Hey Girlies, I'm swamped today, so no time for pithy analysis -- here's a Bill Holman extravaganz, scanned from my own paper collection, foo you to henjoy!
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| February 20, 1939 |
Paul Foomey
Paul Foomey
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A Hot Smokey Stover Fireman Sunday Page From 1939
Paul Foomey
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Energy Patterns Observed in a 1927 Screwball Salesman Sam Sunday by George Swan
The page is a wonderful example of the streamlined, virtuoso cartooning style of George Swanson. Oddly bereft of its trademark background signs past the first two panels, this episode is all about movement and action.And simplification. The hands of Swan's characters are round blobs, feet are (Charles) Shulz-like black ovals, and the cityscape backgrounds are merely suggestive. The panels are filled with sweat drops, swirls, stars, movement lines, and sound effects. By 1927, Swan has mastered the screwball cartoon vernacular like few others.
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| March 27, 1927: One of the last Salesman Sam Sunday by George Swan . C.D. Small would continue the strip for another 10 years or so. (from the collection of Paul Tumey) |
In last week's Salesman Sam essay, we looked at the movement of energy in a Sam by C.D. Small. I made the point that screwball comics have wild and unpredictable (if logical) directions of movement when compared to comics of other genres. Here's how the movements map out in today's Swan comic:
It's all about conflict and comically explosive resolution. The top tier gives us two stable panels, with solid left-to-right movement. The third panel in the top tier initiates a conflicting movement.
After this, we get a tier of relatively minor explosions of random movement. The exaggerated takes shown here would be a highlight in many other artist's strips, but Swan had a much greater range for presenting visual chaos, placing him in the neighborhood of Milt Gross and Bill Holman.
The 3rd tier delivers more building conflict, which continues into the first panel of the last tier. Then, the last two panels explore the energy with the greatest velocity and number of directions of all the panels, proving a satisfying resolution.
All the Best,
Paul Tumey
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For Your Ice Only: A Cool 1926 Milt Gross Nize Baby Color Sunday Comic
Before the days of electrical refrigeration, people had small, thickly insulated cabinets in their home that stored slowly melting blocks of ice. This is how our grandparents and their parents kept food cool and fresh in America. My Southern mother still called her refrigerator an "ice-box," as do I -- to the amusement of some. Back in the day, you had to replace the ice as it melted -- it must have been quite a strenuous and messy task. Milt Gross, in today's comic, uses what was then a common chore as the basis for one of his terrific 12-panel operas of escalation, as Pop Feitelbaum tries in vain to get "de ice in de ice-box."
I think the comics of Milt Gross are superb in all periods of his career, but my favorite is the 1920s Sunday pages, which I think offer some of his wildest and funniest drawings. Today's 1926 comic is a great example:
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| The Iceman Cometh in Milt Gross' Oct 24, 1926 Nize Baby (from the collection of Paul Tumey) |
Despite this pattern, visually the climax of the page is the wonderful 4th panel of Pop's circular skittering fall with the block of ice. Screwball comics are unpredictable in their movements, which is part of the delight of reading them.
We've seen in previous postings that Milt Gross liked to sometimes include his own version of a Rube Goldberg machine. The last panel once again shows Milt Gross' debt to to Rube Goldberg as he makes reference to Goldberg's popular comic panel, Foolish Questions.
Tomorrow, we'll take a look at Rube Goldberg'sFoolish Questions panel. Join me then! And be sure to stop by every Monday for a new Milt Gross comic!
Keeping my ice peeled,
Paul Tumey
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Say, Are You Looking at A Computer? Rube Goldberg's Foolish Questions
A: No, it's a clam playing poker.
Presenting a look at Rube Goldberg's hit panel, Foolish Questions. Readers like me, who grew up reading Mad, will read these cartoons and see a connection between Foolish Questions and Al Jaffe'sSnappy Answers to Stupid Questions. Al has given Rube credit for the original idea, and has even admired Rube, famously calling him a "superJew."
The basic premise of Rube's influential cartoon panel can be gleaned in a second - a boob asks a question that shows s/he isn't really awake. Just as a Zen master might rap a sleepy student, Rube's characters answer in surreal, sarcastic phrases. Both sides of the formula are funny, and Rube's endless gallery of screwball grotesques make it all work brilliantly.
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| circa 1909-10 (from the collection of Paul Tumey) |
Rube credited fellow Evening Mail staffer, the columnist Franklin P. Adams, with the inspiration:
"Did it ever occur to you what funny questions people ask?" observed Adams one afternoon. "You meet a fellow who's been out of town and say to him, 'Hello, you back again?' On an August day, with the thermometer at 100 even, a man is pushing a lawn mower around the front yard and oozing like a sponge, when some nut comes along and asks, 'Cutting the grass?' "
(from Rube Goldberg: His Life and Work by Peter Marzio, Harper and Row, 1973, p. 45)
The first Foolish Question was numbered Number 1, and appeared October 23, 1908. Number 2 followed the day. Rube had a hit from the start. Earlier that year, he had emigrated across country from San Francisco after working as a sports cartoonist for about four years. With little experience, no job offer, and the ambition of youth, Rube faced down numerous rejections and landed a job with the sports editor at the new York Evening Mail, beginning a 14-year association that would prove mutually beneficial in a huge way, starting with the runaway success of Foolish Questions.
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| circa 1909-10 (from the collection of Paul Tumey) |
Between October 1908 and February 1910, the amazingly productive Rube Goldberg wrote and drew over 450 Foolish Question cartoons. Each cartoon featured new characters, a rich cast of extreme figures that are too short, too tall, too fat, too thin. Some with bulging eyes, others with black specks, and still others with inky black round sunglasses. Some hairless, some astonishingly hirsute. Writing in early 1909, Goldberg's fellow Evening Mail staffer, the cartoonist-illustrator Homer Davenport, said, "...funniest of all are the questions and answers of these bald-headed and hump-backed and knock-kneed people."
Here's a scan of a page from a recently acquired scrapbook that offers four Foolish Questions, all circa 1909-10.
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| Rube Goldberg's Foolish Questions displayed on a 100-year old scrapbook page circa 1909-10 (from the collection of Paul Tumey) |
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| The Janesville Daily Gazette, May 26, 1909 |
A political conservative, Rube nonetheless was a humanist who believed in every individual's potential for good -- and the racism in his cartoons is no more extreme than what is easily found in most cartoons of the time.
Here's one from my own collection, from called "Those Ridiculous Questions," which suffers from a common weirdness of comics of the time (but not in Rube's work) where the speech balloons, when read left to right, are out of sequence.
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| Oct 3, 1909 - from collection of Paul Tumey |
Starting July 25, 1909, the Chicago Tribune syndicated a 6-block of Foolish Questions for the color Sunday supplements of their subscriber papers. Sometimes the Sunday comic ran as Don't Some People Ask the Biggest Fool Questions?, a title lacking Rube's cadence and wit, and very likely written by a syndicate editor to fill the space.
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| Foolish Questions ran as a syndicated Sunday comic - July 25, 1909 |
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and Rube's cartoons were so honored. Several imitations sprang up in 1909 and 1910. Here's an example of a Sunday half-page of a series unimaginatively called Foolish Foolish Questions that ran from Feb 14, 1909 to October 3,1909 (source: American Newspaper Comics: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide, Allan Holtz, 2012).
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| A not so "Sterling" rip-off of Rube Goldberg's Foolish Questions- February 21, 1909 |
Foolish Foolish Questions, drawn by "Sterling" and others, was distributed by World Color Printing, which interestingly published Rube's very first Sunday comic, a version of Mike and Ike called The Look-A-Like Boys (1907-1908). I wonder how Rube felt at being ripped-off by an outfit to which he had so recently belonged. Rube never seemed to let failure, rejection, or rip-offs slow him down.
In 1909, a classy cloth hardcover collection of Foolish Questions appeared, Rube's first book, and one of the very first cartoon collections published in America. Published by Maynard, Small, an Co., the volume is stuffed with reprints of selected favorites and sells for anywhere from $50 to $600 today. Occasionally inscribed copies can be found. The book was dedicated to Franklin P. Adams, the source of the original inspiration.
In 1909-circa 1912, Rube Goldberg also penned a new line of color Foolish Questions postcards. Judging by how often these 100-year old items turn up on eBay, a huge number must have been purchased.
