Stripper's Guide

Thursday, February 20 1908 -- Battling Nelson, coming off a string of losses, is desperate to have a win under his belt, especially against Jimmy Britt, who has beaten him twice. He begins his serious training a scant two weeks before the fight, finally laying off the high life. His sparring partner, Kid Dalton, finally has to earn his keep.

In the saga of the weasel hat crack, Hen Berry has now apparently gone so far as to accuse Mayor Harper of having started the rumor.

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles

Ralph Yardley -- 10/10/1908

Ralph Yardley -- 10/17/1908

In 1908 the San Francisco Call, a real also-ran sorta rag in that city of great newspapers,decided to attract children to its Saturday issues with a kid's section. I guess their Sunday issue, which featured the Pulitzer Sunday funnies, was doing well, and so they decided to try to get the kids to annoy their parents for the Call two days a week instead of one.

The new Saturday kids section, with spot color on the cover, featured a comic strip starring a dog named Alonzo, titled (at first) Have You Seen Alonzo?, and Ralph Yardley, who was apparently the head of the art department at the time, took on the task of drawing the weekly strip.

Although the strip is no classic, and Yardley certainly didn't wrack his brain for days coming up with the gags, it seemed to appeal to the tykes, and Alonzo became the mascot and weekly front-page feature of the section.

Yardley handled the strip for the first ten months, from October 10 1908 to June 12 1909, and then handed it off to a young and inexperienced kid named Paul Terry. Of course, Terry would someday go on to bigger and better things as the head of the Terrytoons studio, but at the time he was a wet behind the ears 22-year old with minimal drawing ability.

Charlie Judkins, whose blogpost alerted me to the existence of this feature (which can be read in its entirety in the digital Call available from the Library of Congress), tells me that Paul Terry recalled the strip in a 1970 interview. Sixty years later Terry's memory might have been just a bit hazy -- his recollection was that he did the strip for King Features after moving to New York. Did he revive the feature there after he left San Francisco? I tend to doubt it. I have no record of Terry creating any continuing series for Hearst, and certainly not for King Features, which didn't even exist until 1916. In fact I can find no reliable record of Terry working for Hearst at all. The Wikipedia entry for Terry says he worked for the New York Press, which it calls a Hearst paper. Nope, it wasn't. Any animation fans out there have anything to contribute on the subject?

Paul Terry -- 6/19/1909

Paul Terry -- 6/26/1909

Paul Terry -- 7/3/1909

Paul Terry stayed on the feature for a little less than a year. His last strip was published on May 7 1910, and the next week there was a different cartoonist, but from the same family, taking over. John Terry had a much less distinguished career ahead of him than brother Paul, but at the time he carried on Alonzo with, if anything, greater competence than his brother.

John Terry -- June 26 1910

John didn't stay on the gig as long as his brother, less than two months in fact. His last strip was on July 3 1910. Following him was a cartoonist named Mike Randall, another relative short-timer who only signed the feature until October 30 1910.

Mike Randall -- July 10 1910

Next up was a fellow who signed himself just 'Tam'. Tam wasn't altogether keen on comic strips, it seems, because under his stewardship Alonzo's adventures started to turn into illustrated stories. At some points Alonzo was reduced to barely more than a mascot. Tam stuck around for over a year, ending his tenure on February 24 1912. He was spelled once, on August 26 1911, by a guest cartoonist who ended up being the next one to take over the feature. Jim Navoni ran the show from March 2 to June 8 1912.

Tam -- 11/6/1910

Tam -- 8/12/1911

Jim Navoni -- 4/27/1912

After Navoni only one additional cartoonist signed the feature, and then only with his initials. Somebody named H.M. stuck around for three months, ending on September 28 1912. [HM has now been identified as Herbert Morton Stoops -- thanks Charlie!]. After H.M. the strip was unsigned for the last month of its existence. On November 2 1912 the final appearance of Alonzo was run in what was also the last Saturday kid's section of the Call.

Herbert Morton Stoops -- 9/18/1912

I think the most impressive thing about this frankly forgettable feature is that the quality, which granted was never stellar, was maintained at a decent level through a parade of seven cartoonists. The design of the character never went way off base and the cartooning was uniformly decent. That's no mean feat when cartoonists are playing musical chairs.

