Stripper's Guide

February 15 1910 --- George Memsic fights Lew Powell tonight, and Herriman repeats the same cartoon idea that he had on yesterday's sports page. Yesterday he portrayed Memsic trying to keep a bag of apples (titled "Local Prestige") from Wolgast, Picato and Powell, today it is a ladder to the championship crown. 

Herriman must have had a soft spot for Memsic, because the idea that he had any chance at all for the lightweight championship is pretty laughable -- he had been losing fights pretty consistently for the past two years.

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

The comics editor at the Philadelphia North American must have thought he was about to strike gold when he had the opportunity to put together two bright stars of the cartooning universe. John R. Neill, already on the ladder to enduring fame for illustrating Baum's Oz books, was paired with W. R. Bradford, the wackiest comic strip writer this side of Rube Goldberg, to create a Little Nemo pastiche called The Little Journeys of Nip and Tuck.

Only problem was that the pairing stunk up the place like skunks having a spraying contest in a gym locker full of old athletic socks. It should have been a master class in amazing illustration paired with sparkling writing, but somehow the dynamic duo brought out the worst in each other. Neill's art is fussy and stiff without the impressive flourishes he should have been providing, and Bradford's verses, normally riotous stuff, is about as stuffy as a reading from Leviticus. Great ideas fall flat, opportunities are missed, and yet, with two such giants of the comics page, we always have the sense that with just a little shot of joyousness that is utterly lacking, it could have and should have been truly great. 

The Little Journeys of Nip and Tuck ran in the Philadelphia North American's comic section from March 7 1909 to February 27 1910.

Thanks to Cole Johnson for the scans.

Labels: Obscurities

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 6 comments

We've discussed the filler strips of the New York Herald-Tribune before, so rather than wearing down my fingerprints, I'll ask you to click over to this post for a quick explanation. 

Uncle Charlie is another of those fillers, and it ran on occasion in the H-T's funnies pages from March 14 to October 10 1948. It has the distinction of being the only series penned by Dave T. Jones, about whom I know nothing. Mr. Jones does a perfectly creditable job on the strip, though I can't say I'm keen on characters whose heads are drawn with a compass.

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 2 comments

I like Napoleon just fine, but my favorite Cliff McBride ventures are the daily panel series and Sunday pantomime strip he did in the 1920s. In these he had more opportunity to spread his wings, as there were no continuing characters (well, okay, Napoleon first surfaced in the Sunday pantomime series). Free to find humour just about anywhere his fertile imagination could take him, these series were nothing short of brilliant. 

Oddly, the Sunday and daily series were distributed by two different syndicates. Today I'll concentrate on the daily panel series syndicated by Central Press Association, and we'll leave the Sunday series, from McNaught, for another day -- hopefully not another fifteen or more years in the future. 

McBride's daily panels had no single overarching title, but he did have a set of standard titles under which he drew regularly. Of these, the most often seen were Forlorn Figures, Insect Life, When To Be Nonchalant, and Uncrowned Kings. A few others were less often seen -- Front Page Folk and Bert and Alf (hmm, guess that's two more running characters).  These relatively generic titles were no limitation on McBride's cartoons at all; they worked for just about any situation imaginable. For instance, the bottom sample, headlined Insect Life, could just as easily have run under the title Forlorn Figures or even When To Be Nonchalant. 

What is a little odd about this daily series is that the humour is quite cosmopolitan, quite sophisticated. This is a bad fit for the Central Press Association, which serviced mainly small town and rural papers. One can only wonder what the newspaper readers of Smallville made of McBride's wicked humour about urban concerns. On the other hand, the folks in those towns no longer relied on fireflies and gossip for entertainment; the movies had brought tuxedo-wearing sophisticates as close as the local movie theatre. 

For some reason, Central Press decreed that McBride's panel would bear no date stamps, and for this reason many papers ran it ROP and late. That makes pinning down start and end dates more challenging. It doesn't help that E&P in its January 22 1927 issue stated that the panel would begin that month, whereas I have found enough evidence to pretty well guarantee that the actual start date is March 14 of that year. 

The end date is more elusive; most papers seem to have quit running it in mid-1932 or so. But I have others running it later, albeit sporadically. My guess, though, is that the panel ended on the precise date of November 12 1932. That's because Central Press tended to have a consistent number of comic strips and panels on offer, and they started a new panel, The Tutts by Crawford Young, on Monday, November 14. I'd bet the contents of my piggy bank that means McBride was cut loose at the end of the previous week*. 

* EDIT: Jeffrey Lindenblatt finds two papers ending the feature on that day, Brooklyn Times-Union and Plainfield Courier-News, making the contents of my piggy bank seem quite safe.

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 2 comments

Dwig did a lot of work for Raphael Tuck, and this card bears all the qualities of a Tuck production: excellent quality, embossed, printed in Germany, use of Series designation. However, the card does not credit Tuck. It is marked on the reverse "Series 110" and has the following logo that I do not recognize:

Does anyone know what company published this card?

Labels: Wish You Were Here

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 1 comments