Stripper's Guide

Here's a rather bizarre item from the crumbly depths of Cole Johnson's collection. Bringing Up Baby illustrates odd behavioral tics of babies, supposedly submitted by readers. The panels seem to read like the start of an advice column, where someone tells momma how to deal with the problem -- except there's no column; this is it. Is a baby who can't roll off his back supposed to be funny? Heck, I'd be thinking rickets. As if having a baby that looks like Nikita Krushchev isn't bad enough...

The feature was, I guess, self-syndicated by this R.G. Miller fellow who appears on the copyright slug. And apparently Miller needed to farm out the art to a "professional" who very wisely goes only by his initials, "J.W.", when he bothers to sign at all.

Believe it or not, this feature did actually appear in a few papers and not just in a farm weekly owned by some doting relative of Mr. Miller. My running dates, January 30 1922 to August 12 1922, are based on the run in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Labels: Obscurities

New Goldberg Machines Tie In With News
By Jane McMaster (E&P 7/22/50)

One day nearly half a century ago, mining engineering students at the University of California
had the privilege of viewing the operation of a barodik—a complicated machine for weighing the earth. And looking on glumly was Student Reuben Lucius Goldberg of San Francisco, who didn't take as he should to test tubes, density of air, chemical combustion. He was in private revolt against the marvelous apparatus. "I kept thinking, "hell, I don't care how much the earth weighs,'" he recalls.

But some years later, Rube Goldberg was cashing in on hypothetical barodiks and his own personal observation that most people seem to do things the hard way. As syndicated cartoonist with the New York Evening Mail and later the Journal, he drew machines that would perform in amazingly complicated ways such simple feats as cleaning a straw hat or pulling a cork out of a bottle. The mythical inventor was Professor Lucifer Gorganzola Butts.

Joined 'Sun'
His machine production, despite the popularity, came to a virtual standstill—except in ads—about 15 years ago and Mr. Goldberg had meanwhile moved into other fields: he was comic strip cartoonist of the highly popular "Boob McNutt" before 1934 when he quit cartooning for magazine writing. In 1938 he became editorial cartoonist—the more serious part of the trade—for the New York Sun and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948.

But the name "Rube Goldberg" has remained synonymous with funny looking gadgets. And on July 15, the cartoon burlesquer of the machine age was back. Hearst Newspapers in New York, Chicago .and Los Angeles began a new weekly feature: "Rube Goldberg Views the News for His Latest Invention." Readers saw a revolving disc with a mechanical arm able to set off a rocket which hit a dice box. And a pulley arrangement managed to fix it so a poor old taxpayer lost his shirt.

It was Rube Goldberg, all right, with a wild type of humor based on incongruity (and, he insists, cold logic). But it wasn't a mere revival of an old favorite. Professor L. G. Butts was out, and peopling the six-column cartoon instead were leaders in the news. (From piano-playing Truman to Joe DiMaggio). The feature, through Goldberg ropes and levers and pulleys, tied the news together in a way to make readers' eyes pop.

The new weekly feature resulted from, among other things, the sale of the New York Sun to the New York World Telegram early this year. At that time Mr. Goldberg accepted a three-a-week political cartooning post with the New York Journal-American and King Features (down from his five-a-week for the Sun and BELL). It was agreed then that he'd get up a feature too. Its format was later suggested by William R. Hearst, Jr., Journal-American publisher, when Mr. Goldberg objected to a straight revival of his old-timer. The new element of basing it on current news topics and non-partisan politics puts it in the class of something created— not a mere repeater, the cartoonist points out.

That tenet of the 67-year-old cartoonist seems to go all the way back to his childhood. A brother was the accepted comedian in the family circle but "while they were laughing at so-called funny jokes and songs, I was finding a face I thought was funny in its own right. I wanted to create something original instead of just retelling. . . ."

Later, a one-man rebellion against the commonplace brought cheers from newspaper readers. Working late once at the Mail to fill his entire allotted page ("You don't have the stage now you had then," he says) he encountered an associate who asked, "You still here?" Rube replied without hesitation: "No, I'm up in a balloon shoeing a horse."

He converted the incident into a panel, titled "Foolish Question" to help fill up the lower half of the page (his sports cartoon took up half the page). "The public happened to be ready for that," says Mr. Goldberg, who firmly believes "You must come along at a time when the trend is in your direction." (Another of the "Foolish Question" series: "Did you hurt yourself?" put to a man who had just fallen out of the Flatiron Bldg.).

Mr. Goldberg has kindly crinkles around his eyes; two sons who use a different last name so they won't be trading on their father's fame; and great enthusiasm for the new feature. While humor within bounds is possible for editorial cartooning, he'll have range for a broader type in the "inventions."

And on a second level, some may find his zany correlation of the news representative of the state of the union. "People are sort of balled up in their minds," observes Mr. Goldberg. "We don't know what it's all about but we know we're in it up to our necks." Another trend may be in Mr. Goldberg's direction.

Labels: News of Yore

The Al Smith Service was a small syndicate that produced material for weekly papers. Smith, better known for his many years of work on Mutt & Jeff, ran the company as a sideline. He got into the syndicate business in 1951 and managed to keep it going after practically all the other weekly syndicates had long ago bit the dust.

Syndicates that produced material for weekly newspapers were never a particularly lucrative business. Small papers paid small rates, often under $10 per week for a whole menu of features. Worse yet, the weeklies had a well-deserved reputation for not even paying those small bills, so syndicate owners were just as busy in collections as producing material.

Al Smith offered an entire weekly page of material, including upwards of a half-dozen comic strips. At rates of $5-10 per client you can imagine how even with a large subscriber base the contributors were paid a pittance. Smith, however, managed to put together a stable of excellent cartoonists that made the offerings of other weekly services look pretty dismal.

One of those fine features was Deems by Tom Okamoto, a Japanese-American cartoonist who went by the name Tom Oka on this strip. Okamoto was an animator with Disney before World War II, then was put into a relocation camp for the duration. I don't know if he continued in animation after the war, but I presume he did (animation buffs, a little help?).

Okamoto opted to do the strip in pantomime, a genre that most cartoonists consider the hardest type of feature to produce on an ongoing basis. Okamoto, though, seemed to have a wonderful knack for it. His pantomime gags rarely seem stale or trite, and he came across with a lot of real winners (I particularly like the last sample above where he adds a delightful twist to the old 'painted into a corner' gag).

How hard is pantomime? Jim Ivey once told me that he had a long-standing order from a well-known cartoonist responsible for such a feature. He begged Jim to gather every pantomime strips he could find, no matter what feature or what subject, and send everything to him with bills for whatever he felt was fair. The cartoonist was that desperate for pantomime gags that he could mine for his feature.

Anyhow, back to Deems. The strip was a charter member of Al Smith's syndicated weekly page in 1951 (and after all these years I'm still trying to determine the exact start date of the offering). Deems was such a standout that Smith also tried to sell it as a daily, something he very rarely tried. The daily offering went on until 1955, but I've only found one paper that ran it daily, the Pasadena Independent, and then apparently only for a short stretch in 1952.

Deems was a part of the Al Smith weekly offering until 1980, a run of thirty years. Quite a few of Smith's strips were in re-runs by the 1970s, and I don't know if Okamoto's strip was one of those. However, if Okamoto did actually produce the strip for daily frequency from 1951-55, the backlog for the weekly would have been enough to keep it going with new material even if Okamoto never put pen to Bristol board again after that year.

Labels: Obscurities

Two books by Jim Ivey are available at Lulu.com or direct from the author:

Graphic Shorthand: Jim Ivey teaches the fundamentals of cartooning in his own inimitable style. 128 pages, coil-bound. Lulu $19.95 plus shipping, direct $25 postpaid.

Cartoons I Liked,Jim Ivey's career retrospective; he picks his own favorite cartoons from a 40-year editorial cartooning career. Lulu $11.95, direct $20 postpaid.

Send your order to:


When ordered direct, either book will include an original Ivey sketch.

Labels: Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics

Cartoonist F.W. Parks was employed by the NEA syndicate from 1918-1921 and produced a spate of unmemorable series, of which Betty and her Beau was the last. It began on October 27 1920 and ended sometime in 1921. The end date is unclear -- the NEA archives at Ohio State University are incomplete for 1921, so the best I can do is that it ended sometime in the second quarter. Checking newspapers that ran NEA material is inconclusive since this strip tended to run ROP -- I've seen it running as late as September.

Betty and her Beau is a pretty straightforward copy of other 'pretty girl playing the field' strips of the time, like Polly and her Pals, Petey Dink and Bedelia's Beaus. Though predating the era when every second strip seemed to be about a flapper, they shared the same sensibility, heralding (and ridiculing) the arrival of the liberated woman. Cartoonist Parks certainly didn't add anything to the genre. His strips, drawn in the basic Landon School bigfoot style, have gags that seem to be cribbed from the competition and almost invariably end with that hacky 'falling out of the panel' pratfall.

Labels: Obscurities

The early newspaper comic strip was a steaming, stinky soup of racial stereotyping, and if you follow this blog long enough you can bet eventually it'll feature a strip that will offend your ethnic group, no matter what it might be. Today we have one that goes after the Filipinos. Now you might think this is a rather obscure ethnic group in the U.S. to be picking on, but keep in mind that we had ourselves a little jingoistic war in the 1890s that put us sort of in charge of that nation all the way over on the other side of the globe. The Philippines were very much in the news in the 1900s and a smattering of comic strips did their part to promote disharmony between the peoples of the two nations.

I think Frank Crane, the creator of Philly Peno and Koko, thought he was terribly clever for coming up with the title. It was done for the Philadelphia North American, y'see, so the Philly part has a double-meaning that ... okay, it's not funny or clever at all, but I think it tickled him. The strip ran from February 18 to May 27 1906 -- perhaps after four months someone in the bullpen finally told him that it was a pretty lame bit of punnery.

As you can see from the samples, the strip didn't comment on the recent wars or really have anything to do with the Philippines particularly. Last I checked they don't have giraffes there, anyway. What we have is a mischievous kid and his pet monkey doing some pretty standard turns on the jungle theme, a favorite genre in the early days of newspaper strips. Other than some interesting panel design the strip has nothing at all to recommend it.

Tip of the hat to Cole Johnson for the samples. And if you hope to see more anytime soon from Cole's collection take a moment to send some positive thought waves to his computer -- it's been giving him fits lately.

Labels: Obscurities