The Troubles of the Titmouse Twins is a rather interesting series, too. All I know is that it was running by August 1915, and Alfredo Castelli cites it as surviving into the next year. But the really interesting part is the creator. The strip is signed John Barton, a name that doesn't appear elsewhere in my listings. And obviously he was quite the accomplished cartoonist from this fine example. A Google search on the name quickly offered a tantalizing clue. Although no illustrator or cartoonist by that name was apparent, I did find that Johnny Gruelle, creator of Raggedy Ann, had the middle name of Barton.
Comparing the art on this sample to other Gruelle work of the time, I'm pretty well convinced that we have Gruelle here working undercover. Gruelle liked drawing mouse characters, they usually were drawn like these characters, and there are other telltale signs in the art, too.
Why would Gruelle have worked under a pseudonym? Simple -- he was gainfully employed by the New York Herald at the time producing one of their flagship features, Mr. Twee Deedle.
EDIT: Since determined that the feature ran 5/30 - 10/3/1915.
Good art-Spotting and research, Allan! Now that you point it out, it's obviously Johnny Gruelle's work.
ReplyDeleteThis is an ancient post, but nobody else seems to have linked it to Johnny Gruelle, and I think I can provide some additional insight...
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, I'm also convinced that it's Gruelle's work. The characters bear an uncanny similarity to his Woman's World serial "Johnny Mouse and the Woozgoozle" (which became the book Johnny Mouse and the Wishing Stick), the caterpillars have Gruelle creature eyes, and the landscapes look like his. The few other strips that I've found also bear his hallmarks. So...
Gruelle's New York Herald strip, "Mr. Twee Deedle," had been knocked down from a full-page comic to half a page, and in September 1915, it was abruptly canceled. I can't say if he was having trouble with the new Sunday editor in NY and did "Titmouse Twins" as a backup or if this moonlighting led to Twee Deedle's cancellation, but I can say that around the same time that Titmouse Twins went to press, his young daughter, Marcella, had become gravely ill from a vaccination. (It goes without saying that a sick kid costs extra money.) NY Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett blew up over Twee Deedle's cancellation, fired the new Sunday editor, and the strip was reinstated on November 7. Marcella died the following day. Twee Deedle ran until 1918, when the first Raggedy Ann book (which featured Marcella as the doll's owner) went to press.
It's very curious that Titmouse Twins ended right between Twee Deedle's cancellation and reinstatement, although clearly, this was not a popular strip. After A LOT of digging through the newspaper archive, I finally found that The Buffalo Times ran it. For 5 weeks. And their images are godawful. Other papers ran Newspaper Feature Service strips, but they all seem to have omitted this one. That sucks, I really wish I could find the rest of them.
Anyway, I'm a fan of Gruelle's and truly appreciate the heads-up that you've provided me with (so many years ago!).
Thanks for the details, Mr. Twee Deedle, quite a lot of drama associated with this almost forgotten feature of which I was unaware.
ReplyDelete--Allan