As successful as Danish cartoonist Werner ('WOW') Wejp-Olsen is around the globe, his strips distributed by syndicates in the States really tanked pretty bad (see The Maestro and Amalita and Granny and Slowpoke) until Professor Yuk-Yuk's Cartooning Class started to turn around his fortunes.
Cartooning instruction features have a checkered past throughout the history of newspapers, with most being both useless as instruction and severely limited as entertainment. Wejp-Olsen definitely did not succeed in terms of teaching cartooning (find any useful cartooning instruction in the samples above and win a prize), and the entertainment was a bit sparse, too. I guess he hoped to create a fan base by offering to run the work of amateur cartoonists. How a cartoonist in Denmark could keep abreast of reader submissions in the States back in the 1990s B.E. (Before Email) is beyond me, but he always seemed to have enough submissions for the Sunday-only series.
United Feature Syndicate distributed the series from February 4 1990 to June 26 1994, an absolute infinitude compared to his prior American series.
Werner Wejp-Olsen is probably better known now for his long-running 'Crime Quiz" series.
ReplyDeleteBen Ferron
"How a cartoonist in Denmark could keep abreast of reader submissions in the States back in the 1990s B.E. (Before Email) is beyond me"
ReplyDeleteI should add that starting in 1989, Wejp-Olsen left Denmark for the States (Carlsbad, CA was where he lived and worked at the time).
Ben Ferron
Ah! Thanks Ben.
ReplyDelete--Allan