NEA Service has issued a picture-story strip on "The Hell Bomb." In 12 daily re­leases it describes the Hydrogen Bomb-including its devastating potentialities, its peacetime use and its underlying principle.

The picture strips are by writer Jay Heavilin and artist Ralph Lane, who have collaborated on several other NEA story strips. First release is Oct. 6.

Labels: News of Yore

Willie Hawkshaw the Amateur Detective was one of many sleuth strips of the oughts that played off the popularity of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. This entry was signed Hutch which apparently by popular acclamation has been identified as Frank Hutchinson. I'm not so sure about that. I'd have to dig up an example of the only strip that was definitely by Frank (Willie Wise, Tommy Tuff and Simple Sammy, World Color Printing) to see if the signatures and styles match. There were several different cartoonists going by "Hutch" in the 1900s-20s.

Willie Hawkshaw ran in the Chicago Tribune's Sunday section from August 27 1905 to April 29 1906.

You'll find an interesting discussion about the origin of the term hawkshaw and more samples of this strip over on the excellent Barnacle Press site.

Labels: Obscurities

After Norman Marsh's modest success with the Dick Tracy clone Dan Dunn comic strip, a stint in the Marines, and a short run on the detective strip Hunter Keene, he finally found the niche that suited him with Danny Hale.

After World War II William Randolph Hearst became increasingly interested in features about American history and Danny Hale was one of a group of offerings in this vein that started in the late 40s. Danny was a kid frontiersman who found himself tagging along with revolutionary war heroes, accompanying the Lewis and Clark expedition, and generally being in the right place at the right time (even if those times were widely separated) to be a first person observer of history. Marsh had a light touch with the educational aspect of the strip, though, and Danny Hale can be comfortably categorized as a rollicking adventure yarn, much more palatable to kid readers who can smell an educational strip from a mile off.

Norman Marsh's artwork was never his strong point, but you have to give him points for never giving up. His Danny Hale strips often feature dramatically designed if not all that impressively executed crowd scenes, vistas and action panels.

King Features introduced Danny Hale to a relatively indifferent audience of newspaper editors on October 27 1947. After a little over three years the strip still didn't seem to be catching on and King was ready to pull the plug, but Marsh decided he could go it alone and started self-syndicating the feature, apparently with King's blessing, starting with the January 15 1951 episode. Marsh took it upon himself to aggressively market the strip through personal appearances, devoting almost as much time to selling the strip as he did to producing it. Hard work paid off and Danny Hale managed to no only keep many of its clients from the King days but also to add more. He proved particularly adept at signing up smaller papers.

A year after the switch to self-syndication Marsh changed the strip title to Dan'l Hale and aged his hero a bit into a young man. His adventures continued in the same vein, mixing light dollops of history with lots of good adventuring for over ten years, finally coming to an end on October 13 1962, a very impressive run for any strip, much less an awkwardly drawn self-syndicated one.

A 1951 news story about Norman Marsh's marketing campaign can be found here.

Labels: Obscurities

Although the panel itself used a revolving set of titles, the official title of this series, as reported in the annual Editor & Publisher listing, was Babies.

John H. Striebel gave birth to Babies on September 21 1925, the Associated Editors syndicate played midwife.

This tall one-column panel was essentially a replacement for a very similar panel titled Pantomime by Striebel for the same syndicate. The only real difference was that Pantomime didn't limit its focus to small children.

The Babies feature did reasonably well, appearing in a creditable number of papers, and even had a jumbo sized version available for Sunday papers. The Sunday version was also in black and white and was designed to plug a space in Sunday magazine sections.

In 1929 Striebel started providing the art for the new Dixie Dugan strip, a feature whose circulation took off like a rocket right out of the gate. Faced with continuing the modestly successful Babies or devoting his time to Dixie Dugan, Striebel made the obvious choice and dropped this series on November 29 1930.

Labels: Obscurities

H. T. Webster Dies; 7 Months' Panels Done
By Erwin Knoll (E&P, 9/27/52)

Harold Tucker Webster, for 50 years a newspaper cartoonist and one of the best-known mem­bers of his craft, died Sept. 22 of a heart attack on a train en route to his home at Stamford, Conn. He had celebrated his 67th birth­day on the previous day.

The Herald Tribune Syndicate, which distributed Mr. Web­ster's daily panels to about 120 newspapers and his Sunday "Timid Soul" feature to about 30 papers, announced that the car­toonist had left a large enough backlog of completed work to permit distribution to client news­papers until next April. Sometime before then the syndicate will de­cide whether to terminate the fea­ture or continue it under Herb Roth, Mr. Webster's assistant.

16,000 Panels
In the course of his long career Mr. Webster drew over 16,000 single-panel cartoons, and contrib­uted to the language such phrases as "the thrill that comes once in a lifetime," "life's darkest mo­ment" and "the timid soul."

He made the name of his chief char­acter, Caspar Milquetoast, a house­hold word in America.
Though known primarily as a humor panelist in recent years, Mr. Webster made his early repu­tation as an editorial cartoonist on Midwestern newspapers. His most famous drawing, still reprinted an­nually on Lincoln's birthday, was executed in 1918, when he was on the staff of Associated Newspa­pers. It was captioned "Hardin County—1809," and showed two
backwoodsmen having the follow­ing conversation on a country road:

"Any news down t' th' village, Ezry?"

"Well, Squire McLean's gone t' Washington t' see Madison swore in and ol' Spellman tells me this Bonaparte fella has captured most o' Spain. What's new out here, neighbor?"

"Nuthin' a tall, nuthin' a tall 'cept for a new baby down't Tom Lincoln's. Nuthin' ever happens out here."

Mr. Webster's humor panels fol­lowed a set weekly pattern, formed some years ago. On Mondays the topic was "The Timid Soul"; Tuesdays, "Life's Darkest Mo­ment"; Wednesdays, "The Unseen Audience"; Thursdays, "How to Torture Your Wife" (or hus­band); Fridays, "The Thrill that Comes Once in a Lifetime," and Saturdays, "Bridge." For his "Un­seen Audience" panels he was once described as "possibly radio's most effective critic," and in recent years their sting was felt by tele­vision too. In 1950 they won for him a special Peabody award.

Cartooning, Smoking
H. T. Webster was born in Parkersburg, W. Va., and spent his boyhood in Tomahawk, Wis. His childhood surroundings were often depicted in "Life's Darkest Moment" and "The Thrill that Comes Once in a Lifetime" car­toons. At the age of seven he formed two lifelong habits — car­tooning and smoking.

When he was 12 he graduated from cigarettes to cigars, and sold his first cartoon for $5 to Recrea­tion magazine. Five years later he left high school and Tomahawk to study art at the Frank Holmes School of Illustration in Chicago. The school folded shortly after his arrival and, after a brief and un­successful fling at freelancing, the young cartoonist joined the art staff of the Denver Post.

In the next 10 years H. T. Web­ster's drawings appeared in the Chicago Daily News, the Chicago American, the Chicago Inter-Ocean and the Cincinnati Post. He did mostly illustrations and political cartoons, but on the Post began to dabble in the humor and human interest panels which were later to become his stock in trade. One series, "Little Tragedies of Childhood," was the forerunner of the "Life's Darkest Moment" panels.

Worked in Advance
In 1911, after a trip around the world, Mr. Webster was hired by Associated Newspapers in New York. Though his contract called for political cartoons, he turned increasingly to human interest topics, and these were enthusiasti­cally received by readers. For the New York Tribune from 1919 to 1923 and the New York World from 1923 to 1931 he abandoned serious editorial cartooning almost completely. He joined the Herald Tribune and its syndicate in 1931.
As demonstrated by the seven months' supply of cartoons now on hand, Mr. Webster had a penchant for preparing work far in advance. In 1927, while preparing for a va­cation, he undertook to supply the New York World with three and a half months' material in one month. The strain of continuous drawing lost him the use of his right hand, and would have ended his career had he not learned to draw equally well with his left. At this time Herb Roth, a World car­toonist, joined Mr. Webster as his assistant. Mr. Webster continued to do pencil sketches and to ink in the characters, while Mr. Roth inked in the background details. This arrangement continued until Mr. Webster's death.

Labels: News of Yore

Order Jim Ivey's new book Cartoons I Liked at Lulu.com or order direct from Ivey and get the book autographed with a free original sketch.

Labels: Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics

Not to stretch a point, but after seeing last night's coverage of the Olympics opening ceremonies I can't help but draw a parallel with our Herriman Saturdays. The actual event was obviously spectacular but we only got to see it through a glass darkly. The coverage last night was utterly horrendous, with more commercial breaks than actual coverage, and the camera work was so awful that you often only got the vaguest sense of what was going on. What's your problem NBC?

Our Herriman Saturday scans are much the same. Trust me that between having to work off of microfilm photocopies, and the pathetic resolution of monitors limiting the detail, you are only seeing a watered down representation of Herriman's genius in these posts.

Today's first cartoon is from April 9 1907, and it headlined a full page story about the Examiner providing free rides to 4000 children to go see the Sells-Floto circus that is in town. No free circus tickets, just transport.

The other two cartoons are from Sunday the 14th. The first is in regard to one of the many athletic events organized under the Hearst banner. I believe there are still athletic events at USC under the auspices of the Hearst organization. This one was strictly for schoolkids and looks like everyone must have had a blast.

Finally, Herriman heralds the spring when a young man's fancy turns not so much to love as the hankering to buy a car.

All three of these cartoons were full page width.

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

Sidney's Smith's Ching Chow panel did gangbuster business after being introduced in January 1927, so here's one of the inevitable me-too features. Thornton Fisher, a fellow whose many obscure features make him a regular guest on our Obscurity of the Day, contributed this one. Switching from an Asian sage to a Middle Eastern savant, Fisher's Omar Jr. jiggled the Ching Chow formula a little by illustrating the wise man's sayings rather than just depicting the title character over and over like in Smith's feature.

Omar Jr. was created sometime in 1927 and lasted until at least January 1928. It was syndicated by the Philadelphia Ledger who ran it in their unsuccessful tabloid venture, the Philadelphia Sun. I've never seen it appearing anywhere else.

A tip of the turban to Cole Johnson who supplied all the info on this feature.

Labels: Obscurities

"Napoleon" Strip Moves To Mirror Syndicate
By Erwin Knoll (E&P, 9/20/52)

The "Napoleon and Uncle Elby" strip, one of the old-timers on newspaper comic pages, gets a new syndicate outlet next month. Mir­ror Enterprises Syndicate, Los Angeles, will handle distribution of the strip beginning with the daily release for Oct. 13 and the Sunday release for Oct. 19. Lafave Newspaper Features, Cleveland, has serviced the strip since its inception 20 years ago.

"Napoleon" nearly wound up on the scrap heap of dead newspaper features last year when its original creator, Clifford McBride, died. Subscribing editors, aware of the strip's distinctive art style and old-time flavor, saw little possibility of its continuation. But Margot McBride, the artist's widow, was determined not to let the strip die.

She hired Roger Armstrong, a former student and assistant of her husband's, to draw the strip, and herself took on the job of conceiving ideas, writing dialogue and supervising the art work. To­gether they maintain the style of Mr. McBride's old-time art and humor, despite the fact that Mrs. McBride is 29 and he 34.

As proof of their success Rex Barley, manager of MES, cites the fact that some papers which dropped the strip at the time of Mr. McBride's death have re­turned to the fold, while new ones have been added.

Labels: News of Yore

Clare Victor Dwiggins, or 'Dwig' as he was commonly known, had a very long and distinguished career as a cartoonist. He was a New York World headliner in the oughts but then in 1912 for reasons unknown he moved over to the McClure syndicate. McClure was on very shaky ground in these years; their preprint Sunday comic sections which had been very popular were beginning to lose clients at a fast clip. Dwig was probably wooed away from Pulitzer with the thinking that he might help them to hold on to their diminishing client list.

Dwig created a page that featured today's obscurity, Uncle Jim and Tad and Tim, as a half page strip along with Mrs. Bump's Boarding House. The page debuted on January 12 1913. Apparently the presence of Dwig was not the draw that could save the McClure section because in the 1913-14 period the client list for the McClure section continued to dwindle.

My guess is that McClure might have been their own worst enemy in this period. It's pretty common to find papers switching to the McClure section only to switch again to another syndicate within a few weeks or months. Perhaps McClure's distribution system was unreliable, perhaps they couldn't compete with the pricing from other syndicates. Whatever it was, they seemed to be letting major paper clients slip through their fingers.

Uncle Jim and Tad and Tim is a deliciously pleasant trifle -- Jim and his two young nephews are like the Katzies on Prozac. The kids get into some minor mischief, or Jim plays a trick on the kids, but the action is so low key and the bonhomie of the characters so heartfelt that the overall impression is that the players just got together on a languorous Sunday afternoon to entertain us with some little tableau that they all cooked up together.

By 1914 Uncle Jim and Tad and Tim is appearing in so few papers and so irregularly and sporadically that it is all but impossible to tell when the last strip was offered. My best guess is an end date of September 13 1914 (found in the Atlanta Constitution). But they could have been running it late ... anyone have some corroborating data to share?

Labels: Obscurities

Seriously Speaking of Comic Artists
By R. L. (Rube) Goldberg (Circulation, April 1923)

Why have the present day comics superseded the old-fashioned political cartoons in public favor? By political cartoonists I mean the artists before the day of the inspired pens of Winsor McCay, Tom Powers, Opper, Harry Mayshy, Williams and the like.

I'm not sure that I know the answer, so I'll tell you all about it.

It was not an unusual thing, when I started in the newspaper game, for a kind friend to ask me with a look of pity in his eye and a sympathetic tremble in his voice, "Do you expect to go in for something serious and big and really worthwhile like political cartooning some day?" I was just an insignificant lowbrow drawing idi­otic beings with putty noses and lumpy heads. The famous men of the day were dealing with national subjects in their car­toons. No newspaper cartoon was consid­ered great unless it included one or all of the following symbols: the Republican elephant; the Democratic mule; Uncle Sam; the goddess of Justice; the earth; Father Time; George Washington; Abra­ham Lincoln; and the Dawn of a new Era.

The few comic artists whose daily car­toons were being published at that time were looked upon as youthful freaks who appealed to a low order of intelligence with their odd creations. The work seemed to have no definite purpose other than to give the heavy thinker a little relaxation by let­ting him see the results of the workings of a disordered brain. The comics were not believed to have any relation to human life as it really exists.

The comic artist was supposed to be de­veloping himself with his pen so that some day he could draw a picture of the White House or something else that had a little sense to it. All his preparatory work in the comic line was a total loss.

Of course, there were great political car­toonists in those days. And there are a few today. But people were inclined to gauge the bigness of a man's work by the greatness of the symbols he employed rath­er than by the work itself and the idea in back of it all. A cartoonist could draw a picture of the President of the United States looking at Niagara Falls and call it "Why Not?" and people would say it's big stuff because he handled great subjects. A man who drew pictures of United States Senators was a greater cartoonist than a man who drew pictures of police judges.

As for the comic artist who drew pic­tures of people and things that had no fancy titles at all, he was just a plain nut.

If anyone tells you that the world hasn't gone ahead a little at least, just tell him he's talking through his brown fedora.

People have learned that the comic art­ist is not shooting at the moon. He is try­ing to hit something that is very near you — in fact somewhere inside of you near the heart. The seemingly small things that he centers his drawings around are really much bigger than the Republican elephant and the Democratic mule. They are as big as life itself. And they are much closer to the average man than any composite pic­ture of the whole universe.

The newspaper readers seem to have got­ten wise to some of the political bunk at least. They won't bother about a political cartoon now unless they know there is a good idea in back of it. You can show them a whole row of Uncle Sams and in­stead of saying, " Isn't it wonderful!" they will ask, "How do you play it?"

The comic man is out of the nut class because people now know that the symbols he uses are really the symbols of human nature. They are very definite and they strike home. They are the smallest and at the same time the biggest things we know. Why, once in a while, they even ask us to come to dinners and meetings and say something!

Don't think for a minute I'm trying to convey the idea that a comic artist is a man with a message. Heaven forbid! We'll leave that distinction to visiting statesmen from Europe.

But the home folks know what we are getting at and no one ever asks any more when we expect to branch out into something big like political cartooning.

I met three political cartoonists yester­day who were trying to get into the comic game.

[of course it turns out that Rube was making jokes on himself in this article since he eventually decided that he wanted to be an editorial cartoonist and forsook the comic strippers' fraternity]

Labels: News of Yore

Chaos may have just been another in the parade of Far Side wannabes, but the feature and its creator have an interesting biography.

Brian Shuster claimed to have created Chaos in 1989, but the earliest evidence I can find for its existence is in 1994 when it was being offered by Daily Features Syndicate of Los Angeles. Although Editor & Publisher talked of it as if it were a real syndicate, complete with marketing manager spokesman, a little Google sleuthing revealed that the syndicate was actually based in a private home on a residential street in LA.

So presumably Shuster was self-syndicating his Far Side knockoff, a seven day a week feature in which the Sunday was little more than a color daily (see above). But Shuster had a knack for marketing. When Gary Larson announced that he was retiring his feature, Shuster started a marketing campaign guaranteed to both get him clients and infuriate Larson and his syndicate.

Shuster sent out a marketing piece to prospective clients in which a letter from Gary Larson himself said that Chaos was the feature that he endorsed for taking over his spot. Only problem was that the Larson who penned the letter was not the Gary Larson, just a guy Shuster picked out of the LA phone book.

Shuster claimed it was all meant as a light-hearted joke and nothing came of Universal's threats of a lawsuit. It did, however, seem to work like a charm. Shuster boasted in 1995 that he now had 220 client papers for his feature, an astounding number in the fractured marketplace looking for Far Side replacements.

With that number of papers taking his feature it was inevitable that the major syndicates would come calling, and King Features carried away the dubious prize of Chaos. Only problem was that Shuster seemed to already be losing interest in working on it himself. He later claimed that by this time he just wrote the gags and had several cartoonists drawing the panels. Note on the samples above the credit to "PanGaniBan".

King Features dropped the feature in 1996 after a very short run and Shuster went back to self-syndication. He was now more focused on the internet, though. Shuster started a site running his Chaos cartoons and also started some porno websites. Chaos finally ended in 1998, but the porn sites lived on. Facing a huge number of competitors in that market, Shuster realized that he needed to bring his mind for marketing to bear on the problem of gaining traffic.

Shuster was apparently a technical whiz as well as full of marketing savvy. Though few know his name, he was quite possibly the most hated man in America for several years because Brian Shuster has the distinction of having created the web pop-up ad. Though he failed to properly protect the idea and thus didn't become a zillionaire, few are interested in disputing the claim that he was the first to annoy millions of users with those incessantly appearing gimmicks.

The pop-up porn king eventually left all that behind him and is now running a virtual reality social networking site called utherverse.com.

You can read an interview with Shuster here: Porn's Prince of Pop-Ups Speaks.

Labels: Obscurities

Order Jim Ivey's new book Cartoons I Liked at Lulu.com or order direct from Ivey and get the book autographed with a free original sketch.

Labels: Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics

Two absolutely delightful cartoons on this Herriman Saturday, both published in the April 7 1907 Sunday edition of the Examiner. The first commemorates the Angels' opening day parade -- unfortunately they lost to Oakland 4 to 2, but thems the breaks. All sorts of local luminaries caricatured in this one, all captioned with prime Herriman lunacy.

The second, a half-pager comic strip from the Automobile section, reads like a storyboard from a Warner Brothers cartoon!

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

Dick Kulpa has a very long and varied resume, and the first item of note on that list was his self-syndicated comic strip Double Eagle & Company. He created the daily strip for the Loves Park Post in 1975, then switched it to the Belvidere Daily Republican later that year. The strip was syndicated to at least one other paper under the banner of Artline Screen Printing and ended sometime in 1976.

The strip was about the obsessive love of teenager Francis Fink for his 1960 Chevy. The 70s were a car-mad decade for American teens, the last in which the low cost of beat-up old cars, insurance and gas made it easy for the average teen to own and maintain his own personal 2-ton best friend. Although I fell into the Detroit iron obsession a little later in the 80s, I can assure you that the saga of Francis Fink was true to life -- I felt exactly the same way about my 1957 Chevy Belair, which I named Rosinante, not to mention my 1968 Thunderbird, 1967 Mustang and 1970 Chevelle, all of which qualified as consuming passions over the years. I understand why this strip resonated with kids despite the sometimes awkward art and silly gags -- I would have been a fan myself if I'd been in Illinois in 1975.

Kulpa was too busy to stick with the strip long. In 1977 he was elected to the Loves Park City Council and later to the county board. He gained national publicity for occasionally donning super-hero tights and calling himself Alder-Man. In the 80s he did short stints on a pair of syndicated strips, Star Trek and Legend of Bruce Lee (the latter was uncredited). He also became involved with the supermarket tabloid Weekly World News.

Later Kulpa returned to syndicated strips on The Ghost Story Club, and then took over the Mad-imitator humor magazine Cracked in an unfortunate episode I imagine he'd like to put behind him. You can read more thorough bios of Kulpa on Wiki and at the Dick Kulpa Fun Club where you'll also find additional Double Eagle strips.

Labels: Obscurities