Thursday, August 07, 2008

 

News of Yore 1952: Napoleon Moves to the Coast


"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.

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Not on today's topic...
With the death of Jack Kamen, I was wondering if his (and George Thatcher's) comic strip "Inspector Dayton" ever appeared in newspapers.
I notice you don't have it in the Mystery Strips, but I haven't found anything to assure me that it actually ran in the papers.
 
the only comment I can make it that Mrs. McBride was nine when Napoleon started? hmm....
refresh our memory how long did it run by Armstrong?
 
DD - After an initial run in 1938-39 the Eisner-Iger shop's Inspector Dayton strip was later advertised in E&P in 1942, 45-46, 48-50 by Pan-American Press Service as a daily and Sunday feature. It was still credited to George Thatcher and I've never found it running anywhere. I have a photocopy of the original art to one daily from this period which does indeed have Jack Kamen art. My guess is that it was actually being produced and was running in some foreign paper(s).

The feature was advertised one more time, in 1974, by Jerry Iger's Phoenix Features, obviously now offered in reprints.

Steven - Napoleon was put down in 1960. And I don't know if Clifford had himself a child bride or if Margot subscribed to the Jack Benny school of age reporting. From the grainy pic I'm gonna guess the latter.

--Allan
 
in the for what it's worth department, she wasn't the first bride of McBride. I havent been inspired enough to see what happened to the first Mrs. McBride.
 
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Wednesday, August 06, 2008

 

Obscurity of the Day: Uncle Jim and Tad and Tim

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?

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Hi. Hoping you can help me. In the 1950's , there was in the Sunday comics, a set of drawings of various characters with descriptions underneath the drawing which were in circles or boxes. They were mostly shoulders up black and white faces of people you might see around-really detailed and interesting characters. It was in the Star Ledger or one of those papers my Dad used to get. I have tried to find anyone who remembers them as I would love to know who drew them and the name of the "strip". Wish I could describe them better but I was very young at the time. Please help if you can. Thanks. Pat
 
Sounds to me like you may be looking for "Among Us Mortals" by W.E. Hill.

--Allan
 
Hello Allan-
The Washington (DC) Herald carried the Uncle Jim & Tad & Tim/The District School Boys page until 29 November 1914.
 
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Tuesday, August 05, 2008

 

News of Yore: Goldberg on Editorial Cartooning


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]

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And won a Pulitzer, no less! (New York Sun, '49, I think.)
 
Allan,
I would love to reprint this in the next issue of Stay Tooned! Magazine. May I?
 
Hi John -
Anything labeled "News of Yore" on my blog is a reprint of a vintage article so I make no claim to it.

--Allan
 
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Monday, August 04, 2008

 

Obscurity of the Day: Chaos

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 1997 after a 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.

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I've just found here so many strips I've ever read!
 
"PanGaniBan" is Wil Panganiban. He does a webcomic called "Frank & Steinway" now.

He mentions working on "Chaos" on his Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/wilpanganiban
 
The final "Chaos" from King Features ran on Sunday, July 6, 1997. The final daily from the day before has a farewell message from Brian Shuster announcing he's ending the strip and I found articles in papers announcing the strip's ending.

I found the last comic running in Stranton Times-Tribune and The Miami Herald.

A lot of papers that ran "Chaos" replaced it with "Zits"

https://imgur.com/a/gysLJ8q

If any papers ran it in 1998, I couldn't find it.


 
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Sunday, August 03, 2008

 

Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics


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.

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How much fun would it have been to smoke a stogie [and I don't even smoke] and listen to Jim and Jack exchange stories? Oh, the legends I could have built!
 
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Saturday, August 02, 2008

 

Herriman Saturday


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!

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Friday, August 01, 2008

 

Obscurity of the Day: Double Eagle & Company









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.

My Rosinante

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It's fascinating to hear that Dick Kulpa achieved "national publicity" when in fact he was all but unknown in his own town. Kulpa worked for a time as a graphic artist for the Testor Corp. in Rockford, Ill., which seems a natural since Testor makes model cars and everything that goes with them, and while I don't think I ever actually had a conversation with him, I spent my summers in the late 1970s working for Testor, when Kulpa was working in Testor's basement, where the graphics dept. was based back then. It wasn't until many years later that I was reminded that the Dick Kulpa who worked in the basement and drew the DOUBLE EAGLE comics was the same guy who took over CRACKED.
 
Hi Dave -
His stunting as "Alder-Man" may not have made an impression on you, but I remember seeing him featured on one of those "That's Incredible" type TV shows that proliferated for awhile back in the late 70s-early 80s. That would qualify as national publicity, no?

--Allan
 
I grew up across the street from the Kulpa family and was very close freinds. The Double-Eagle car was the biggest thing in our little Loves Park, IL neighborhood.
He also did a short strip for the post before the Double Eagle called the Barnaby Street Gang.
There were about 18 homes on our small Barnaby Dr. street. When we moved in there were 52 kids on that one street.
My last memory of the D-E was when the girl across the street from me dared me to put the Double Eagle in gear while it was parked in his drive. Showoff that I was, I obliged. I almost crapped my pants when the Double Eagle rolled out into the street and turned on it's own, coming within about 6 inches of hitting the car park in the street. I never admitted it to him, but he always knew, that if there was any hanky panky going on, I was probably not too far away. Sorry Rick.
Rick was always the studious one of the bunch, a hard worker and dedicated to his dream.
My third oldest brother still has the original first Duble Eagle comic strip that was published in the post. He also has the original drawing of the Barnaby Street Gang, in which I and a couple of my other brothers are in.
 
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