Saturday, April 13, 2024
One-Shot Wonders: Weekday Gag Array, 1904
An array of single panel gag cartoons was a familiar sight in 1900s papers, especially evening editions. Here's one such grouping from a 1904 edition of the New York Evening Journal, featuring four cartoons by William F. Marriner (first and third columns) and two by Harry B. Martin in the middle.
A few explanatory notes:
* "Beautiful Snow" was a poem written in 1869 by John Whittaker Watson. It seems to be the only poem of his that really outlived him in the public consciousness.
* I can find no evidence that there was a revolutionary named Bustaments in South America in 1904, but there are a few by the name Bustamente in decades long past by then. I imagine Martin is using it as a sort of generic Latino name.
Labels: One-Shot Wonders
At Hearst, we would syndicate even these one panel straight line/payoff type gags, mixed in with some weekday strips like "E.Z. Mark", fill a page or half page, all under the heading, "With The Twentieth Century Fun Makers" with slight variations like "Laughs With the Twentieth Century Humorists". I've seen these as a sunday feature in papers in Indianapolis and Baltimore in 1903-4. The "Bustamante' referred to might be Francisco Eugenio Bustamante, a radical politician and exiled opposition leader to presidente Palacio of Venezuela, overthrown in 1892.
: 4/13/2024 12:01 PM Friday, April 12, 2024
Ink-Slinger Profiles by Alex Jay: Ramona Fradon
... E. R. Munn & Co., Inc., leased apartments in the Gilford, 140 East Forty-sixth street, to ... Peter Dom ...
The Houghton Company leased for Clement J. Todd his house at 39 Valley Road, in the Larchmont Woods section of Larchmont, to Peter Dom.
I didn’t take high school seriously, and by the time I graduated, I doubt if I could have gotten into a college. I started at Parsons School of Design in New York City. I went there for a year, but I found it to be superficial in terms of learning how to draw. We had life drawing once or twice a week, and the rest was all about technique and an overview of the different commercial fields. I felt I wasn’t learning anything that I needed to learn, so I switched to the New York Art Students League. I could never have been an interior decorator or a fashion artist anyway. I was drawn to the League because it was totally unstructured. You had to provide your own motivation. There were no tests, no grades, no diploma, no nothing. You just went there, and if you wanted to learn, you could learn, and that appealed to me. And we drew from a model every single day. …… I studied Fine Art at the Art Students League and wasn’t very good at it. I had absolutely no ambition, but I found myself doing it anyway. And then I met Dana Fradon there [around 1946], who was an aspiring cartoonist. His goal was to get into The New Yorker, and he encouraged me to try cartooning, which I thought was a total fall into degradation. People are very snotty in art school, so it just seemed like the most degrading thing in the world. But I had a talent for it. We were broke when we got married, so Dana and a friend of ours encouraged me to make some comic book samples. I did and that’s how it started. …
He … was a freelance lettering man. He designed among other things, the Elizabeth Arden, Camel, and Lord and Taylor logos—ones you still see around. And what else did he do? He designed type faces: the Dom Casual font, among others.
My father was a commercial lettering man. He designed the Elizabeth Arden and Camel logos—some of the things that you still see around. I think Elizabeth Arden has a new one now, but they used my father’s version for years. He also lettered the Lord & Taylor logo ... lettering men like my father began to design fonts that were made into typefaces. So, instead of hiring a lettering man, they’d use these fonts, as they do today. My father designed the Dom Casual and other typefaces and everybody told him not to do it because it would put them all out of business. And it did.
Mrs. Irma H. Dom, of 51 Parkway Road, Bronxville, died today in Lawrence Hospital after a short illness at the age of fifty-three.Born in Chicago, daughter of Louise Tute Haefeli and the late John Haefeli, Mrs. Dom had resided in Bronxville for 14 years.In addition to her mother, she leaves a son, Jay R. Dom of Bronxville and a daughter, Mrs. Ramona Fradon of New York City.
Yes, he [Gill Fox] called me up one day out of the blue and asked me if I wanted to draw it. He told me what they were offering, which was more than I was making in comics, but I didn’t tell him right away that I wanted to do it. I wanted to think about it, because I never liked Brenda Starr very much, and yet it seemed like an opportunity to me.Friends of mine who did strips warned me prophetically, that I would be on a treadmill, and I’d never get off of it, and that it was a grind. But I decided I’d give it a try. By the way, Gill had been looking—they’d been beating the bushes, trying to find somebody for about a year, because they wanted a woman to do it, and they finally bumped into me ...
Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
Magazine Cover Comics: Sally's So Sentimental
This series does the almost unthinkable when in the final installment Sally stands by as her sister gets wed. Did Loring not read the magazine cover writer's manual? The heroine ALWAYS gets married in the final installment. Sheesh.
Oh, and why is the word 'sentimental' used in the title? I have no idea. Sally exhibits no particular sentimentality all through the series. I get the funny feeling that Loring/Robinson didn't quite have a grasp of the word's meaning, and the editors at NFS couldn't be bothered to educate him.
Labels: Magazine Cover Comics
Monday, April 08, 2024
Obscurity of the Day: The Vidiots
As we've discussed many times before, TV listing pages, with their acres of boring tables, were ripe targets for a cartoon series to brighten things up. By the 1980s, though, the TV-centric gag panels (they were almost all panels) were very much on the wane. Why that is I cannot figure, because this was the decade in which cable TV blossomed, making those listings take up far more room than in the old days of three networks and a local station or two. Apparently the equation that more boring type implies more need for brighteners does not actually compute, though.
Into this bear market came Ken Bowser, who was at the time working on staff at the Orlando Sentinel-Star. He created The Vidiots for his paper, debuting there as a daily on August 13 1981*. Bowser's work was familiar to Orlandoans and he was already well-known for his repulsive toad-like characters, now institutionalized in The Vidiots.
Because the Sentinel-Star was owned by the Chicago Tribune, Bowser had a well-oiled pipeline for submitting to their syndicate. About a year and a half after the feature started as a local feature it was picked up for syndication, first appearing with a syndicate stamp on January 3 1983.
The Vidiots never had more than a modest list of clients, and I think most of them were probably likewise Chicago Tribune owned papers. It was a pretty funny panel, but newspapers generally just didn't seem interested in TV page brighteners anymore. Bowser stuck with the feature for four years, finally giving it up on February 14 1987.
*Source: All dates from Orlando Sentinel-Star.
Labels: Obscurities
Sunday, April 07, 2024
Wish You Were Here, from R.F. Outcault
Outcault produced many of these calendar advertising postcards, some for specific advertisers, like this one, some more generic.
The Rockford Watch Company was not a particularly major player in the pocket watch market, and the factory was shuttered just six years after this marketing campaign. Perhaps a victim of the newfangled wristwatches, I wonder?
These cards seem to have been produced with the idea that Rockford dealers would do the posting, but then you would think they would not be preprinted with "Dealers Name and Address Here" on them, but rather just an open space for the dealer's stamp. Bad planning, that.
Thanks to Mark Johnson, who provided the scans of this card.
Labels: Wish You Were Here
: 4/08/2024 12:32 AM 