Unscrupulous publishers ripped off the postcard series as well, quite clumsily:
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| The original Foolish Questions game - circa 1912-19 (from the collection of Paul Tumey) |
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| circa 1909-10 (from the collection of Paul Tumey) |
In 1924, the Foolish Questions game was revived in a second edition, with fresh graphics, including a new Rube Goldberg designed cover, with a typically screwball answer:
In the summer of 1913, Rube took his first trip to Europe. The Evening Mail paid for the trip, and Rube faithfully mailed back a new cartoon series he called Boobs Abroad (after Mark Twain's European travelogue, Innocents Abroad). As we can see, in this example scanned from my paper collection, Rube integrated Foolish Questions as a panel within the cartoon series, and linked it thematically.
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| Rube cleverly links his Foolish Questions series with his Boobs Abroad series - 1913 (from the collection of Paul Tumey) |
Rube continued to write and draw Foolish Questions until 1934. The series peaked in 1910, and he had a second big hit with I'm the Guy, followed by an astonishing series of inspired cartoon series and panels. Foolish Questions remains a notable standout among Goldberg's many inspired creations. As Homer Davenport admiringly wrote in 1909:
"What a simple creation is a parody, and what a world of reality is there in Goldberg's Foolish Questions series!"
Say, is this the end?
-Paul Tumey
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| Paul Tumey holding original art for an early Rube Goldberg Foolish Questions while visiting Jennifer George, Rube's granddaughter and Director of Rube Goldberg, Inc. An appeal on behalf of these fine forgotten cartoons: If you enjoy this blog and have a way to help win readership, please do so. A link, a mention, a rave review, or even just a comment -- it all helps. Here's the stats from the last week of posts.  |
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H.M. Bateman and The Speed of Life: Four Cartoons from 1923
Here are four pages of the brilliant English cartoonist H.M. Bateman's cartoons from 1923, scanned from a scrapbook I recently acquired. I believe these are all from the pages of Life, a black and white humor magazine that preceded the more famous photo-based Life Magazine.
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ANNOUNCEMENT! We're changing direction at the Masters of Screwball Comics blog. Instead of a daily posting, we'll shift to a weekly Sunday posting for the fall of 2012, to be called "Screwball Sunday." This will mimic a Sunday newspaper comics section, but will be assembled by me and be composed entirely of noteworthy screwball comics from all eras, with notes by me (of course). I will occasionally write and post illustrated essays on screwball comics as well. Tune in this Sunday for our first SCREWBALL SUNDAY!
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As I wrote in an earlier posting on H. M. Bateman (1882-1970), it may be too much of a stretch to classify him as purely screwball, but there's no doubt his work influenced screwball cartoonists. Consider how the the panel I've excerpted above compares to this scene from Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder's classic "Restaurant!" story from Mad #16 (1954)
While Elder has created a dense tapestry of sight gags, the basic energy is the same as Bateman's panel. Both cartoonists are saying something about the acceleration of modern life.
There is so much to savor in Bateman's work. Like Milt Gross, each drawing is funny on it's own, but also contributes to a glorious escalation of comedic chaos. Bateman himself said that his cartooning was "going mad on paper."
The four pages in this article are chosen because they all depict people struggling madly to get somewhere, something that was relatively new in 1923. Bateman, who was born in 1882, saw the rise of the automobile. In this cartoon, he chronicles the plight of the pedestrian plagued by motorized vehicles at every turn.
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| From Life, circa 1923 (from the collection of Paul Tumey) |
The gag is that our nimble pedestrian is run over by an "out of date vehicle." This cartoon says there's no avoiding change, and if you try, you will suffer. Here's another Bateman, beautifully composed and rendered, that depicts another battle between a pedestrian and a car-clogged street:
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| From Life, circa 1923 (from the collection of Paul Tumey) |
I love the manic, focused -- one might say mad -- look in the pedestrian's face. It requires madness to triumph in a world that turns a man out for a walk into a pedestrian.
Finally, here's an entire group of individuals who have completely adapted to the increased velocity of life. We begin with a group of seven people, all interacting civilly and having a pleasant time. As with William Golding's Lord of the Flies, the trappings of civility are shed when the group must combat each other to survive -- but in the case of the cartoon, they are only competing for a ride on the crowded subway.
They emerge from the underworld, disheveled but willing to embrace civilization once again. The astonishing third tier of the subway battle mirrors the energy of a subway train itself, screeching, jolting, careening, speeding through the darkness.
This was the world of London, New York, Boston, or any other major city in 1923.
Today, it seems the speed of life continues to accelerate -- but instead of fighting for our survival like fleeing or fighting animals, we seem to be in a narcotic haze of Internet, TV, sugar, caffeine, alcohol, drugs, memes, constantly looming disaster -- in short, many of us in the big city are subdued, bored, and possibly even depressed. Here's a photo I took while waiting for a subway train in New York City a few weeks ago.
And here's a shot I sneaked on the train -- looked how bored and tuned out the people are:
Maybe it was like this for people in 1923. Or 1823. Our time certainly has no claim to being the only era of numbing stress in humanity's history.
Today's last H.M. Bateman cartoon once again revolves around transportation. It depicts the ever increasing happiness of a traveler with some priceless drawings and a beautiful opera of escalation. As our Englishman gets further and further away Canada, he becomes happier and happier.
Our traveler has died from happiness! It seems in 1923, Bateman was acutely aware of how technology seemed to aid the human ego in its need to constantly be somewhere else, distracted, and gratified.
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| H. M. Bateman in 1931 |
In The Man Who Was H. M. Bateman (Webb and Bower, Great Britain, 1982), Anthony Anderson observes:
"Bateman by no means rejected all progress: he thought scientific advance exciting, and, for example, considered the first Moon landing the most wonderful feat of his lifetime - he never stopped talking about it. It was the ugly, leveling, concrete and tarmac side of progress that he hated, and it upset him so much that it was without doubt one of the major factors in his decision to quite England." (p. 202)
Bateman moved to the island of Malta in his later years, where he enjoyed a quite life as a painter. His work was a major influence on Harvey Kurtzman, who in turn influenced scores of important cartoonists and humorists.
Yours in Screwballism,
P.C. Tumey
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Screwball Sunday Supplement V17 No 148 - Ahern,Goldberg,Gross, Bradford,Holman,Capp
A big thank you to Dan Nadel and the folks at the The Comics Journal for the link - your support is greatly appreciated and very helpful.
ANNOUNCING a change in direction. Instead of a daily posting, we have shifted to a weekly Sunday posting for the fall of 2012, to be called "Screwball Sunday." This will mimic a Sunday newspaper comics section, but will be assembled by me and be composed entirely of noteworthy screwball comics from all eras, with notes by me (of course). The first issue is above.
I will also occasionally write and post illustrated essays on screwball comics as well, as time and inspiration allow.
To be clear, the pages above are all designed by me, Paul Tumey - they are not scans of any existing paper document (although they contain plenty of scans from my paper collection that you will only find on this blog).
Tune in every Sunday for a NEW collection of startling, saliva-spewing screwballistic delights.
Please remember to help promote this blog if you can. A link, a mention, or just a comment -- it all helps. Let's spread the word, Alphonse. I think Alphonse is a purrfectly good word to spread, although butter is margarinely butter.
Hope you henjoy! Drop me a line or a comment and let me know what you think. paultumey@gmail.com
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My friend and fellow comics scholar Frank Young has co-authored with David Lasky an outstanding graphic novel, The Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song (from Abrams ComicArts). The book will be reviewed in the October 14 issue of Time Magazine, along with Chris Ware's landmark work, Building Stories.
I've read both of these books and highly recommend them.
Click here to read Frank and David's absorbing post detailing the enormous craft that went into a single page of their book.
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Screwball Goes to the Dogs - Doc Syke, Milt Gross, Swinnerton, and Smokey! (Vol.1 No. K9)
Welcome to the second Screwball Sunday Comics Supplement! In this issue, we have literally gone to the dogs. Here's your chance to bone up on some forgotten screwball classics. With one exception, these are all scans from my own paper collection, and the first time these appear on the Internet. This faux newsprint supplement is designed by me, Paul Tumey.
In this survey of cartoon screwball dogs, we note the prevalence of black-spotted orange dogs. In every example, we also see dogs interacting with us fellow humans. One of the surprising aspects of screwball comics is how they often reveal the underlying truths of life. In this weeks' Sunday supplement, we see cartoonists turning over and over to the theme of dogs and people as constant companions.
Please let me know how you like this. Your comments and emails are so important to me!
paultumey@gmail.com
And, if you have the chance to plug this blog, it would help spread the word about these worthy comics.
The day this post went up, Google celebrated Winsor McCay's 107th birthday with an astonishingly good point-and click interactive comic.
Screwily Yours,
Nuthouse Tumey
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Screwball Sunday Supplement Vol. 3 No. 33 - The Squirrel Cage, Swinnerton's Hilarious SAMs, & Count Screwloose
GREETINGS FROM THE LAUGHING ACADEMY!
Welcome to the third issue of our Screwball Sunday Supplement. This issue is packed with comics that ALL have produced guffaws and laffs amongst me self and me pals.
We kick off with a superb Milt Gross Count Tooloose that could well be the prototype for Tex Avery's classic Droopy cartoon, "Dumb-Hounded." We also get a Milt Gross Banana Oil topper. This was a very popular strip in itself back in the day, with folks saying "banana oil!" instead of "bullshit!"
In the interior spread, we get the extra-special treat of 4 Squirrel Cages, all from the 1946 detour from Foozland into Goonia. This is Gene Ahern at his most inspired, most trippy, most sublimely screwball.
On the the back page, we find two truly funny rescued 1905 Jimmy Swinnerton gems from the Platinum Age of American newspaper comics that I hope you will take the time to read, as I think they are something special, racial stereotypes aside.
Swinnerton's SAM strips echo Gross' Banana Oil and Count Screwloose comics in that they both provide a surrogate observer into the strip in the form of the Count, and Sam. Where black American Sam laughs at pomposity, Jewish American Screwloose is aghast at hypocrisy. Sam may have the more light-hearted response, but in all fairness, he "mp-mp-mps" in an earlier and more innocent era, before the horrors of the 20th century transpired.
Just as Sam and The Count are doorways into their comic strip worlds, Ahern's Paul Bunyan-as-bewitched-gnome is a surrogate figure for us in The Squirrel Cage, through which we can comfortably explore the weird worlds of Foozland and environs. Ahern fractally inserts a multitude of additional doorways into his strip, going ever deeper into the labyrinth, until it's impossible to tell the dream from the dreamer -- do we dream of the snarky citizens of Goonia, or do they dream of us?
Ump, Ump ~
Paul Tumey
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Screwball Sunday Supplement - Hairbreadth Harry, Petty Patty, Squirrel Cage, Dave's Deli, and Goldberg
Welcome to the fourth Screwball Sunday Supplement. This issue features two consecutive examples from 1913 of the early screwball masterpiece, Hairbreadth Harry, by C.W. Kahles, in which all the water is drained from an ocean and much silliness ensues. The strip's title, "Hairbreadth Harry" comes from the fact that the hero always escapes from mortal danger by a hair's breadth, a cliche even in 1913.
We also see a rare example of Rube Goldberg's comic strip advertisement for Pepsi Cola, a late Squirrel Cage, and a terrific example of the forgotten romantic screwball comic Petting Patty by Jefferson Machamer. All this, plus a mind-blowing Milt Gross!
As I am fond of clucking, HEN-joy it!
Screwily,
Paul Tumey
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A Rube Goldberg Machine For Voting - Election Special
To commemorate election day 2012 in the United States, I offer to the world an impressive screwball machine that Rube Goldberg invented for recording votes. Click on the cartoon to enlarge.
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| Voting Machine cartoon by Rube Goldberg, circa 1920s |
"When all clerks are unconscious, election is over."
I don't have an exact date of publication for this cartoon. I would say that it's from the 1920s. Rube, a Pulitizer Prize winning editorial cartoonist (1948) promoted a largely conservative agenda. In his humorous cartoons, however, he often transcended political factions and commented on the screwball side of life, as he did in the above invention cartoon, which works both as a typical "Rube Goldberg" machine and a sarcastic comment on our election process.
It's one of his best. His biographer, Peter Marzio, placed it on the front endpaper of his book, Rube Goldberg His Life and Work (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).
Need I urge my readers to vote today? Perhaps you'll get lucky and encounter a wacky screwball machine!
Your Fellow Screwball American,
Paul C. Tumey
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Pigging Out on Jimmy Swinnerton - A Rare 1912 Color Sunday
This scan is from my own paper collection. The comic itself is extremely fragile and fell apart as I scanned it. I'm happy to be able to preserve these treasures. Hopefully more folks will come to appreciate the greatness of Jimmy Swinnerton and the works of his fellow screwball masters shared on this blog!
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| Little Jimmy by James Swinnerton August 18, 1912 (from the collection of Paul C. Tumey) Even though it's not named as such, this page is part of Swinnerton's long-running Little Jimmy series, sometimes spelled as Little Jimmie. Jimmy's often tasked by his father with minding the baby, or going on an urgent errand. Jimmy is easily, always, and inevitably side-tracked, and the result is often comic chaos. The scene in panel 8, where the father sees what he thinks is his baby playing with the piggies is screwballism par excellence. This sort of set-up is exactly what Milt Gross would recreate about 25 years later. In Gross' case, the father's panic would be hugely exaggerated, with hair standing on end, hat flying into the stratosphere, and the entire body stiff as a board in shock and three feet off the ground. With Swinnerton, even though the comic exaggeration is several notches below what we tend to expect in screwball comics, the basic framework for this exaggerated humor is solidly present. Swinnerton's story is fascinating. He started out as one of the very first newspaper cartoonists in New York, working for William Hearst, also a close friend. Swinnerton was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1906, and Hearst -- in great concern -- paid for his relocation to the arid desert out west. What a journey and a huge cultural shift that was for "Little Jimmy!" Swinnerton learned to love the west and spent weeks hiking and sleeping under the stars. he kept drawing his cartoons and would wait for trains to pass by when we came upon a track. He'd hand his cartoons to the train conductor, who would get them back to Hearst in New York. The very cartoon we share today may have undergone just such a cross-country journey. Swinnerton's cure worked, and he lived until 1974. He shared his love of the desert, luring many fellow New York cartoonists to the ancient canyonlands. Swinnerton was the guy who introduced George Herriman to the desert and, as such, is probably responsible for the magical landscapes of Krazy Kat. Swinnerton started out as a charming cartoonist who could spin out screwball and slapstick with layers of disarming cuteness. After a while, his work became more spiritual and lyrical, and he integrated the desert and American southwest into his cartoons. He was highly sympathetic to the various American Indian cultures he experienced first-hand. Here's some breathtaking Little Jimmie dailies from 1933, in which Jimmy and his kid and animal friends have somehow migrated to the southwest:  Click here to hear a great rare 1963 audio interview with Swinnerton about his life and career. Just wait till we get home, Screwball Paul |
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The Secret History of Screwball: A Squirrel's Progress
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Note: Georgian folksinger and comics scholar Carl Linich has posted 10 of the rare Paul Bunyan strips from Gene Ahern's The Squirrel Cage on his blog here.
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Unique among American newspaper comic strips, The Squirrel Cage has a structure that allows broad philosophical and social commentary in the innocent guise of a goofy Sunday comic. Where strips like Pogo and Doonesbury offer sharp topical political commentary, The Squirrel Cage provides a more philosophical-poetical -- almost a Shakespearian perspective on social trends, morality, and government. One hesitates to say how much of the wisdom expressed in The Squirrel Cage is intended or deliberate.
To me, it feels like Ahern in the 1940s knew he was on the mainline connection to his subconscious, and somehow was able to make it flow for years, while at the same time meeting (just barely, and with decreasing sales) the demands of the American newspaper comic strip market. A remarkable feat. Contrast the dreamlike play of a Squirrel Cage comic with the pointed, pun-drenched satire of a Pogo Sunday, and you can see a profound difference between an artist offering superb craftsmanship and an artist revealing his subconscious. There's a very real link between Ahern, psychedelic Underground comics of the 1960s, and the free-flowing stream-of-consciousness social and spiritual commentaries of Steve Willis. While I love Walt Kelly's work, for my money, the surreal, screwball association of Ahern's comics are more valuable to me, because they offer a way to bypass the limitations of rational thinking and reveal something deeper, weirder.
Reading The Squirrel Cage is exciting because it's delightfully odd, and that oddness is rooted in a dreamlike exploration of reality itself. Humor at its best is always based on sharp insights about the world. Ahern's humor grew more sophisticated in this way with each passing year. Finding poetic-philosophical meditations in a forgotten old screwball newspaper comic strip is tantamount to discovering the profound philosophical-religious explorations of Philip K. Dick that were originally packaged as 1950s and 1960s pulp magazine and cheap paperback science fiction.
In the Foozland strips of The Squirrel Cage, Gene Ahern -- a cultured man who (according to his press) used his cartoonist's salary to collect paintings by European masters -- presents a kaleidoscopic view of a fantastic world. His landscapes shift from panel to panel. George Herriman's Krazy Kat is famous for its ever-morphing landscapes; Ahern's Squirrel Cage is virtually unknown but employs the same device with equal artistic success. The multi-year aimless drift through Foozland offers hundreds of bizarre characters, odd plants and animals, and distorted physical laws that reveal, in a disguised and surreal way, underlying truths about our social systems and the subjective nature of reality.
