Stripper's Guide

Sunday, July 21 1907 -- Herriman contributes a huge cartoon on city folk who get the urge to go out in the woods to blow away some wildlife.

Monday, July 22 1907 -- Herriman spends a day deep sea fishing with the Southern California Rod and Reel Club. In the accompanying story it is mentioned that the club members had a casting competition. Sherman Baker, that fellow caricatured on the right end, won the contest by casting an unbelievable 198 feet. I don't know much about fishing, but that sure sounds incredible to me. According to the article, the cast was one-handed and used a 2.5 ounce sinker.

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

Maybe some obscurities are better left unearthed, but for better or worse here we have Old Black Joe. If not for all the racist trappings this would be a delightful strip. The gag is strong, Joe is a funny fellow, his song is snappy, and the art is crude yet exuberant.

Old Black Joe ran in the World Color Printing Sunday sections starting on December 1 1907. It ran semi-regularly until April 26 1908, then disappeared for a long time before two final episodes appeared on November 22 1908 and February 7 1909. Alfredo Castelli has the series running in 1910 in Here We Are Again, but I've not seen it in the 1910 WCP sections.

The creator of Old Black Joe signed himself only "Williamson", and sometimes didn't bother signing at all. There were at least three Williamsons working in newspaper comics in the first quarter of the century, but I don't know which if any of them this might be. Frank M. Williamson had a vaguely similar style (if you call utter primitivism a style), but I wouldn't bet a nickel on that guess being right.

Labels: Obscurities

The Barnyard Club is one of those features that, if we were to be able to unlock its secrets, might be very revealing of the early comic strip business. It was summer 1898, and R.F. Outcault was in the process of moving back and forth between Pulitzer's New York World and Hearst's New York Journal. Somehow in the middle of all this Outcault created a pair of features that, as far as we know, ran only in the Philadelphia Inquirer. We've covered this subject before when we talked about The Country School, and at the time mentioned the existence of a second series by Outcault. Well, here it is, once more courtesy of Cole Johnson.

The Barnyard Club ran July 17 to November 6 1898. An odd side-note (or maybe its crucial -- who knows?) is that J.B. Lowitz produced a Sunday panel by the same name for the New York World earlier that year.

Labels: Obscurities

Good thing there's no commandment against being a copycat. Or is that covered under the coveting clauses? The Lesson The Bible Teaches seems to have been created to compete with the surprise 1954 success of John Lehti's Sunday bible strip, Tales From The Great Book.

The creators of this feature completely missed the reason for Lehti's success. Lehti's feature, at least within the confines of Bible stories, was full of action, whereas The Lesson The Bible Teaches was utterly static, a series of talking head panels with enough yada-yada to make most Sunday funnies readers pass right by to find Pogo and Peanuts.

The Lesson The Bible Teaches made its pilgrimage into the Sunday comics section on September 25 1955 (a year and a half after Tales From The Great Book debuted). It was distributed by Hall Syndicate and was "by permission of the International Council of Religious Education." A Google of this organization results in a list of very long dry PDF documents. Turns out this researcher isn't committed to the project to the extent of reading them to find out what this council was all about.

The author of the strip, R. Paul Caudill, was a preacher, missionary and writer. You'll find a capsule bio and photo of him on this Wake Forest Alumni News page.

If there is a bright spot in this strip, it's the well-drawn art. Despite being hampered by scripts full of talking heads and long soliloquies, artist Ralph Keenon managed to make the strip look attractive, though perhaps a little stiff. I can find no information or other credits for this Keenon fellow. Is it my imagination or does Keenon's art look an awful lot like the work of Jay Disbrow?

Unlike Lehti's livelier competition, The Lesson The Bible Teaches was a flop, and deservedly so. The latest strip I've been able to find is from November 1956, and I assume it didn't last much longer than that. Anyone know a definite end date?

Labels: Obscurities

How Busy Can Man Get? Answers by Lariar
By Ogden J. Rochelle (E&P, 3/19/49)

A job description of Lawrence Lariar would be pattern for most of the tasks in the production of comic strips. Few, if any, continuity writers bring as much experience and training to their work as Lariar. "Bodyguard," an adventure strip with a straight man, distributed by New York Herald Tribune Syndicate, is authored by Lariar with the sure touch of one who is both writer and illustrator.

Yet, the strip, which became a daily feature March 7 after running 10 months as a Sunday page, is drawn by John Spranger, 27-year-old war veteran, whom Lariar recruited from the comic books.

Draws, Writes, Teaches

Lariar had 15 years of cartooning and illustrating when in 1942 he began writing. He is now author of 16 published books, has a serial in the current Liberty magazine, and is working on another book, "Careers in Cartooning," for Dodd-Mead & Co. He also is executive director of a professional school of cartooning in New York City.

"Bodyguard" has the plot of a mystery story, begins in India, is sprinkled with exotic and American beauties, and has a central character that's different — a saucy, precocious, fat child with enough on the ball to run a kingdom and a child's desire to play ball. It is a swift moving story, a vehicle giving scope to Lariar's broad background.

Cartoon editor of Liberty for the past seven years, Lariar began the Thropp Family there, first comic strip to run as a continuity in a national magazine.

As a free-lance (1930-1938) Lariar did advertising and direct mail cartoons, comic strips and spot drawings and contributed political cartoons to the New York Journal-American.

In 1935, Brooklyn-born Lawrence Lariar married his agent, Susan Mayer of Brooklyn. They have two children. Lariar says his wife was one of the first cartoon agents in the magazine gag panel field, and was a gag creator on her own.

Three Young Adventurers

Lariar's training began in the New York School of Fine and Applied Art. For the first six months he was on commercial illustration, then switched to cartooning. After graduation he started out with two buddies, Jack Arthur, now a school teacher in the New York system, and Adolph Schus, now a designer in fabric house.

The trio set up a cartoon agency in a flat in the 80's in New York, sold vignettes to College Life, for which the editor wrote two-line captions. They also got in America's Humor magazine, primarily because it couldn't pay as much as Life or Judge, says Lariar. Arthur, the oldest of the three (he was 21) would contact various outlets and say he represented a dozen different artists, which Lariar, Arthur and Schus tried to prove. One of their "artists" was named Baron de Shebago, who drew a full page of zanies.

In 1927, Lariar went to Paris on a scholarship to the school of dynamic symmetry. He was accompanied by Arthur. Later, the third musketeer, Schus, joined them. They went into the same routine in Paris, and did a big business with British magazines and Fleetway House, then one of the big magazine publishing houses of the world. Much of their work was for The Looker-On, which folded but paid off — fortunately for the sake of their fares back home. They did work, too, for Boulevardier, a Paris publication operated by Erskine Gwynn, an American.

Come Home for Depression

The trio caromed back to New York in October, 1929, a few days after the boom had burst.

"To make a living, we did everything," says Lariar. "We had a service for printers, drew cartoons for calendars, played messenger and did some of the first work for the slicks."

The boys hit upon a deal that brought home the bacon when they did a series of cartoon postcards, designed to save Boy Scouts time in writing home to mother. They sold over a million of them in a direct-mail campaign.

Flushed with success, they then embarked on a venture that sank them. In Paris, Lariar had picked up a book reproducing the etchings of a Rembrandt exposition. The plates were excellent, and they had sold many of them to friends back home without any other effort than razoring them out of the book. Reproduction by a photographic process was expensive, and they moved in trade as slowly as coal buckets from a hardware merchant's shelves in the summer time.

"I still see them in shops around town," remarks Lariar sadly. "They're very good, too."

So the combine broke up, and Lariar rented offices on 45th Street where he turned to strip cartooning, drew some of the first comic books in 1933, and for Stuart Shaftell's Young America created "Inspector Keene of Scotland Yard."

He took the Walt Disney aptitude test in 1938 and went out to Hollywood briefly. Not liking the Disney factory approach, he soon returned to New York.

He emceed the CBS television show, "Draw Me Another," in 1947, and created the "Happy Headlines" show.

He is editor of a juvenile book publishing company, director of sketch units for hospitalized servicemen, and was president of the American Society of Magazine Cartoonists (1943-1946).

Among his writings is a winner of the Dodd Mead $1,000 Red Badge Prize.

He claims he has several hours' leisure time every day.

Labels: News of Yore

I don't normally do a post just to tell you to go check another site; seems a bit of a cop-out. But I can't let the March 26 post on Yesterday's Papers go by without directing you to it. John Adcock has unearthed a superb 1935 article about newspaper comics in something called New Outlook. The article, written by William E. Berchtold, is incredibly well-researched. That's something you just never see from that era (about comics, that is).

Go and enjoy, and then we'll get back to business as usual tomorrow.

Jim Ivey's new book, Graphic Shorthand, is available from Lulu.com for $19.95 plus shipping, or you can order direct from Ivey for $25 postpaid. Jim Ivey teaches the fundamentals of cartooning in his own inimitable style. The book is 128 pages, coil-bound. Send your order to:


Also still available, Jim Ivey's career retrospective Cartoons I Liked, available on Lulu.com or direct from Jim Ivey for $20 postpaid. When ordered from Ivey direct, either book will include an original Ivey sketch.

Labels: Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics