Stripper's Guide

Saturday, March 7 1908 -- In the first exhibition game between the Chicago White Sox and the Angels, hometown fans get the thrill of seeing their local boys make good, posting a 'W'. The White Sox players have been on a train for days, and haven't practiced since the end of the previous season, but still .... !!

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

Jack Wilson alit at NEA for a short stint in 1915-16,and created a few features, including Andy the Ad Man, for them. Now if you read these samples you'll wonder why I call the strip by that name. There is no indication that Andy is in the advertising business, and besides, the strip is clearly titled Andy the Wise Guy.

Well, all I can tell you is that the strip bore that name in the NEA archives and in quite a few papers. Maybe Andy's advertising angle only lasted the first few strips, and the Atlanta Journal, the paper from which these samples originated, had the sense to come up with a different name. I dunno. But that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Andy the Ad Man ran from October 22 to December 10 1915. After that the strip was revamped, dropping the Andy character and making Harrigan the star. And that strip will be covered some other time.

Thanks to Cole Johnson for the samples!

Kishio Christopher Ishii was born in Caruthers, Fresno County, California on August 11, 1919, according to the Archives of American Art (birthplace) and the California Birth Index, 1905-1995 at Ancestry.com. He was in Japan when the 1920 U.S. Federal Census was enumerated. On June 12, 1920, his family sailed from Kobe, Japan and arrived in Seattle, Washington on July 1. He was the youngest of four children born to Koshiro and Naka. His father was a farmer. They had visited his father's mother in Toyotamura Kagawa-ken.

Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles

Sadayuki Thomas Okamoto was born in Kent, Washington on March 15, 1916. His Japanese name is from the record, Japanese Americans Relocated During World War II. The birthplace was on a 1918 passport application, although the birth year was recorded as 1915. His birthdate is from Washington Births, 1907-1919. According to the application, he lived in Hiroshima-ken, Japan since September 28, 1916. He, his mother, older brother and sister arrived in Seattle, Washington on March 16, 1918, as recorded on a passenger ship list. All records are from Ancestry.com.

Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles

Robert "Bob" Kuwahara was born in Tokyo, Japan on August 12, 1901, according to Kuwahara's biographical sketch at the In Memoriam page of the National Cartoonists Society (NCS) website. Wikipedia said his Japanese name was Rokuro. The NCS bio said he, "…came to good ol' U.S.A. in 1910…held a book upside down the first day in school but managed to get away with a sheepskin from the Los Angeles Polytechnic High School in 1921…" Asian American Art, 1850-1970 (2008) said he lived in Santa Barbara, California from 1910 to 1914, then in Los Angeles. The newsletter, Santa Anita Pacemaker (California), July 1, 1942, published "Former Studio Artist Now Supervises Art Classes" which said, "…Kuwahara got his start as a cartoonist for the Poly Optimist, a Los Angeles high school newspaper. He attended the Otis Art institute then went to New York where he did portrait work for well-known book publishers."

Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles

It is the nature of the newspaper comics business that if a new feature catches on big, me-too features will follow. And there's at least a slightly more practical reason for the practice than might at first meet the eye. It is easy to dismiss imitation features as the product of people trying to make a quick buck off of someone else's good idea, and that's certainly a big part of the strategy. But there's also the factor of newspaper features being sold under exclusive contracts. For example, let's say that Ripley's Believe It or Not is a big hit (that's not much of a stretch). Now let's say the San Francisco Chronicle has bought the exclusive rights to it in their market. The other San Francisco papers, not to mention Oakland and other surrounding cities, are frozen out. So when another syndicate comes along with a similar feature, and practically every other syndicate did jump on the 'odd facts' bandwagon tout de suite, those papers are downright eager to counter the Chronicle's popular new feature with something similar.

Nowadays, when only a few markets like New York and Washington have multiple newspapers, the exclusive contract is a very minor factor, and consequently you don't see many outright copycat features anymore. But back in the day, me-too features fulfilled a pretty important role in competitive markets.

So I said all that so that I could say this: here's a feature that takes "me-too"ism in a weird direction. Miki is a bald-faced attempt to copy Crockett Johnson's great Barnaby, of that there can be no doubt. The weird part is that Barnaby was never a particularly successful strip -- speaking, of course, financially, not artistically. Why would you market a copy of a strip that runs in, oh, let's be charitable and just say less than a hundred papers.

Misguided as it seems, the syndicate, George Matthew Adams Service, wasn't exactly saddled with a long list of big-selling features in the mid-40s, so maybe a strip that had a chance to sell in a few big markets because of the copycat angle seemed worth it. If that was the idea, I guess the few papers they did sell on that basis (for instance, the Brooklyn Eagle in the NYC market) seem to have made it worthwhile to the tune of a five year run. The strip debuted on March 26 1945 and ended on July 1 1950.

Me-too features are rarely memorable, for obvious reasons. Hobbled from the start with the mission of duplicating another feature, the cartoonist not feeling any sense of ownership, what can one expect? If not outright disaster, certainly a pedestrian feature. So was Miki one of them? Sadly, very much so. Everything that made Barnaby great was missing from Miki. The great characters, the magic and whimsy, the nostalgia for childhood -- all utterly missing from Miki.

Creator Bob Kuwahara worked on the strip under the pseudonym Bob Kay for political reasons; but also, I'm guessing, he was content to not be identified with it. At the end of World War II, the American newspaper reader was not going to take kindly to an Asian name on the comics page, and that probably suited Kuwahara just fine in this case.  

Miki seems to be embarrassed of itself. The doppelgangers for Barnaby and Mr. O'Malley -- Miki and Uncle Harry -- are entirely devoid of personality, which is no great loss because they appear in the strip as seldom as possible. The setup to the typical story has Miki learning of a problem, telling Uncle Harry about it, and Harry does some magic that will fix the situation eventually. That business is usually transacted in a matter of two to three strips. Then the story, with Miki and Uncle Harry now offstage, goes on for weeks.

If Kuwahara was trying to spotlight his other characters, Miki's parents and a buddy, Mr. Morris, in lieu of Miki, that would be understandable. They, at least, weren't created as knock-offs. The problem is, though, that they don't have personalities either. They all seem to sleepwalk through the stories struggling to appear even one-dimensional. They seem like disgruntled actors who are trying to be fired from the production. Maybe this was Kuwahara trying to kill the strip. If it was, he was certainly using slow-acting poison.

NB: Sorry about the missing art on the sample strips. They came from the Youngstown Vindicator, which trimmed the strip bottoms in order to fit more on a page. Unfortunately I have no runs from a paper that printed the strips complete.

Labels: Obscurities

Join us next Sunday for a sampling of Ivey's Claude Kirk cartoons!!