Stripper's Guide

March 3 1910 -- Famed editorial cartoonist Homer Davenport is making the lecture circuit in California, and to ensure he gets plenty of press coverage of his visit he brings with him a rather unusual personal valet -- an Arab who dresses in the traditional garb of his region and who conspicuously prays to Allah in the hotel. If the story is to be believed, Davenport visited some Arab bigwig in the Middle East and was given this servant as a gift. 

Davenport is making news for the messy divorce he's going through, too, but the Examiner finds the Arab servant also worth a photo, a few Herriman vignettes, and some lineage. 

I'm going to guess his personal appearances were sell-outs given his smart manipulation of the press.

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 0 comments

When he was still in knee pants, Ralph like to draw. He used to hang around a drug store, the proprietor of which was an enthusiast of Indian lore. Ralph drew some Indian pictures and the druggist exhibited them in the store. By and by, a man of some influence saw them and suggested that Ralph, all of 18 years old, go see T. R. Williams, then managing editor of the Press.

Ralph did, but it didn’t do much good. The twig was bent, though, and for six months, Mr. Williams had a frequent visitor, a lad with a handful of sketches. Since he couldn’t very well blockade the Press entrance, Mr. Williams, in desperation, hired Ralph at $8 a week.

Ralph plugged away and in eight years was doing a local panel—Rambling With Reichhold—centered around one incident of everyday life. It was a Press feature for nearly 10 years. 

Donnie Dingbat Is Weather Predictor

A year-old half-column bird is the current toast of Pittsburgh news readers.

He is Donnie Dingbat, the Pittsburgh Press weather predictor and commentator extraordinary.

When the war forced the curtailment of weather predictions, Phelps Sample, Press rewrite man, injected topical conversation into his page one daily forecasts. The stories caught on so well that editor E. T. Leech asked editorial cartoonist Ralph Reichhold to create a character to be used as a half column illustration.

Wishing five minutes Donnie Dingbat was born and made his first public appearance in the next edition.

Cartoons

For sales promotion, ads, house organs by cartoonist listed in “Who’s Who.” Years experience with national accounts. Write Ralph Reichhold, 121 Vernon Drive, Pittsburgh 16, Pa.

Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles

# posted by Alex Jay @ 7:00 AM 0 comments

If there were a prize for the most cryptic cartoon feature ever, it has to be Radiotoon. Cryptic, that is, until you read the lengthy instructions for decoding the cartoons.

Radiotoon actually looks like someone's conception of radio waves emanating from a hodgepodge of sources, which is pretty cool and quite inscrutable. But all will be revealed, kids, when you listen to Uncle Kay-Bee on the radio. He will give you a list of numbers and if you draw lines between them a cartoon will be revealed. In other words, this is just a connect-the-dots puzzle, but the connections must be made by following the 'radio waves' from number to number. 

Usually the hidden pictures in connect-the-dots puzzles are pretty easy to figure out just by looking at the pattern of dots, but in this case, with all those 'radio waves' obfuscating things, the revealed picture will really be a surprise. Nicely done Ralph Reichhold, creator of this feature. 

Being an activity feature, Radiotoon sadly doesn't qualify for Stripper's Guide, but I couldn't resist showing you this neat feature. It ran in the Pittsburgh Press on Sundays in 1927.

Labels: Archives Sub-Basement

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 2 comments

There's nothing particularly groundbreaking about DeVoss Driscoll's The Chubbies, a gang of egg-shaped small fry, but they go about their business in the cute and rascally manner that we expect of our little folk. Driscoll, who was drawing pretty much the whole G-D section, took a lot of care with this feature. He cranked up the art to maximum quality, better than his adequate but not outstanding typical fare. He must have been pretty proud of this work because he bothered to copyright the first page to himself, something he did not do with any of his other many series.

The Chubbies might have proved too much work or failed to set the world on fire as hoped, because Driscoll dropped them very quickly. The series only ran from December 25 1904 to February 26 1905.

Labels: Obscurities

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 0 comments

Here's another postcard from Series 580 (or S80) from an unknown publisher. As usual Percy Crosby lets us know with slapdash art that he was not happy about doing this job. This is the second card from the series that concerns doctors and offers a pretty pathetic pun. As I often wonder with these lesser cards, who actually opted to pay a penny for it (other than, obviously, Robbie's Grandma)? 

As usual, I can't help but wonder about those black letters. Can 

        T    Y    E    D    E    L    O    P    I    S

be some sort of anagram? How about "SPOILED YET".

Labels: Wish You Were Here

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 1 comments