Stripper's Guide

December 13, 1908 -- Herriman summarizes the late history of boxer Billy Papke. He's fought Stan Ketchel twice in the past few months. First he won with a TKO, but in the second fight Ketchel knocked him out. Now Papke is trying out his luck with Hugo Kelly, who he has fought before to a draw. Telling tales out of school, this fight will be a replay of that one.

By the way, Vernon and Colma are the boxing venues at which these bouts were fought.

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

This Friday's cartoonist postcard is labeled (on the back) as Tuck's New "Outcault" Series Valentines Postcard #7. It is a divided back with no copyright year indicated. Late 1900s would be my guess.

The divided back has a large drawing of Tige taking up most of the room reserved for a message, and I'm betting that's what attracted little Billy to choose it. Something tells me that Billy didn't have any great desire to send a Valentine to his uncle (whose name he seemingly can't even remember), and he sure didn't want to waste precious moments on adding a message to the back. Smart kid, that Billy.

The lack of a signature on this card, and the mismatched sizes of Buster and Tige, lead me to guess that Tuck just cut and pasted some off-the-shelf art to create this uninspired card.

EDIT: As Mark Johnson astutely recognized, these aren't cut and pastes, they're tracings (and not great ones, to boot). The original image seems to also be a Tuck postcard, pre-1907 and likely 1906, which has the same gag but in rebus form. Here's one for sale on eBay. While still not Outcault at his best at least in the original Buster's body parts are sized more harmoniously. Thanks Mark!

Labels: Wish You Were Here

Joseph Soder Moyer was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on July 1, 1874, according to his Spanish-American War veteran’s compensation application and a passport application.

The 1880 U.S. Federal Census said Moyer was the youngest of three children born to Joseph, a stone cutter, and Mary. The family resided in Philadelphia at 2236 Bolton Street. Information about Moyer’s education and art training has not been found.

Moyer served during the Spanish American War. His veteran’s compensation application said he enlisted April 28, 1898 and was discharged October 26, 1898. Moyer was a corporal in Company I, First Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteers. At the time, Moyer resided at his parents’ home, 1827 North 19th Street in Philadelphia.

American Newspaper Comics (2012) said Moyer drew The Quaker Kids from July 2 to October 22, 1899 for the Philadelphia Press.


Moyer’s address was unchanged in the 1900 census. His occupation was artist. Moyer was a self-employed artist in 1910. Moyer, his wife, Mary, and step-daughter, Clarice, lived at 5653 McMahon Avenue in Philadelphia.

The 84th Annual Report of the Philadelphia Board of Trade (1917) had this listing: “Moyer Art and Decorating Co., Joseph S. Moyer, 41 North Eleventh, Birds’-eye View Specialists”. The 85th annual had the same information.

According to a February 1919 passport application, Moyer and his wife planned a trip to Cuba. The purpose was for health and recreation.

According to the 1920 census, the Moyers were Philadelphia residents at 6002 Greene Street. in 1930, artist Moyer and his wife lived in Pelham Court Apartments, 6809 Emlen Street, Philadelphia.

Moyer passed away July 21, 1950, in Philadelphia. The death certificate said he was an art decorator. He was laid to rest in Laurel Hill Cemetery.

Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles

After a long hiatus, Heritage Auctions has included some more items from my collection in their latest auction. There are some pretty special items in this one, some of which I believe will be of great interest to Stripper's Guide readers. Many of these items they failed to properly describe or highlight, so that blog readers should have a good chance at picking them up inexpensively.

To see all my items on Heritage's website, follow this link. Here are the auction items and my comments:

A group of 17 Editor & Publisher annual syndicate directories. If you are researching comic strip history these are the greatest tools in your library. Every comic strip offered by the syndicates, large and small, is advertised in these annual books. Represented here are the books for 1969, 1971, 1973, 1974, 1976, 1978, 1981, 1991, 1992, 1993 and 1996 plus a few duplicates.

These annual books are extremely scarce. I buy them whenever I find them, yet my collection is still missing dozens of the annual issues, for which I am forced to rely on really bad microfilm copies.


An oddball but fabulous conglomeration here. First up is Famous Artists and Writers, an incredible spiral-bound book sent to newspaper editors as a promo by King Features in 1946. It offers samples of all the comics they offer (quite a few in glorious glossy color stock), along with bios of the artists. These are tough to come by and highly prized.

Next is an incredible rarity from 1902 -- a catalog from a cartoon exhibition and sale -- perhaps the very first in history! Would you like to buy a Winsor McCay original? No problem, there were something like 50 different examples up for sale in this exhibit. What an amazing document that shows cartoon art taken seriously so early.

Finally there are five different instructional booklets from Norman Marsh's cartoon school full of interesting art.


Here's another odd but delightful assortment. Three issues of Crapouillot, a French political humor magazine with superb illustrations and cartoons, plus a couple issues of New Masses with those terrific leftist cartoonists represented (one is a special expanded anniversary issue), a rare issue #2 of Americana, a 1932 satire magazine with an amazing high-end list of cartoonist and writer contributors, plus an issue of Touchstone, the humor magazine of Amherst College.



Yet another assortment of wonderful goodies. First and foremost, an original edition copy of Your History by J.A. Rogers, the black historian who authored the weekly cartoon panel series for black newspapers from the 1930s to 1960s. In the same vein, there is also Facts About the Negro #2, a later reprint book of the Your History cartoons. Next up is Eventful Decade, which is a real sleeper item -- this classy booklet was issued by the American Federation of Musicians in 1952 and features a retrospective of political and humor cartoons related to their profession from the mainstream press; lots of interesting material and neat jazz music references of course. Next we have two different editions of Texas History Movies (1935 and 1959), which we've discussed on the blog. Next there is Picture Life of a Great American, a very scarce comic strip reprint book detailing the life of Herbert Hoover (an election giveaway), and finally, In and Around the Lehigh Valley, a book of cartoons about eastern Ohio by Leo Hammer.




For two glorious seasons, Winsor McCay contributed the covers for the New York Hippodrome's annual souvenir books. In this lot, much to my chagrin, the auctioneers have included two (!) copies of the scarcer 1908-1909 edition, along with one copy of the 1909-1910 issue.


In the realm of rare platinum comics, Buttons and Fatty in the Funnies rates at the high end for scarcity. This is the only copy I've ever encountered. Condition isn't the greatest (the original binding was ridiculously fragile and doomed from the start), but as the saying goes, where you gonna find another one?


Another ridiculously rare platinum comic, Comic Cuts is all but unknown to collectors. My guess is that its rarity is even greater because when copies are found, they are often mistaken to be from the British series of the same name. But these rare issues came out of New York, and contain all original material, which makes them among the earliest original comic books ever published (along with The Funnies, below). This is issue #5. Though it has a good size hunk out of the front cover, the same admonishment applies -- where you gonna find another one!


We've discussed the 1929-30 series The Funnies on the blog at length, and here is the only original issue from the series (10-4-30) that I had in my collection. As a major bonus, included is a big batch of photocopies, some in color, of other issues from the series. The Funnies is pretty much without a doubt the earliest regularly issued original material newsstand comic book series, and issues are beyond rare. Don't miss this rare chance to get an issue plus a lot of bonus material.


Three issues of Gulf Funny Weekly, the gas station giveaway series with some great newspaper comics-style art and stories. Issues in this lot are #38, 56 and 319.


Here's a nice group of Platinum books, with the oversize Gumps Cartoon Book, Tad Dorgan's very funny Daffydils, a couple of Briggs books, and a very niuce copy of the scarce original material comic book Knock Knock Featuring Enoch Knox.


A nice batch of Cupples and Leon platinum comics in lesser condition, featuring some of the harder to find issues: Harold Teen, Keeping Up With the Joneses #1 and #2 (by Pop Momand), Percy and Ferdie by the great H.A. McGill, and Tillie the Toiler #2 and #4.


Some absolutely great material here in this lot! T.E. Powers' Joys and Glooms is very tough to find, and expensive if you do. Landfield-Kupfer's very early reprint of The Gumps is also very tough to find, though this copy is in rough shape. Also a tough book to find is Billy the Boy Artist's Book of Funny Pictures as it was probably only sold in the Boston area -- this one is also quite rough.

Much lesser known is A Child's Book of Abridged Wisdom, which is by the naive cartoonist Childe Harold. His work appeared often in Hearst's New York American in the 1900s.

Another really special item, though, is The Adventures of Peter Pupp, which isn't a platinum book at all. It's also not rare, but somewhat tough to find in decent condition It was issued in 1943 by comics pioneer Jerry Iger though his Action Play-Books imprint. The fantasy/sci-fi story is by comic book scripter Ruth Roche, and the illustrations are uncredited. The exciting thing, though, is that those cartoons are adapted from a comics series by none other than a very young Bob Kane! Iger recycled Kane's art for this kid's book and didn't give him any credit.


Getting into the comic book end of things, we have two whopping big lots of early Dennis the Menace comic books (one batch from the regular series, the other from the Giant Size series). I collected these back in the 1970s when I was absolutely loopy in love with the art of Al Wiseman, whose art graces most of these issues. I just couldn't get enough of his work. I don't know if Wiseman has ever gotten much fan press, but I think he's a most incredible stylist.



There are three groupings of miscellaneous golden age comic books in the present auction, but they didn't even bother to picture many of the issues. I understand why they look down their noses at these I suppose -- condition is generally merely average -- but there are some wonderful seldom seen issues mixed in. I hope you comic book fans will take a look at these:

Group 1: Smash Comics #63, Crack Comics #39, Red Band Comics #3 (one-eyed monster in a jive hat cover!), Black Magic #31 (bizarre Kirby cover), G.I. Joe V.2 #9 (Saunders painted cover), Justice Comics #17 (scarce Canadian comic book),  Official True Crime Cases #24 (nice Syd Shores cover), Pioneer West Romances #5 (classic Firehair cover), Super Magician Comics V.5 #6 (strange title and scarce), Young King Cole #4, and the highlight: Picture News #1, 3 and 9 (very tough to find, and full of great art -- Milt Gross and Kirby!). #3 and #9 are in SUPERB condition, which they didn't even bother to mention.


Group 2: Captain Marvel Jr. #24 (Raboy cover), Feature Comics #89, Ibis the Invincible #6 (classic monster cover), Journal of Crime (one of those cool Fox giants with all sorts of strange material inside), Key Comics #2 (oddball issue seldom seen, neat cover), Smash Comics #45 and (my favorite series, again) Picture News #7 (very scarce, not indexed on GCD).


Group #3: Police Comics #30 (Cole and Eisner art), Jane Arden Crime Reporter #1 (uncommon reprint comic), Red Circle Comics #1 (neat and scarce series with adventure, crime and comedy inside), Cow Puncher #3 (classic cover), Young King Cole V.3 #2, Super Comics #28, 33, 51, 54 (all with great Dick Tracy and other comic strip reprints)

Other comics lots:

Gay Comics #27 in superb condition, with Wolverton art and lotsa pretty gals.


Georgie Comics #6 (Georgie visits the Timely Comics office), 9 (Kurtzman art), 24 and 29.


Sexy good girl art lot with Tessie the Typist #14 (Wolverton and Kurtzman art), Margie Comics #44 (Kurtzman), Nellie the Nurse #16 (Kurtzman), Miss America V.3#3, Candy #2 (Gustavson art), Gay Comics #34 (3 Hey Look pages by Kurtzman).


Two Mighty Midget Comics with great covers in nice clean shape.


Three very uncommon sports-related comic books; Sport Stars #4 is the only one that Overstreet even knows about. How Champions Play Football is so obscure that GCD doesn't know about it either -- they only list the companion baseball issue. Sport Slants is a real gem containing sports cartoons and caricatures by famed sports cartoonist Tom 'Pap' Paprocki, and seems to have been issued by his syndicate, the Associated Press. It must have sold terribly at 25 cents in 1946!


We finish off with Zip Comics #8, featuring an incredibly gruesome cover from the pen of Charles Biro. Inside art by Mort Meskin and others.

Bertin Frederick “Bert” Link was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on November 16, 1884, according to his World War II draft card which also had his full name. Information regarding Link’s education and art training has not been found.

Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles

In the very limited genre of comics that were designed to run all (or most of) the way across an 8-column newspaper broadsheet in a very thin strip, the one that we see most often is most commonly seen without a title, a credit or an artist signature.

Although there are plenty of  things I don't know about the strip, I can supply all of the above -- the official title (or one of them) was A Reel of Nonsense, the creator was Bert Link, and the syndicate was World Color Printing. The original run of the strip, as best I can tell, began on April 30 1917. A very similar strip, titled A Reel of Nonsense in Our Own Movies ran for awhile in 1916, but it was done with very simple stick-figures and I think it is a separate and different series (besides the preceding I know exactly zilch about it).

Anyhow, A Reel of Nonsense only ran through about July 1917 (at least in the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, the best and most complete run I have discovered), and that may have been practically the sum total of it. However, World Color Printing really seemed to love the idea of a page-wide strip, and re-used it sporadically on their weekly black-and-white pages throughout the 1920s, and also used it as sort of a bonus strip along the bottoms of some of their Sunday pages in the 20s and 30s.It was also sold to other papers to use in like manner.

Could a strip that ran for only a few months have been recycled that heavily and for that long? It seems unlikely, but what I do know is that beyond that original run, Link's name doesn't appear on the strips and they are untitled. Perhaps they were recycled incessantly, or maybe Link decided he didn't want the credit anymore, or maybe new artists (all anonymous) were contracted to create further episodes.

What I do know is that trying to figure all this out, by cross-referencing strips ad nauseum, is not the way I plan to allocate precious days and weeks of my remaining lifetime.

Labels: Obscurities