Stripper's Guide

Friday, September 18 1908 -- I have no idea why Herriman has chosen to dress up the Angels in stylish ladies' hats. Funny enough, I guess, but why? Why!?

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

Labels: Connie Sci-Friday

Harry J. Flemming was born in Buffalo, New York on November 17, 1886, according to his World War I and II draft cards at Ancestry.com. In the 1900 U.S. Federal Census, he was the second of three children born to Frederick and Rose. They lived in Buffalo, New York at 456 Glenwood. His father was a sign painter. The Buffalo Express (New York), June 4, 1907, reported the "Art School Commencement": "…Buffalo Art Students' League scholarships, representing four months free tuition in the school: …Men's life class, Urquhart Wilcox, instructor…honorable mention, Harry J. Fleming [sic]…." Academy Notes, Volume 4, Issue 12, 1909, published the article, "A Satisfactory Year in the Art School", which said, "…In the competitive examination for scholarships, given by the Art Students' League of New York—open to any student in the country—the Art School of Buffalo was awarded two scholarships on life work—one to Frank Minstermann and the other to Harry J. Flemming…."

Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles

Comics Scene: Give us a capsule history of your career and early background. You graduated from the Chicago Art Institute?

Burne Hogarth: No, I didn’t, as a matter of fact, I went to the Institute but it was only a kind of supplemental activity while I was really in the process of going to high school and at the same time doing art work.

I went to the Art Institute, started Saturday classes, at the age of 12 [1924]. My father thought that I had sufficient material to be able to enroll in classes like that and so he took down a bundle of stuff one day, on a Saturday, and said “Let’s go see what they will think about this.” And they accepted me—so that’s how my training began. Later I went to the Institute taking special courses, but I didn’t enroll in any formal classes. I couldn’t because we were not an affluent family and [the world] was headed into what was later to be known as the Great Depression.

CS: When did you know you had a talent for cartooning?

BH: Very early, when I was a kid, about four. My father would sit and design furniture and cabinets—he was a carpenter and cabinet maker—and I would ask for my own piece of paper and pencil. And when I would say, “What should I draw?” he would push a cartoon under my nose and say “Here, draw this.” So the cartoon became a kind of focus of attention.

CS: What happened after you left the Art Institute?

BH: I enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago. There I studied further drawing and then cartooning as another side of that. That’s when I met a cartoonist who was working for a syndicate and other people who were working for newspapers, and we used to get heavily into what syndication was all about…deadlines and magazines and doing samples and taking them around. I did gags and editorial cartoons, illustrations and that was all part of my portfolio.

I used to take this around and get some jobs in magazines and at the same time worked at odd jobs like driving a truck, selling newspapers and shoes—nothing was too high, too low, or too intermediate to do, because there was obviously an economic necessity.

One of the people I met at the Academy introduced me to one of the syndicates. I worked (for them) in his studio and I was his assistant. I was just an apprentice. I used to come in and sweep up. I learned lettering and I learned also there’s something about the craft of doing work on deadlines. And more than anything else I learned how to use pen, brush, different media and all sorts of things in a very professional way. Maybe two and a half, three years later I sold my first feature to Bonnet Brown. (Many sources called the studio “Barnet Brown” but there was no such company. The Bonnet-Brown Company was mentioned in The Economist, March 13, 1915; Certified List of Domestic and Foreign Corporations for the Year 1920; and The Miami Daily News, October 12, 1926.)

Hogarth has not been found in the 1930 census. According to a family tree at Ancestry.com, his father passed away in 1930. In the Comics Scene interview, Hogarth said he sold his first series to Bonnet-Brown, a commercial art studio, and it was called

Ivy Hemmanhaw. It was one panel, humorous gags about Americana. I was just 18 [1930]. It lasted about a year and then I went on to teach in the Emergency Educational Program, which came along about the time I was 20-21 [1932–1933], and I went to school, too. I went to Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and studied psychology, anatomy, sectional anatomy, and then things altered. The Depression got worse and under the urging of friends who had relocated to New York, I made my foray into the field in New York, into the syndicate field, very quickly—and that became the start of a whole new and different part of my life.

