Monday, May 06, 2024
Obscurity of the Day: Yenevieve Yonson's Cat
I really like Yenevieve Yonson's Cat. I know it's dopey and repetitive, I know the strip just rips off the popular song The Cat Came Back, I know it animates cruelty to animals, and I know the Yonson character is an unkind stereotype of Scandinavians. But despite all that the strip still finds its way to my funnybone just about every time I get to read one. Which isn't exactly an everyday occurrence because the strip ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer from February 10 1907 to October 31 1909.
Yenevieve Yonson's Cat is also intriguing from another perspective. In its very respectable two and a half year run, the feature was NEVER ONCE signed. Some syndicates didn't like their creators to sign a whole bunch of strips because it made them look like a penny ante outfit. And some creators didn't sign because they were on salary at another syndicate and did uncredited work to bring in some extra scratch. But for a titled feature to run that long with the creator so consistently not signing is a feat of some note.
Is it a record? Mmm, maybe not. Some of the McClure Sunday strips from the latter half of the 1900s weren't signed for years, too. The difference there is that almost always in some part of their run they WERE signed, even if only once or twice.
So the big question, then, is who wrote and drew Yenevieve Yonson's Cat? And I have a pretty strong belief that the culprit is Charlie Payne. First, it looks like his work, Secondly, he had two other features running in the Inquirer Sunday sections -- Scary William and Bear Creek Folks -- so the powers that be at the Inky might have told him to anonymize himself on this one.
Luckily, I happen to know that there is an expert on all things comic and Philadelphia lurking out there, and I will be waiting to hear him weigh in on my art ID. Oh Mark...?
Labels: Obscurities
Sure, it's Payne! The shading crosshatching, the tiny squeezed letters in the ragged square word balloons, the water splats, and nobody else did the starry faceplants like his.
I note here that a more advanced detective of interpreting styles than I, Cole, had unhesitatingly named Payne as the artist for Yenevive in all his Inquirer notes.
: 5/07/2024 12:23 PM 