Tomorrow: an Ink-Slinger Profile of Ralph Yardley, the originator of Alonzo.

Labels: Obscurities

Here's on to be filed under "Unexplained Failures". Tyler Two was a very well-drawn strip that featured a smart-mouthed, fantasy-prone kid, a neurotic single dad, and a small cast of generally solid supporting characters. The creator, Leslie Harris, had a wonderful drawing style that took full advantage of his space, and an ear for dialog and pacing that put across his punchlines with considerable verve. So why in the world did this strip come and go in 1985 with more stealth than a B-1 bomber?

Ignoring the possibility that Leslie Harris (of whom I know nothing) decided to pack it in for a personal reason or a dispute with the syndicate, or that Tribune Media Services didn't promote the strip at all, I can come up with only a few dim possibilities.

Could a strip about a single parent family have been still a little too touchy for newspaper editors at this time? They were the Reagan years, after all, when the 2.5 child, dual parent (one of each gender please) family unit was being heavily touted as the answer to all our problems.

Or was it the frankly awful title? Tyler was the surname of our stars, and Tippecanoe their imaginary home city. Harris failed to point this out on anything like a regular basis (I had to read six weeks of dailies in the syndicate sales package to figure out to what the title referred), so was the obscure title the whole problem? A bad title is not to be sniffed at as a significant handicap -- look how long it took for Peanuts to catch on.

Could it have been secondary character Hattie Wunder? She was one of those energetic, hip grandma types that we all had to suffer with over and over and over in the 1980s and 90s. I don't know about you, but those sprightly grannies drove me bonkers -- I would gladly consign every episode of Golden Girls to the flames of Hell with nary a second thought.

Could it have been the occasional gag that would offend the grannies (you know, the actual, real grumpy ones, not the hipster TV sort)? I was surprised to find a gag referring to a "Honk if You're Horny" bumper  sticker made the cut for the syndicate sales pack, for instance.

Well, whatever it was that put the Mark of the Cancelled on Tyler Two, it seems like an unfortunate waste of talent. I can't even give you start and end dates. I can verify only that the Sunday ran at least June-August 1985 (EDIT: you'll find likely start and end dates in the comments section below). I've seen not one single daily printed in a newspaper; all the ones above are from the aforementioned syndicate sales package.

I said up top that I know nothing about Lawrence Harris, but that's not strictly true. From the syndicate promo we have this scant information: "the 32-year old creator graduated with honors in fine arts from the University of Pennsylvania ... He smokes cigars and lives somewhere in modern America, which he knows very well." This description is accompanied by a moody, dramatically lit photo that looks like an LP liner pic of The Band member Robbie Robertson circa 1972.

Labels: Obscurities

Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles

Josephus Bugle had a very short run -- not because it was was a bad strip, just ill-timed.

When World War I ended in November 1918, a lot of papers were caught flat-footed holding war-themed material. Some of it got dumped, but a lot of it ended up being published, sometimes slightly re-jiggered to reflect the new situation. Luckily, anything that didn't actually show doughboys under fire could be run pretty much as is, because American soldiers remained in Europe by the thousands until well into 1919. As you can imagine, it was a task of Herculean proportions to shut down operations and get all those fellows back across the Atlantic.

Josephus Bugle bears the mark of having been produced while the war was still being fought. The star of the show was a hyper-patriotic fellow who wanted to do anything he could to assist in the war effort on the home front. Never mind that there wasn't a war anymore by the time the strips actually ran. There was, after all, still plenty of work to be done apres la guerre. So the Chicago Tribune, which probably gave cartoonist Pete Llanuza the green light to start producing a Sunday page of Josephus Bugle in late 1918, ended up running the even dozen produced episodes of the strip from May 4 to July 20 1919. They probably didn't have much choice. The Tribune inaugurated a new enlarged Sunday comics section on May 4, growing from four to eight pages, and they needed material. Apparently Josephus Bugle had been earmarked for the expanded section for quite some time.

As soon as the dozen Josephus Bugle strips were used up, Llanuza started a new strip for the enlarged section. His new strip also had a very short life, but that's a subject for another day.

Tomorrow: an Ink-Slinger Profile of Pete Llanuza

Labels: Obscurities

Labels: Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics