Puppetry of the gentils

Saturday leftover day.

Since Bill Wray mentioned it, I am taking today to show you on of Chad's Howdy Doody pages. This on is from 1951. More about it and more samples at a later point. Most eye-catching feature is that weird line that became his trademark.



The green and orange hue is a result of my way of taking out the yellowbrown paper color.

The Browne and Walker Show

Tuesday comic strip day.

Today a couple more Hi and Lois strips from the late fifties. I recently read somewhere that Fantagraphics is doing a complete edition of Mort Walker's early sixties Sam's strip, one of the weirdest self referential strips ever done for major syndication. I won't be buying it because it has been reprinted here and there several times (including once in a dutch magazine, so I have a complete set). But I urge you all to check it out. I hope that it will be a great success, just as the Complete Beetle Bailey, out soon from Checker. For now Fantagraphics seems to have had more success in getting such books into the general book stores, where they belong. I hope Checker manages to do the same and the success of this series leads to a reprinting of Mort Walker's other strip Hi and Lois. As I said before, I believe it is gorgeous and the humor far ahead of it's times. I liked it better when it was more than just a family strip, though. In the syndication brochure it was called a satire of modern urban life and that is what I like about it. Check out these samples.

I am starting with an early daily strip. My earliest Sunday is from 1857, but the strip ran from 1954 with a Sunday starting in 1956. As you can see from this daily, after two years Dik Brown'e own angular style had complete given way to Mort Walker's more rounded forms. This golf joke would have worked just as well with Beetle Bailey, which probably explains why the dumb character didn't last long.

Anyone for Dennis?

Tuesday strip day.

After stating yesterday that Ketcham may have been drawing the Sunday Dennis the Menace in 1954, I went and checked my acts. Most sources say Ketcham turned over the writing and drawing of the Sunday page to Al Wiseman en Fred Toole in 1953. Which makes yesterday's Sunday about Mr. Ketcham al the more curious.

Here we have my only sample of the Sunday from 1952, when Ketcham was almost certainly all doing it himself. The strip itselfs seems like nothing more than a string of Dennis gags. The drawing is as artful as Ketcham ever was. This is Ketcham in his early years. He would restyle his character not long after. Still, some of his major achievements in cartooning are visible here. His use of silhouettes of course. Not only the straightforward silhouettes in the first and seventh panel, but also the way he silhouettes the desk in the third panel for effect. This sort of shameless simplification is the trademark of Ketcham's style. Look at the folds on the bed or the babysitter's clothes. How could you not draw them like that after having seen Ketcham's simple and flowing lines? The variety in his use of panel shapes and sizes. His use of walls and doorp[osts to seperate and draw the attention of the reader. He had not yet discovered the trick of leaving lines open instead of clsing everything up. When he started doing that he enabled himself to let his lines flow from one into the other without having to bother with such realistic stuff as closed pant legs of backs of shirts. I will talk some more about those in a later post.



For those of you who are used to my normal deluge of scans I am adding two more early B.C. Sundays. The first one is from 1958, the first year of the strip, and already Hart was wrestling with his relationship with the Gods.

Ketcham if you can!

Monday cartoon day.

I have been showing a lot of cartoons by Mort Walker which he did before starting Beetle Bailey between 1948 and 1952. In that same period there were two other important cartoonists, both if which I think are great. One was Virgil Partch, who was a large influence on a whole generation of cartoonists. The other was someone who worked together with Partch at Disney in the early forties. After the war, he took to magazine cartooning and soon he was a master of the genre. Like Mort Walker, he stopped doing cartoons in the early fifties when he started his own newspaper feature. The feature was Dennis the Menace. The cartoonist Hank Ketcham.

Like Walker, Ketcham managed to place cartoons in all of the major magazines of the day. Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, True. Where the Post was Walker's main outlet and True belonged to Partch, Ketcham sold most of his stuff to Collier's, a man's weekend magazine which could be read by the little woman too. Before landing at Collier's he sold cartoons all over the place, appearing in monthly cartoon magazines such as Judge and 1000 Jokes, as well as others. He also did a lot of advertising, especially in the later years. He never joined up with a company, so my guess is he was sought after because of his style.

Last year Fantagraphics published the first real collection of Ketcham's wonderful cartoon pieces. They had already published three volumes of The Complete Dennis the Menace (with more to come) but Where's Dennis is a welcome addition. Ketcham's cartoons are almost always laugh out loud funny, often better than the more popular Dennis. It is well known that Ketcham relied on gag writers for his dailey panel about Dennis' shananigans, but I am not sure if he used those for his cartoons. Some of the worst Dennis cartoons are nothing more than illustrated gaglines, but most of the cartoons seem to have been written with the drawing in mind. In a good cartoon, the cartoon itself is a large part of the fun. In Backstage At The Strips Mort Walker advises strip artists to 'have your character hit over the head once a week'. This is not only a reminder of the fact that slapstick and visual humor is a large part of the fun in a good strip, but also that the cartoony aspect of it is it's pure reason for being. We don't read the comics get our daily quota of funny lines and zingers, we want to see the world through the eyes of a cartoonist. The simplification of the outside world, body movement and facial reactions are what makes one stgrip stand out from the other. It is why we come back to it and it is why it has to be consistant on the one hand and keep renewing itself on the other. In his cartoons, Ketcham understood this like no other. They are each and every one of them a revelation as to how the world can be seen and simplified into a couple of lines. For some reason this tickles our funnybones. The same way an experienced stand-up comedian will tell you that shorter always is funnier.

I will be giving Ketcham's cartoons a lot of space over the next few weeks. I will even have a look to see if I can manage to get in a review of the Fantagraphics book (which, apart from the fact that is was long overdue, has it's problems). To kick it off, I will start with an early piece about Ketcham, from Lariar's 1945 edition of Best Cartoons. I don't know how long this series ran, but the earliest one I have seen is from 1943 and the latest for 1956. In the earlier editions Lariar included short descriptions of the most popular cartoonists, often accompanied by a self-portrait.





These next three cartoons are from the Summer 1945 issue of 1000 Jokes, a quarterly Dell publication featuring gags and cartoons. They are best known among collectors for having photo's or charicatures of celebrity comediens on them. We have come across it here on this blog, when I pu lished some of the written pieces Mort Walker did for them when he was the editor for one short year in 1950.





To illustrate how much that self-portrait remained unchanged, I am including a 1954 sunday page of Dennis the Menace, which has a photograph of Ketcham. According to most sources, Ketcham gave the sunday to his assistants (about which more later) in 1954, a year after the sunday was started. In the late fifties, this was running so well that he never even interfered with them. This self-referencial sunday is either one of the last one he did himself, or a very self-consious attempt to reiterate his importance after handing it over to a ghost artist (but possibly not yet a ghostwriter).

Flessel With The Pessel

Tuedsay newspaper strip day.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to pay some attention tot the work of Creig Flessel, the industry legend who had worked on everything from pulps to th earliest DC comics to advertising comics, newpaper strips and finally Playboy. I showed some of the commisions he was still doing in his nineties.

When I returned from my two weeks holiday in France, I read online that he had died july the 17th at the age of 96. Several people, including my old friend Mike Lynch have written more about him and I urge you to look it up. Mike links you up to Mark Evanier's obituary, the completest I have yet seen and a full presentation of the presentation of the 2007 Sparky Award, with a great interview of the then 95 year old Flessel, which is up on youtube. I have decided to take the opportunity to show you some more of Flessel's magnificent, but often unseen work.

Since today is newspaper strip day here at the FF, I have spend all my free time yesterday to round up what I have of Flessel's only newspaper outing, the Christian message strip David Crane. Flessel took over the strip from it's creator Win Mortimer. Mortimer had created David Crane in 1956 and seems to have left it in 1960. as you can see from the samples I am showing, Mortimer's name wasn't replaced by that of Flessel until 1961, which makes it sort of hard to find out when exactly the change-over was done.

David Crane was a niche strip about a hunky minister, who gave sermons and life lessons to the youngsters in his care. By the time Flessel took over, it had changed into a gag strip about one of it's side characters, a diddering old fool of a man. At first I thought this figure was David Crane, as must have many of the readers. In the early years the sundays usually had some sort of sermon or showed a certain biblical fact or thought. As with most miche strip, the editors must have thought there was an audience for such a thing. The change to a gag a day strip bout a pensioner and the fact that the strip was taken over by Flessel seem to indicate that it was not the succes Mortimer and the syndicate had hoped.

Still, the fact that Flessel did take over the strip after a full decade of doing a lot of well paying work for the advertising company Johnstone and Cuching, must have some significance as well. The comic strip ads that were so popular in the sunday section sof the forties and the fifties were losing ground to other forms of advertising. Maybe Flessel's income was dwindling and he had to look for another source of income. Or maybe he had had enough of drawing that sort thing all the time (although David Crane wasn't all that different from the biblical tales he had been drawing for Boy's Life) and wanted a change. Whatever the reason, around the same time he seems to disappear from Boy's Life as well. He did continue his succesful series of ads for Eveready batteries, as can be seen from my previous post (and the one above this from tomorrow).

Anyway, here are all the David Crane's I could find in my collection. The first one from 1957 is clearly by Mortimer and has his rounded inking style.



The next three from 1958 already give me problems. They seem to be by Mortimer, but the inking style has changed. The subject matter is still Christian Message (not unsimilar to the style of Flessels bible stories from Boy's Life), but we have been introduced to the character that will eventually take over the strip.





The next two from 1960 are still attributed to Mortimer, but it seems to me that the change-over to Flessel must have taken place somewhere around here (if not earlier). If you have a look at the last two, you'll see Flessel's own style emerging, making it plausible that he did these as well. From this point on, the grumpy old guy seems to be the main character of the strip. I don't know if he is a pensioner or an old clergy guy, who at some point played the Barry Fitzgerald to David Crane's Bing Crosby in the movie Going My Way.




The last two are signed by Flessel. Here we also have my only three tier version. The strip was three tiers, or course. And it look sit's best in those dimensions. But as usual the three tier version wasn't used a lot anymore since the late fifties. Too bad, because in the three toer version Flessel signs in the first panel. If he and Mortimer did that in the other strips as well, there would have been no doubt about who did what. Note that Flessel signed his name Creig, although he was officially names Craig. He went back and forth between these two names all his career.

Jeanie baby.

Thursday story day.

Continuing my run of Gill Fox and Selma Diamond's Jeanie, here are two complete weeks from august 1952.

Marvelous Reprints

Lumped In

Tuesday strip day.

One of the first strips I featured was Stan Lee and Dan DeCarlo's Willie Lumpkin. Fellow fan Angelo sent me a bunch of scans from Willie Lumpkin strips that were colored and republished in Marvel Age, the advertising/publicity magazine Marvel published in the late eighties. I tried to make out the strip dates to order them chronologically.

The first one was probably published in Marvel Age #54 and was accompanied by this little write-up by Stan the Man himself.






















Last time I lookedthere was a huge storyline in the current Marvel Universe about Skrulls taking over all sorts of heroes. I wonder if ols Willie is going to feature in that...