Wednesday, August 02, 2023
Obscurity of the Day: Billy Brash The Boy Hero
In the oughts, before they ponied up for a proper colour comics section, the Sunday Minneapolis Journal had a kids' section with colour cover. That cover often featured comic strips, or at least comic drawings, produced by the Journal's art bullpenners.
The best cartoonist at the Journal was Charles L. "Bart" Bartholomew, who produced their front page editorial cartoons. Despite his lofty position at the Journal, Bart seemed to relish producing some of the kid series (see The Shanghai Twins, for instance). But today's obscurity, Billy Brash the Boy Hero, is not among them -- it was produced by Fred Bartholomew, who had a style that somewhat resembled that of Charles, though of an order or two less polished. One might naturally assume they were related (I certainly did), but I just found an obit for Fred where it turns out he was originally from New York and mentions no blood relation to the Minnesota "Bart." Just a coincidence of em-bart-assing proportions? Thank goodness he was not yet another Bartholomew who signed his work "Bart"!
Fred only produced this one series for the Journal, but it was a long-running one, appearing there from December 12 1903 to November 12 1904. In each strip our title character tries to take on the persona of a hero from history or a daredevil of today, with predictably disastrous results. We have a few interesting examples of the strip above. First, did people really parachute out of balloons at the turn of the century? I never heard of it, but I suppose it's possible. Second, check out that middle example showing a grisly scene that evidently skated right past dozing editors.
Labels: Obscurities
The "Bulls' eye gag at least hada logical, if painful point to it. There's a Popeye cartoon ("Robin Hoodwinked"(1948) where another arow vs. targets compitition arises, but Popeye's missile goes off course, hitting an (offscreen) bull. Olive Oyl sees the result, proclaiming he'd hit a "REAL Bullseye!" but we see that the bull somehow has only one black eye!.The gag didn't work, not as graphically as Bart's did, anyway.
: 8/03/2023 6:59 PM 