Friday, April 01, 2022
Obscurity of the Day: Izzy the Iceman
I don't know if the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph went through only a short flirtation with in-house comics, but for some reason I only have an index of their series from 1904. Maybe they didn't do anything interesting except in that single year, or else my research is incomplete. My notes fail to tell me whether the microfilm for other years wasn't available at the Philadelphia Free Library (just about the only library to have more than a reel or two of this paper), or if I ran out of time when in Philly and only managed to look at that single year.
So anyway, here's one of their weekday series from 1904, called Izzy the Ice Man. It's a perfectly fine little strip about the travails of an iceman who can't seem to deliver H2O in solid form. It ran a handful of times from July 5 to August 11 1904.
The strip was signed with the name Bill Nye. But the Bill Nye was a very famous humorist who died in 1900, so whoever appropriated his name at the Telegraph had quite the cheek to use the name. Even if the fellow's name was actually Bill Nye, he could have gone by Will, or Billy, right? Anyway, this Bill Nye was responsible for working on no less than seven series for the Telegraph in 1904, and while his work isn't virtuoso level, it's pretty darn good for a guy who disappeared without a trace.
There is a section on icemen, who "inspired a lot of raunchy male humor" because they were generally big, strong men who regularly entered women's homes during the day (to drop off a big block of ice in the icebox) when their husbands were at work.
For whatever reason, Bill Nye seems not to have gone anywhere near that subject, at least based on the samples here.
