Stripper's Guide

 Here is the sixth and final batch of unidentified comic stamps. Can you name the strip the stamp ran with, and the name of the character depicted? 

Labels: Q and A

  Here is the fifth batch of unidentified comic stamps. Can you name the strip the stamp ran with, and the name of the character depicted? 

Labels: Q and A

 Here is the third batch of unidentified comic stamps. Can you name the strip the stamp ran with, and the name of the character depicted? 

In fairness, I wonder if perhaps #23-26 aren't real; they sure look like amateur drawings to me. 

Labels: Q and A

 Here is the second batch of unidentified comic stamps. Can you name the strip the stamp ran with, and the name of the character depicted? (Okay, a few are named ....) One hint: our comic stamp collector has the ID wrong on #15; it is not Tillie the Toiler.

Labels: Q and A

 What are comic stamps?

They were an extra added feature of some Sunday comic strips, mostly in the 1930s. In addition to the main strip and up to two topper strips, some cartoonists added yet more punch to their pages with comic stamps, which were little cartoon portraits typically printed at about the size of a typical postage stamp. Most simulated stamps, with the perforations along the edges, others play money with character faces, some just put the portraits in plain ol' rectangles. 

Here's a typical comic stamp from a Tillie the Toiler Sunday, an addendum to the Van Swaggers topper strip:

The idea of comic stamps was that kids should cut them out and paste them into stamp albums or scrapbooks, I guess. I don't really get the entertainment value of this, but then I'm not the intended audience. There evidently were kids who did this, because today if you watch the eBay auctions sometimes you'll come across a dusty old collection of comic stamps or play money. 

Much to my surprise, there are even people today who collect them. I was contacted recently by a comic stamp collector who was hoping to get my help IDing some of their more obecure stamps. What I thought would be easy turned out to be anything but. It turns out that many comic stamps don't identify the characters, and often they depict secondary or even short-lived guests in the strips. 

Rather than have all the fun to myself of trying to figure out the comic strip that gave birth to these comic stamps, and the characters they depict, I decided to throw it open to the group as a quiz. And this is not some easily aced gimme, either. So if you can figure any of them out, be sure to post a comment and accept the laurels of an expert comic stamp spotter. 

Here's the first batch. I'm not sure #1 is an actual comic stamp, but the rest appear to be the real thing:

Labels: Q and A

Q: On the Facebook group Leonard Starr Appreciation Society James Gauthier, who was friends with Starr, played a role in On Stage being collected and runs the group has been posting On Stage promotional pieces, not only to herald the impending start of the strip or a newspaper picking it up but to tease a new storyline. He has also posted some promotional pieces from when Starr took over Annie plus some storyline teasers for early storylines.
Do you have a sense to what extent client papers printed this sort of stuff? Gauthier has even shared photos of On Stage being promoted by at least one paper with a display window at the newspaper headquarters onto the street and banners on the side of delivery trucks. Comic Strips were a big deal for attracting readers in the golden age so it is plausible some papers would ballyhoo adding one or promoting a news storyline. Did some papers have a reputation for running promos more so than others?

A: That's a good question, and yes, there definitely was an era when newspapers promoted their comics, some with great vigor. That era is long over, but back in the 1920s through 1970s or so you could count on quite a few papers -- not all by any means -- actively promoting the comics they ran through promos in the paper and even sometimes in their outside advertising.

Because many people in charge at newspapers are embarrassed by the pulling power of their comics,  promos from the syndicates often went straight into the circular file. But in big cities where there was intense competition between papers, one way to set yourself apart and attract readers was with a good line-up of comics, and you ignored that at your peril. Smart marketers realized that their paper might cover the news somewhat better than the competition, or offer a different editorial slant, but for many readers the decision about which paper to buy was based more on the features the newspaper offered. Some might buy a particular paper for a good columnist, or a movie reviewer, or a better crossword puzzle, but plenty of people (not to mention their kids) chose a newspaper at least in part because of the comic strips that were offered.

The question then, is why did this end? The answer is lack of competition. When most cities became one-newspaper towns, why should those papers waste column-inches or outside advertising trying to sell you on a particular comic strip -- you have no other option. Your only choice is whether to buy a paper every day or not. If you really despise the local paper, then your other options -- USA Today, Wall Street Journal, New York Times -- don't carry comic strips. So like it or lump it, what they print is what you get.

A secondary factor worth mentioning is the computerization of newspaper layout. This began in the 1970s, and as software got better and better, the machine version of the layout man got really good at solving layout problems. Rare was theoccasion now when a page would be laid out and a hole would need to be filled with in-house content. When those holes became scarce, one of the things that used to fill them -- comic strip and other promos -- became rare.

The syndicates can take a tiny slice of the blame, too. When newspapers curtailed their use of promotional materials, it was natural for the syndicates to become more and more lax about producing them. Nowadays even if a newspaper wanted to run promotional material, they'd find that the syndicates are so out of the habit of producing it that there's little available, and not much energy for producing some of it for them. 

Labels: Q and A

Received an interesting question from a fellow who is new to the hobby of comic strip collecting. He's working on gathering together a complete run of the Oaky Doaks daily, mostly from online sources.

Q: I was thinking of creating a free little blog with the strips I've already compiled and cleaned up; or, if it's better, uploading them to the ILoveComix archive. Is that frowned upon in the hobby though?  Even if I can't find good copies, I hope to compile a full run of Oaky Doaks and hopefully bring the title out of obscurity a little for anyone who'd like to view it--but I don't want to do anything as a new guy that isn't the norm. If everyone has a pet project like this, collecting and keeping secret a run of obscure strips, I don't want to step on that I suppose. 

A:  First of all, my compliments on your good taste. I love Oaky Doaks, and if I had the time I'd be gathering the strip myself.

Let's start by looking at your question strictly from a legal standpoint. To create a website that offers a substantial run of any strip, the first thing you should consider is whether you will run afoul of copyright laws. Caveat emptor on what follows because I am not an attorney.

Under current law it is my understanding that anything prior to 1923 (maybe 1924 now) is always fair game. Obviously Oaky Doaks doesn't qualify. There is a rule, though, for works published from 1923 to 1963, which covers the whole run of Oaky Doaks, that copyrights must have been renewed in order to stay in force. The renewal is supposed to occur sometime in the 27th or 28th year after publication. If the copyright on the Oaky Doaks strips was not renewed, theoretically you are free to reprint them at will.There are online sources for searching these copyright renewals, but they are by no means perfect or exhaustive. Proceed with caution. A copyright attorney may be needed to perform a more definitive search.

Another option for checking copyrights is to simply ask the entity that held them. If they tell you they no longer hold that copyright, you are again free and clear. In the case of comic strips, it may be worthwhile to get that release from both the syndicator and the estate of the creator, in case the renewal that you couldn't find was in a different name than the original copyright.

Okay, now let's be realistic. Do most people jump through all these hoops to put some comic strips on a website? No. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't. And if they forgo all these checks, they should know that they are opening themselves up to a cease and desist letter, or at worst a full-blown lawsuit. It doesn't happen very often, but it can happen.

That brings us to Steve Cottle's ILoveComix archive. While I applaud the concept, I have found the interface impenetrable so that I don't really know what he's put together there. Maybe I'm just too dumb to figure out his site. Anyway, I see that he's offering subscriptions for a monthly fee, but without knowing if that gets you a better interface, or what is actually available, I just can't open my purse.  I do get the feeling that he is on pretty thin ice, copyright-wise, and that makes me uncomfortable ... but I guess that's his problem, not mine.

Seems to me that if you are going to go to all the trouble of finding and restoring all these strips, you don't want to hide them behind someone else's paywall or oddball website design. You should either benefit yourself, or if your desire is just to share, do so freely and openly in a format in which fans can easily take advantage. As long as you are comfortable that the lawyers won't be nipping at your heels, go for it!

As to comic strip collectors secretly amassing fabulous runs of comic strips that they won't share, I certainly wouldn't put it that way. There are several reasons I and many other collectors don't upload massive amounts of old comic strips. First is the legal problem that we just discussed. Second, the investment of time would be substantial and I for one am too busy with the Stripper's Guide project, which has different aims than sharing long runs of strips. Third is that when a collector pays good and often substantial amounts of money for their strips, they may consider that an investment. Once most comic strips are reprinted the resale market for the original tearsheets basically goes into freefall, leaving that collector with a lot of practically worthless paper. For instance, my Li'l Abner and Little Orphan Annie daily strips, numbering in the many thousands, are almost better used as kindling for the fireplace than trying to sell them.

Labels: Q and A

I came upon a short stack of miscellaneous Sunbury (PA) Daily Item 1972 comics pages in my "to be filed" tower (the word 'pile' having been given up as a gross underestimation at this point). I came upon a single page, dated July 1 1972, that included the above strip, Lumer by Jerry Beaver. Other pages from late June did not include the strip. I had no comics pages from later than this date. Since I have no other record of the strip or the cartoonist, I pose the question to you -- does anyone have any info on the strip or Jerry Beaver? Since I have only the one example, I can't even list it as a series.

UPDATE: Sunbury Item is now online, and Lumer ran weekly from 5/8/1971 - 2/24/1973.

Other Questions
* Does anyone know of an online  resource that identifies if and where a digital  archive for a particular newspaper title is available? I spend a lot of time looking for newspaper titles (like for instance the Sunbury Item), checking newspapers.com, Google, Library of Congress, state archive websites, etc., and it sure would be great if that information was available in some central repository -- the Wikipedia page for the newspaper would get my vote as ideally convenient.

* a correspondent has asked me to tell him, in great detail, how newspaper comics get from the cartoonist's drawing board all the way to the printed page. He wants to know about the whole technical process, in layman's terms. Given that I don't have the free hours to do a complete brain dump, and that I'm likely to get some details wrong anyway, any suggestions for online sources where he can read up on this process? He is, of course, interested in how things worked in the bad old days, not in our new digital world.

* I have just recently discovered that overhead book scanners are now available to the general public at reasonable prices (if -- gulp -- $800 can be judged reasonable). I've been looking at the Fujitsu ScanSnap SV600 specifically, but there are others. I would very much like to hear from anyone who has one of these, or knows how well they work, or can offer any suggestions on the particular brands and models that work best. The online reviews for the Fujitsu are decidedly mixed, and the reviews for the lesser brands are downright awful, so I'm wondering if I need to wait until the 'bleeding edge' days have passed. I have fantasies of digitizing my collections of various journals and getting rid of many running feet of bookcase space. Ooh, to have searchable digital versions of my long runs of Editor & Publisher! Nirvana!

Labels: Mystery Strips, Q and A

Sorry folks, ran out of time to prep my Herriman post for today. So instead here's a few questions we're pondering; maybe you can help!

Our Gang Ad -- Cole Johnson sends this Royal Gelatin ad, saying that it might be by Virginia Huget. I see no particular resemblance to the art style I associate with her, but it's also well established that she was pretty good at aping other styles. Anyone want to weigh in with an opinion on whether this is Huget, or maybe you'd like to nominate some other cartoonist?

The Grizzwells -- I was just clipping a few current strips the other day and noticed that The Grizzwells by Bill Schorr seems to have a second creator credited within the strip. Looks like 'Smith' to me, but at postage stamp size it is hard to tell. Found nothing on the web saying that the strip now has two creators. Does anyone know anything about this Smith person and his/her role?

Newspaper Archives on the Web -- I know about Newspaperarchive.com, of course, and the Library of Congress has a selection of digitized newspapers, and then there's Google Newspaper Archive as well. There's also Newslibrary.com, which I know very little about. There's also some localized websites like this one for Utah and one for New Jersey papers, for which I've somehow lost the link. If you know of other sources for digitized newspapers available on the web, either free or fee, I'd like to know about them. I think a link collection for digitized newspaper sources would be a great resource. Ideally we'd also tabulate a list of newspapers and date ranges as well, but that may be impossible to do as it is a pretty swiftly moving target.

Labels: Q and A

Here is some recent correspondence from researchers. I was unable (or in the last case, too lazy) to help these folks. Can anyone provide sustenance for these hungry minds?

From Ulrich Merkl:
I'm still researching about Robert McCay, found out many interesting details, but nothing about the strip HIS JOB. I've only got three samples from Peter Maresca. Do you think you could post a 'Please help' call on your website? Anybody out there being aware of any strips, dates, newspapers, etc.? I don't want you to do my homework, but I really don't know how to reach only 1/10 of the strip experts you can easily reach with your blog.

(Ulrich is primarily looking for papers that ran it. It only ran for a week in the New York Journal, only place I've found it. And he's found the SF Examiner running it in July 1923. But we are pretty certain it ran longer than that.)

From Tony Rose, University of Arkansas at Little Rock:

I'm trying to find out more about the cartooning career of an early 20th century illustrator, Royal Roger Eubanks (born 1879).  Our archives has just received a very large collection of letters and ephemera from a wealthy Cherokee family, one member of whom was briefly married to Eubanks.  I'm familiar with his career as a book illustrator in the 1920s but I know next to nothing about his cartooning.

He signed himself "R. Ubanx".  At the turn of the century, 1902 or so, he was working for the Chicago Evening Journal.  He may have had a larger business role than merely cartoonist.  Family history connects him to something called the "Star Cartoonist Company."

By 1910, following a divorce, he was back in his hometown in Oklahoma (he was a Cherokee), living with his parents.  He listed his occupation on the census as "cartoonist."  In 1920 he illustrated a collection of Native American folk tales called "Tales of the Bark Lodges."  He also wrote some dialect tales of his own.

He spent the later part of his life as a high school teacher in Berryville, Arkansas, dying in about 1955.

From Kenneth:
How many "Hocus Focus" cartoons are known to exist?

Labels: Q and A

Charlie Roberts just sent me a batch of questions, some of which I can answer, some I can't. So can you help on those I can't?

Q When did the first Dagwood sandwich appear in Blondie?
A Dunno. Anyone?

Q When did Daisy first appear in Blondie?
A Dunno. Anyone?

Q When did the Blondie Sunday page start?
A Ooh, one I can answer. Sunday started on 9/21/1930. Daily, by the way, almost certainly started on 9/15/30, not the oft-quoted 9/8/30.

Q I've read that Chic Young stopped drawing the strip for a year or so when his son passed away in 1937. Any idea of what time period that was ?
A Wasn't Jim Raymond handling all the art chores by then? Anyone?

Q When did the "Joe Palooka" daily and Sunday strips start?
A 4/21/1930 and 1/10/32 respectively.

Q Do you have any information on Vin (or Vincent) Sullivan doing cartoons or strips in the Brooklyn Eagle or other Brooklyn newspaper in the late 20's or early 30's ?
A Vin Sullivan did have a few things published in the Eagle, little strips on the kiddie page. He did a strip called Jibby Jones that ran VERY sporadically from 1927-29 for that amateur page.

Q Are Fred Harman's Bronc Peeler originals available?
A I do recall seeing a daily for sale once, so they do exist, but I imagine they'd be pretty pricey. A Sunday with the On The Range topper would, I imagine, be into 5 figures.

Labels: Q and A