Around 1934, Hogarth moved to New York City. According to the 1940 census, he had lived there since 1935. In the Comics Journal interview, he said he visited, on a friend’s advice, King Features and found work. He met Lymon Young who offered him an assistant’s position on Tim Tyler’s Luck because his current assistant, Alex Raymond, was leaving. After two summer months of penciling in Greenwich, Connecticut, he quit and returned to New York. At the McNaught Syndicate he met Charles Driscoll who liked his work and considered him for an Albert Payson Terhune dog project. Hogarth got the job but soon was reassigned to Pieces of Eight, which was written by Driscoll. Hogarth recalled the research involved to produce accurate historical drawings, “…Well, I want to tell you, I started work in February. It was agonizing. I spent 11 hours every day, half the time in the library, and I’d be sitting up nights and working incessantly, and by the end of the week I’d be drained. I’d send this stuff off to the syndicate…I lived the life of a monk in that period….” In the fall, the syndicate decided to end the strip. Hogarth said, “…‘Thank God this thing is over! I’m through with it’. The pirate strip was the heaviest chore I ever carried. And I was glad it as over.” Two weeks of his Pieces of Eight can be viewed here and here.

In the winter of 1937 he visited United Features and learned that Hal Foster was leaving the Tarzan strip. Hogarth accepted the invitation to submit samples. Later he learned he got the assignment because the United Features general manger could not tell the difference between his and Foster’s work. His first Sunday page appeared May 9, 1937 and the last on November 25, 1945. A dispute with the syndicate led to Hogarth’s departure. After Tarzan, he produced the strip, Drago, for the Robert Hall Syndicate.

Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles

Fred W. Neher was born in Nappanee, Indiana, on September 29, 1903, according to Indiana’s Laughmakers (1990) and Who’s Who in American Art (1980).

The 1910 and 1920 U.S. Federal Censuses recorded Neher, his parents and two older brothers in Nappanee at 301 North Main Street. His father was a tailor in 1910 then a grocery salesman in 1920.

In More Amazing Tales from Indiana (2003), Fred D. Cavinder wrote: 

Fred Neher’s first cartoon appeared in 1920 in the magazine Judge, two years before he was graduated from Nappanee High School. He already had gotten $2 for a drawing he made at the age of 12 of a woman hanging up clothes. He took a correspondence course in cartooning while in high school, and after graduation he went to the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. For a while he did backgrounds and penciled in the dialogue in cartoons in a strip [Doo Dads] drawn by Arch Dale.

The Doo Dads entry in American Newspaper Comics (2012) said: “Fred Neher says he assisted on the feature in the mid-1920s.” Emboldened, Neher continued Feg Murray’s McDuffer from August 25, 1924 to April 2, 1927. A year later, Neher started Otto Watt which ran from August 31, 1925 into 1927; it was continued by other artists. December 27, 1925 was the start date of his Goofey Movies, which ended in October 1930.
In the 1930 census, Neher was married and resided in Cleveland, Ohio on East 101 Street. The Daily Camera (Boulder, Colorado), September 25, 2001, said he married Frances A. Rutledge on September 7, 1929, in Chicago.

In 1934 Neher started Life’s Like That which ran for 43 years. American Newspaper Comics said it had many alternate titles: Bubbles, Hi-Teens, Mrs. Pip’s Diary, Sis; Some Punkins, The Colonel, Us Moderns, Will-Yum and Zeke.

International Who’s Who in Art and Antiques (1976) said Neher’s cartoons appeared in magazines including Colliers, the New Yorker, Punch, Everybody's Weekly, Life, Judge and College Humor.

Neher’s home in 1940 was on Greenwalde Drive in Kings Point, North Hempstead Township, Nassau County, New York. The cartoonist had two sons, Fred and James. At some point the family moved to Norwalk, Connecticut. The city directories for 1946 to 1948, and 1951 listed Neher at Silver Mine Avenue North. The Daily Camera said he moved to Colorado in 1951. Neher’s listing in the 1953 Boulder, Colorado directory said: “Neher Fred W (Frances R) cartoonist h end 19th”.

Who’s Who said Neher taught cartooning, beginning in 1964, at the University of Colorado in Boulder. A 1965 photograph of Neher with Dik Brown, Mort Walker and Bob Bowie is here.

In 1987 his wife, Frances, died. Neher passed away September 22, 2001, in Boulder. Obituaries were published in the Daily Camera on September 23, and 25.

Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles

We've discussed radio page features here on quite a few occasions, and Otto Watt is another from that genre. In the 1920s, the new technological marvel of radio was a fascination for practically everyone. Imagine having entertainment piped right into your home 24 hours a day, without even so much as a wire (well, except for that electrical cord)! It is hard today to even imagine the impact that radio had on American homes in that exciting decade. Before the US became a nation of television couch potatoes, radio already had our behinds firmly attached to the couch, and spreading.

Otto Watt was among the more successful of the daily radio page features for one overriding reason: it packed its entertainment into a very small footprint. As a longish single-column cartoon, newspapers didn't feel their precious space being pinched too much, and certainly the ever-growing sea of type listing the radio programs needed that bit of graphic interest. Comic strips and two- to three-column panel cartoons were just too much space to lose on a daily basis, and so long after most of the other radio panels and strips had gone off the air, Otto Watt persevered.

The panel debuted on August 31 1925 to a smallish but good client list of newspapers. It was distributed by Associated Editors, a minor syndicate which specialized mostly in panels, and did best with specialized features for various sections of the newspaper, like Otto Watt. The feature was written by Barrie Payne, who also supplied gags for a golf panel for the same syndicate. Although primarily a writer, apparently he could draw as well, as he did a comic strip later under his byline alone.

The art was by Fred Neher, who also supplied art on Barrie Payne's golf panel. Neher would later on prosper off of a rather generic panel gag feature called Life's Like That, which for some reason found its way into a large client list of papers.

Neher was a perfect choice for this tall thin panel because his art, while not particularly exciting, was very clear and uncluttered. Perfect to get a gag across without a lot of fuss.

The minor success of Otto Watt was evidently not quite enough to keep the creators happy. On September 26 1927, Neher's art was replaced by that of Nick Nichols, who had come on board with the syndicate to start a new weekly strip, The Adventures of Peter Pen. Soon Barrie Payne left, and as of November 10 Nichols was taking sole credit. Nichols gave Otto Watt a great burst of energy. The cartoonist liked continuities, and somehow managed to shoehorn them into the tiny space afforded by Otto Watt.

Late in the decade, Nichols may have been feeling he might be on a sinking ship as other radio features bit the dust, and he decided to take a powder after two years. On April 1 1929 the panel was handed over to a fellow named Paul Sell. I know nothing about this cartoonist's background, but he brought the same sort of energy to the panel as Nichols. Perhaps the two kindred spirits found that they liked the cut of each others jib, because only a few months later, Nick Nichols returned as the writer of the feature.

Nick Nichols' writing byline was added on July 1 1929, and he brought back the continuities that he so enjoyed writing. However, the problem of a shrinking subscriber list seemed to continue, and it certainly wasn't helped by the first blasts of the Great Depression later that year. As the new decade of the 30s began, I notice that the Associated Editors syndicate stamps disappear from Otto Watt. While no other syndicate takes credit, I have heard that Nick Nichols did run his own syndicate.I wonder if he took over syndication of this panel when Associated Editors no longer considered the panel worthy of their distribution?

Nichols and Sell added a new feature to their cartoons in 1930, a small additional panel at the bottom of each installment titled Snappy Endings. Ideas were solicited, and credit was given, to reader submitted gags. While this did nothing to resurrect the client list, it did result in one interesting entry, seen below from unfortunately blurry microfilm:

It's hard to make out, but the reader submission in the February 15 1930 edition is from a fellow by the name of Berne (not yet having settled on 'Burne') Hogarth. The young Hogarth, eventually a cartooning giant, was 19 years old and, according to some accounts, working at Associated Editors at this time, so it's not too surprising that he'd supply a gag.

Otto Watt appears to have finally fizzled out on August 2 1930, or at least that's as far as I can track it. That makes it one of the longest running radio-related cartoons, certainly worthy of some note in the scheme of things.

Labels: Obscurities

Labels: Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics