Stripper's Guide

Here we have a collection of miscellaneous gags from the McClure comics section of December 15 1901. Some are about Christmas, befitting the publication date. But Herriman's contributions are evergreen items, probably stuff he'd been carrying around in his portfolio for months looking for some pigeon to buy them. 

Besides Herriman, whose cartoons are at the upper left and right, we have a Marriner gag (top center), and a two-panel A.D. Reed gag on the bottom. I have to give Reed the nod for best gag, though Herriman's wordplay in the upper right gets points for ingenuity.

Labels: One-Shot Wonders

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 2 comments

These ads shouldn't have been hawking dish soap. They should have been touting divorce attorneys.

Ivory Soap used the "red 'n' rough" terminology in their ads for years, but the version in which Red and Rough become actual characters seems to have been limited to these ads by Paul Fung, which ran from about March to June 1944.

Labels: Marketing Madness

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 2 comments

I know that Stripper's Guide readers need no introduction to Charles Dana Gibson, perhaps the most celebrated and successful penman of his day. So I can go directly on to the sad fact that after becoming the top illustrator/cartoonist of the 1890s, a legend in his own time, his popularity was on the wane by the mid-1910s. He was still a respected illustrator, of course, but his work no longer inspired quite the level of adulation and awe it once had. The fickle public had moved on.

So in 1915 he was no longer the latest fad, but Gibson's name was still a draw. Life Magazine tried to capitalize on it by offering a series to newspapers with the simple and direct title Charles Dana Gibson's Latest Pictures. The series did not sell tremendously well, and I'm guessing that was because the pricing of the feature reflected Gibson's worth more circa 1900 than 1915.

The series offered was ten weekly drawings*, each accompanied by the humorous poetry of Boston Post newspaper writer/humorist Joe Toye. Many papers that took the series unceremoniously lopped off Mr. Toye's verses, leaving the pictures with a certain lack of context. The drawings were wonderful, of course, and the seldom seen verses by Toye weren't bad either. But sales were underwhelming, and the series came and went, the last time such a newspaper offering would be made of Mr. Gibson's drawings. Although some copyright slugs noted 1914 as the publication year, actually the earliest known running dates for the series are January 24 to March 20 1915**.

* Some mentions claim that there would be twelve installments, but ten seems to have been the actual number.

** Source: Atlanta Constitution, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, etc.

Labels: Obscurities

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 1 comments

The Detroit News had some really interesting homegrown material in the 1900s and 1910s. Unfortunately I have never had the opportunity to take a long leisurely indexing run through the microfilm, and as far as I know, the paper does not yet exist on the web. So for now all I can offer is based on the samples from my personal files. 

Burt Thomas had pretty much just arrived at the Detroit News in 1906 when he penned the series Petey, The Growler, The Old One and The Goat. My few samples are from September of that year, and though a daily-style strip, seemed to have run only in the Sunday editions. If the present samples are a fair indicator, Thomas's black kids use the near-required mushmouth dialect and the typical moon-faces, but otherwise they are just a group of kids having some fun and inevitably getting into trouble. 

I don't know if Detroit had a large black population in the early 1900s (the major influx of blacks apparently happened in the 1910s and later) but by comparison with how blacks were represented in many other black strips this was practically an outreach to Detroit's black community. 

UPDATE: Jeffrey Lindenblatt informs me that the News is indeed on the web, but unfortunately at the GenealogyBank website, whose slowness and bad interface make indexing a practically impossible job. Sigh. I did manage to get running dates for this series though; it ran from August 19 1906 to October 21 1906 on the Sunday children's page. The first two installments were accompanied by long text stories by "N.T", but the strips can stand on their own. Thanks Jeffrey!

Labels: Obscurities

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 3 comments

Carmichael produced a whole series of cards (Taylor Pratt & Company Series 668 of 1910) based on the 1908 hit song "Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?".In this case we only need but look up.

Labels: Wish You Were Here

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments