Stripper's Guide

Today we look at Herriman's contributions to the Sunday May 12 1907 LA Examiner.

Up top we have the first sports cartoon Herriman's done in awhile. Here he gives us a sketch of W. C. Temple, the retired former owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Temple's main claim to fame is that he created one of the earliest post-season championship major league baseball gimmicks. He had the top two teams in the (then single) league battle in a best of seven series after the end of the regular season. The winner of the series got possession of the Temple Cup. This forerunner to the World Series was short-lived, for reasons you can read about in this excellent article.

Herriman's second offering consists of one last set of Shriner toons. These cartoons appeared as part of a full page color fare-thee-well to the befezzed partiers. Sorry if the image seems awfully small, but that's cuz it started out so darn big!

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

Clementine and Cat Cavort In Cartoon
By Ray Erwin (E&P, 6/5/1965)

A Girl Scout with big expressive eyes and a pet cat she rescued from a garbage can will enliven newspaper readers soon.

The cartoon: “Clementine.”
The cartoonist: Bob Stevens.
The format: Comic strip or one-column panel six days a week.
The release: July 5.
The distributor: Lew Little Syndicate (210 Post St., Suite 915, San Francisco, Calif.).

Clementine and her cat, Fang, are the creations of Bob Stevens, Mill Valley, Calif., a retired Air Force lieutenant-colonel who has been a free-lance cartoonist for years. Mr. Stevens draws editorial cartoons for the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury-News on a free-lance basis.

Jet Pilot
After studying art at Pasadena (Calif.) City College, Mr. Stevens joined the Army Air Corps in 1942 and won his wings a year later. He was a fighter pilot in the Pacific until the end of World War II, when he became a civilian flight instructor and advertising director of a short-haul airline. He was recalled to active duty in 1948 as a jet pilot and set the world’s speed record in an Air Force F86 in 1950.
While assigned to the Strategic Air Command at Omaha, Col. Stevens drew illustrations for the Omaha (Neb.) World-Herald’s Sunday supplements.

Clementine and Cat
Fang, soon after being pulled from a smelly garbage can with a fishbone in his teeth, proved to be quite an education for Clementine. She took him to a bathtub and then wrote with a shaky and bandaged hand, “Dear Diary, Today I learned something new about cats.” After taking Fang to a pet obedience school—with predictable disastrous results—Clementine exclaimed: “My goodness, I thought all pet schools were co-educational.”

Mr. Stevens said his six-year old Danish niece, Majbritt Funder, and Sandra Stevens, his brother’s eight-year-old daughter, provided the inspiration for Clementine.

Labels: News of Yore

Here's a gem from the good folks at General Electric. This series of cartoon ads was produced in 1924 by the great C.D. Russell. Russell was at this time well on his way to becoming a favorite in the humor magazine Judge, and almost a decade away from creating what would become his life's work, Pete the Tramp.

Thanks to Cole Johnson for sending in these superb samples from the series!

Scorchy Smith and the Art of Noel Sickles

Edited by Dean Mullaney, biographical essay by Bruce Canwell
IDW Publishing
Hardcover, 391 pages, $49.99
ISBN 978-160010206-6

Noel Sickles never really had any great ambition to be a comic strip cartoonist, but nonetheless ended up being one of the most influential of the 20th century.

Scorchy Smith was an awful Associated Press aviation adventure strip penned by John Terry. Sickles called Terry the worst cartoonist ever, and he wasn't exaggerating much. When Terry became ill Sickles was given the thankless task of ghosting the strip in that horrible 'style'. Luckily for Sickles the ghosting period didn't last long, as Terry soon died. Sickles was then given free rein to experiment, and in the process he revolutionized the way adventure strips are drawn. Sickles is credited with popularizing the chiarascuro technique for adventure comic strips, a style that his buddy Milton Caniff more famously appropriated for his Terry and the Pirates. Sickles experimented endlessly in Scorchy, and this volume shows Sickles playing with various techniques, changing the look of the strip practically on a week by week basis.

Little fanfare has been given to Sickles writing talents. He famously disliked the process of writing the strip, and I expected therefore to have a hard slog reading through his entire three year stint. However, I was gratified to find that Sickles' writing was far better than I had been led to expect. His stories make good internal sense, a basic factor lacking in some highly celebrated strips, and one that keeps me from enjoying many adventure strips. His plots, according to essayist Bruce Canwell often loose adaptations of his favorite western movies, are entertaining and solid. His story pacing, especially after he became more comfortable with his assignment, is unhurried and full of little details, a refreshing change from the frenetic pace maintained by much of his competition. About the only oddity in the stories, and I'm surprised that his editors let him get away with it, is that aviation, the raison d'etre of the strip, is noticeably absent. While strips like Tailspin Tommy strictly constructed their stories around flying, Sickles' Scorchy stories rarely use the aviation angle in any meaningful way. Sometimes the only flying that happens is in the segue from one story to the next. The stories are better off, though, because the slavish imperative of sticking to genre makes strips like Tailspin Tommy quite a bore for those not fascinated by wind shear and the latest advances in de-icers.

The reproduction of the strips is miraculously excellent if I assume correctly that tearsheets had to be used as source material. The smaller papers that tended to use the Associated Press features seldom had excellent print quality, but the strips here look fantastic. Even the zipatone, very hard to reproduce well from tearsheets, is clear and sharp. I doff my Photoshopping hat to the work of the restorer on this project.

The book is a giant, weighing in at a whopping seven pounds. Not only do we get the complete Sickles run on Scorchy (plus a little of Terry and Christman to pad out story arcs) but there is an exhaustive biographical essay by Bruce Canwell. It is accompanied by an incredible array of Sickles work all the way from rare early pieces to his later commercial and fine art work. This section of the book, comprising over 130 pages, could easily have been published on its own to rave reviews from Sickles fans.

Have I mentioned that NBM's latest entry in their Forever Nuts series of classic comic strip reprints is Happy Hooligan by Fred Opper? I provided a biographical essay on Opper for the book as well as a number of raw scans of Opper material. You can purchase your copy at Amazon.com.

I supplied a great many Opper cartoons that didn't find their way into the book, so here's the final batch of bonus Opper items for you.

Up top we have a suffrage cartoon from 1912 starring one of the less used members of Opper's repertory company, King Solomon.

Next are a pair of Puck full-page strips showing just how differently Opper approached his work when working for that magazine. Both are from the early 1890s.

Next we have an editorial cartoon about prohibition from late in Opper's career, 1929.

And finally a 1906 Monopoly Lodge editorial cartoon from Teddy Roosevelt's trust-busting days. It's not hard to imagine what T.R. would have to say about our current financial crisis which owes most of it's woes on our government's welcoming attitude to giant rapacious corporations. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

NBM's latest entry in their Forever Nuts series of classic comic strip reprints is Happy Hooligan by Fred Opper. I provided a biographical essay on Opper for the book as well as a number of raw scans of Opper material. You can purchase your copy at Amazon.com.

I supplied a great many Opper cartoons that didn't find their way into the book, so here's a potpourri of bonus Opper items for you.

Today we have a 1918 Dubb Family Sunday, an incredible Down On The Farm Sunday from 1925 wherein practically all of Opper's best-known characters make appearances, and a 1904 Alphonse and Gaston Sunday.

Jim Ivey's new book, Graphic Shorthand, is available from Lulu.com for $19.95 plus shipping, or you can order direct from Ivey for $25 postpaid. Jim Ivey teaches the fundamentals of cartooning in his own inimitable style. The book is 128 pages, coil-bound. Send your order to:


Also still available, Jim Ivey's career retrospective Cartoons I Liked, available on Lulu.com or direct from Jim Ivey for $20 postpaid. When ordered from Ivey direct, either book will include an original Ivey sketch.

Labels: Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics

The Shriner's convention is winding down, but Herriman is still in there plugging away with his daily cartoons. These were published on May 10 and 11 1907.

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

NBM's latest entry in their Forever Nuts series of classic comic strip reprints is Happy Hooligan by Fred Opper. I provided a biographical essay on Opper for the book as well as a number of raw scans of Opper material. You can purchase your copy at Amazon.com.

I supplied a great many Opper cartoons that didn't find their way into the book, so here's a potpourri of bonus Opper items for you.

Today we have a wonderful editorial cartoon from 1919 wherein Opper gives us his interpretations of a few of Hearst's other star comic strips. Then we have a Cousin Willie daily strip from 1916. Willie was a member of Opper's cast of country folk who popped up in many of his strips. Finally we have a pair from my personal favorite Opper series, Our Antediluvuan Ancestors. Opper really seemed to get a kick out of drawing weird dinosaurs and used them to good effect in commenting on modern problems. The example from the short-lived Sunday version is from 1904, the daily-style one is from 1913.

NBM's latest entry in their Forever Nuts series of classic comic strip reprints is Happy Hooligan by Fred Opper. I provided a biographical essay on Opper for the book as well as a number of raw scans of Opper material. You can purchase your copy at Amazon.com.

I supplied a great many Opper cartoons that didn't find their way into the book, so here's a potpourri of bonus Opper items for you. Today we have three from Opper's Puck days, when he used a very refined style completely different than the one he used for newspaper strips.

These three Puck cartoons are all satires on religious themes, a favorite subject for Opper in his days with that magazine. Opper curtailed such cartoons when working for Hearst.

NBM's latest entry in their Forever Nuts series of classic comic strip reprints is Happy Hooligan by Fred Opper. I provided a biographical essay on Opper for the book as well as a number of raw scans of Opper material. You can purchase your copy at Amazon.com.

I supplied a great many Opper cartoons that didn't find their way into the book, so here's a potpourri of bonus Opper items for you. At the top we have a Happy Hooligan page from near the end of Opper's career, 1931. Although many say that he was well past his prime and the art was no longer any good, I've always liked Opper's later work as a study in expressive minimalism.

Next we have an experimental strip from 1906 called The Red Rig-aJigs. This short-lived feature starred a cast of gremlins delineated only by a ghostly red tint.

Finally we have a 1905 And Her Name Was Maud strip, Opper's second most famous feature after Happy Hooligan, and a 1910 Howson Lott strip, a comedy about a city fellow who moves to the country.

Johnny Reb and Billy Yank has the distinction of being the very last new feature to be produced in the full page format. The Sunday only strip debuted in the New York Herald-Tribune on November 18 1956, beautifully drawn to take advantage of its vast acreage by Frank Giacoia.

The strip initially told the tale of a pair of soldiers, one each in the Civil War's Union and Confederate armies. The story was well-researched and according to Ron Goulart, was a joint effort between Giacoia and Herald-Tribune editor Ben Martin.

The concept of following the two separate stories might have seemed like a good idea, and would have been in a novel, but the weekly comic strip doesn't lend itself well to such literary devices. The schizophrenic strip eventually settled down to primarily tell Johnny Reb's story, and was better for it.

The glorious full page version of the strip was last printed by the Herald-Tribune on September 22 1957, after which the strip was available only in the conventional half- and third-page formats. The strip wasn't selling well, a common problem at the H-T -- many excellent strips have foundered in obscurity for no other reason than having the misfortune of being picked up by that syndicate.

Giacoia was evidently having trouble keeping up with deadlines on the strip, probably because he couldn't afford to devote much time to it considering how little revenue it was bringing in. The embattled Giacoia enlisted help on the strip from various quarters -- we know that Jack Kirby's hand is evident on many a strip, and it looks to me considering the ever-changing quality of the art that many others were called on to help. I think that someone skilled in art-spotting of 1950s comic book artists would have a field day with this strip.

It finally became obvious that Johnny Reb and Billy Yank was simply not going to catch on, even with Southern papers that should have been clamoring to add it to their Sunday sections. The story was brought to a close on the Sunday of May 24 1959. It was only one of a long string of victims of the H-T's preternatural inability to sell its fine wares.

Labels: Obscurities

There's a whole laundry list of state history cartoon features, and Builders of Wisconsin was pretty typical of the genre except that unlike most it ran in color in the Sunday comics section rather than in black and white. The feature was by Kern Pederson, who is at least slightly better known as the creator of Little Farmer, a long-running weekly strip of the Al Smith Service.

The Sunday feature appeared in the Milwaukee Journal from October 22 1972 to sometime between May and October 1973. If it appeared anywhere else I'm unaware of it. A close look at the examples above reveal that the feature may have run as more of a daily style-panel at some earlier point -- notice that there are two numbered panels per Sunday episode. I've not found the feature running in that configuration, though.

One additional note -- don't blame Pederson for using such a muted and repetitive color palette on his feature. The Milwaukee Journal's whole Sunday comics section looked like this in the 1970s. Although they were definitely employing a 4-color press all the colors were washed out. I don't know if they were using cheap inks or what, but the whole section looked awful.

Labels: Obscurities

Jim Ivey's new book, Graphic Shorthand, is available from Lulu.com for $19.95 plus shipping, or you can order direct from Ivey for $25 postpaid. Jim Ivey teaches the fundamentals of cartooning in his own inimitable style. The book is 128 pages, coil-bound. Send your order to:


Also still available, Jim Ivey's career retrospective Cartoons I Liked, available on Lulu.com or direct from Jim Ivey for $20 postpaid. When ordered from Ivey direct, either book will include an original Ivey sketch.

Labels: Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics

Here are Herriman's offerings for May 8 and 9 1907. He's still covering the big Shriner convention. What I find interesting in this whole series of cartoons is that George is having a lot of fun with dialect and wordplay, later a hallmark of his Krazy Kat.

The weird names all over the second cartoon (Zem Zem, Anezeh, Murats, etc.) are various local chapters of the Shriners. The ostrich business, on the other hand, I can't interpret.

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

Here's two more from the Chicago Defender. Bungleton Green was the paper's longest running strip. It was created by Leslie Rogers in 1920 and went through a long roll call of cartoonists before finally ending in 1968. Here are two samples, one by Jay Jackson from 1937, the other by Henry Brown in 1950. There's a lot to tell about this strip, but I'm saving that up for the book I want to write on the comics of the black papers.

The Sparks was a delightful domestic comedy by Chester Commodore; it ran from 1948 to 1962. The original title of the strip was literally Nameless; the Defender ran a contest to name the new strip, and The Sparks won the competition after four months of gathering entries.

Labels: Obscurities

To welcome our new African-American president (who I'm sure follows this blog regularly) here are a few features produced for Barack Obama's biggest booster in Chicago, the Chicago Defender.

First we have So What?, a panel feature that ran irregularly in the Chicago Defender from 1939 to 1962, making it one of the longest lasting features in that paper. It was originally done by the great Jay Jackson, then was taken over from 1949 on by Chester Commodore. Our example is from the Commodore years. So What? was a gag panel without recurring characters

Next we have Ravings of Professor Doodle, another Defender feature that was created by Jay Jackson. Doodle was a latter day Everett True; he took it upon himself to rather vigorously enforce his standards of propriety on all who had the misfortune to cross his path. There were quite a few features of this sort in black papers in the 40s and 50s that were meant to gently, or not so gently, tell blacks to behave better if they wanted to be treated with respect by whites. Our example here is from well after Jackson's short tenure; this one is by Henry Brown. Chester Commodore also worked on the feature after Jackson.

Li'l Smart Alex was a short-lived kid feature by Henry Brown. It ran 1950-51.

The Notorious Mr. Jim Crow is a pointedly political strip about a racist Southern politician. The strip was penned by Garrett Whyte and ran from 1946 to 1951. Crow's speech pattern is lifted from the Senator Claghorn character of the Fred Allen Show, the same distinct voice we remember better today when it was appropriated by Foghorn Leghorn in the Warner Brothers cartoons.

Labels: Obscurities

After walking hundreds of miles over the past month and knocking on thousands of doors I arrived home after the polls closed last night and fell asleep before any results were in. By some small miracle I awoke at midnight to hear Barack Obama's inspiring victory speech. Judy and I wept with joy to know that our country has chosen the right path to the future, one in which the rest of the world is not seen as a long list of enemies to be battled, but as a roll call of friends and potential friends.

Frankly I had just about written this country off as having fallen completely under the spell of neo-conservative right wing fundamentalists, but as it turns out our mighty beacon of freedom, hope and liberty still burns. Although I had dared to hope that the margin of victory would be much wider than it was, I'm confident that the next four years will be a turning point in showing our people that this past eight years of fear-mongering and xenophobia were just a brief nightmare and that we have awakened to a new dawn, a day when the United States of America regains its rightful position as a country to be admired and emulated by the rest of the world.

This is my 1,000th post on the Stripper's Guide blog. In it I have one very simple message for you:



See you after the election -- I have many more doors to knock on before I sleep again.

Jim Ivey's new book, Graphic Shorthand, is available from Lulu.com for $19.95 plus shipping, or you can order direct from Ivey for $25 postpaid. Jim Ivey teaches the fundamentals of cartooning in his own inimitable style. The book is 128 pages, coil-bound. Send your order to:


Also still available, Jim Ivey's career retrospective Cartoons I Liked, available on Lulu.com or direct from Jim Ivey for $20 postpaid. When ordered from Ivey direct, either book will include an original Ivey sketch.

Labels: Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics

A real quickie today folks. I'm going to be out canvassing for Obama all day and didn't have the foresight to get a Halloween post ready ahead of time. So BOO already.

Anyhow, here's a mystery item. Percy Crosby's Skippy had a long-running Sunday topper strip titled Always Belittlin', but I'd never encountered or even heard of the possibility that there was a daily panel until I stumbled across these two examples.

Both are from the pages of the New York American, Hearst's flagship paper, and date from January and February 1933. If these were just some oddball item and not a continuing series I wouldn't expect them to have dates and syndicate slugs.

Does anyone have any additional evidence that there was a daily panel series of Always Belittlin', or perhaps even have running date info?

NEA Sundays seldom fit into our obscurity category, but The Clownies is a notable exception. This rare addition to the NEA list ran in very few papers -- it almost seems as if it was an extra offering not included in the standard package. In fact, even the NEA archives at Ohio State University are missing this strip. I used to think that these Sundays might have been pilfered from the syndicate bound volumes, but as I've come to see just how rare these Sundays are I wonder if they were never bound in to begin with, much like other oddball items like the NEA Christmas strips and such.

The Clownies seems to have started sometime in 1931 (earliest I've found is October 11 but take that as a start date at your peril) as a sort of Sunday adjunct to the daily kiddie story feature The Tinymites. Both The Clownies and The Tinymites were being produced by writer Hal Cochran and cartoonist Joe King at the time. The Clownies started off as a full page feature without a topper, but gained a half-page companion called Animal Cracks sometime around mid-1932.

Joe King's art was serviceable but The Clownies turned into a real graphic knockout in April 1933 when the fabulous George Scarbo took over the art chores. Scarbo was a real workhorse of the NEA bullpen, but he lavished great attention on The Clownies and Animal Cracks when he took over. I apologize that the only sample I had in reach for this essay was a Joe King production, so you'll have to take my word for the quality of Scarbo's work on the feature -- it is definitely worth seeking out.

Scarbo also brought new life to the activity panel Comic Zoo that ran as a sub-sub-feature of Animal Cracks. Whereas Joe King usually produced uninspired panels like the one above, Scarbo's version of the panel was so delightful that it survived the end of The Clownies page (my latest is June 25 1933) . Comic Zoo was brought back in 1936 as the topper to the Out Our Way Sunday, and Scarbo produced that delightful feature for almost thirty years more.

As you can tell by all the prevarication above, I'd be more than delighted to hear from anyone who can supply more definitive running dates for this feature and its topper.

Labels: Obscurities

You wouldn't think that any feature that ran for fifty years could be classified as an obscurity, but I think Dick Wingert's Hubert may honestly fit the category.

Hubert first came to life in Stars & Stripes during World War II. He was the eternally confused little dope who doggedly tried to do his duty but constantly ran into trouble. It's said that Wingert's creation was almost as popular as Mauldin's Willie and Joe with the GI audience.

After the war Wingert brought Hubert back home in a syndicated panel offered by King Features starting December 3 1945. Hubert made a painless transition from foxhole to suburbia with his dishy wife Trudy, and started out strong enough in sales that a Sunday page was added February 3 1946.

No one expected the panel to last long. Many wartime features tried to adapt themselves to a post-war world and lasted only as long as the nostalgia of returned GIs held out. Seldom did that sentimentality last beyond a decade. Although Hubert lasted much longer, I think his welcome was generally worn out by the end of the 1950s as it's rare to find the feature after that. However, King Features continued to make the feature available to an increasingly tiny number of newspapers for decades more. King is notable for keeping features well beyond their profitable life, whether through inertia or affection fo