Where Our Boarding House (1922-1936) and later Room and Board (1936-1953) are centered on the delightfully self-deluded world of Major Hoople/Judge Puffle, The Foozland strips of The Squirrel Cage (1936-1953) are subversively directed outward, with a constant focus on the environment instead of the interior world of a central character.
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| A typical Gene Ahern Our Boarding House episode, encased in the limited -- but comically rich -- world of Major Hoople's delusions... |
The Paul Bunyan Gnome
The closest thing we have to a central character in the Foozland strips of The Squirrel Cage is the red-yellow-black clad gnome (the same color scheme worn by Jack Cole's form-bending Plastic Man).
Attentive readers of The Squirrel Cage know the little gnome -- a doppleganger for the the Little Hitch-hiker (who also appears in the Foozland strips) -- is actually Paul Bunyan, the mythic logger giant from American tall tales!
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| The Squirrel Cage by Gene Ahern - March 10, 1943 One of the earliest of the 'Paul Bunyan" strips - note the Little Hitch-hiker appears in the last panel |
This alone is a wonderful surreal gag, but Ahern dropped it after a couple of years. After Paul Bunyan tangles with an ill-tempered witch, he is reduced to a pint-sized lawn-ornament style gnome and banished to the mysterious country of Foozland, where the laws of humans and nature are radically different from our collective reality. After this transformation, the strip never again refers to the gnome as Paul Bunyan. He is essentially a cipher, with no name, no purpose, and no character -- the very opposite of the richly human Major Hoople and Judge Puffle.
Bunyan-gnome occasionally breaks through the borders of Foozland, but instead of returning to our universe, he finds himself in places like Goonia, which is merely another country in the un-named alternate universe. The strip is filled with a never-ending labyrinth of magic doors, caves, tunnels, and stairways that force the gnome (and the reader) to abandon all sense of direction and bearing. Ahern has created on paper a metaphor for what living itself feels like (at least living unconsciously), with its unexpected twists and turns that lead us through a daily parade of bewildering dead-ends in our search for security and reassuring (and non-existent) consistency.
The main visual symbol of travel in the Foozland strips is the ever-present Road, on which characters mostly travel left-to-right, in a mirror-image of the way English-speaking peoples read symbols and (most) sequential graphic narratives.
Minor masterpieces like The Squirrel Cage, because they have been ignored and forgotten, appear to spring up from nowhere, but this is far from the the truth. This lost comic strip actually continues a centuries-old tradition of allegorical storytelling, and traces to some surprising cultural cousins on the nut-laden screwball family tree.
The Origins of Foozland: Bunyan to Bunion
In considering the possible antecedents of Gene Ahern's Foozland, it helps to recognize the strip has an allegorical tone. In some cases, the strips may function as an allegory -- which is a story structure in which characters symbolize ideas and concepts -- and some cases, the strips only assume an allegorical tone, because at their heart, they are more surreal, eschewing any direct, one-to-one correlations between character and concept.This was, after all, first and foremost, entertainment for the masses.
The allegorical tone of Gene Ahern's Foozland strips can be traced back to A Pilgrim's Progress, a little-known series by Winsor McCay, one of the greatest artists of the medium.
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| Perhaps the first great allegorical comic - A Pilgrim's Progress by Winsor McCay |
According to Allan Holtz's American Newspaper Comics: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide (2012), A Pilgrim's Progress ran on weekdays from June 26, 1905 to May 4, 1909.
In McCay's A Pilgrim's Progress, we see a tall, gaunt man clad in black carrying a suitcase called "Dull Care." As with the gnome-Paul-Bunyan in The Squirrel Cage, he seems to almost always journey from left to right, on an eternal Road. McCay's Pilgrim (who is sometimes referred to as "Mr. Bunion", a play on John Bunyan's name) ) encounters one tortured soul after another, and is unable to put his suitcase down to help. In the example shown above, we see a man driven crazy by his own outrage at the world's injustices -- unable to see that his "truth-telling" is really a form of blindness. He's an allegorical figure representing mindless blaming. Other people our Pilgrim encounters represent greed, gluttony, lust, hypocrisy, and so on. The Pilgrim himself respresents Everyman, who is burdened with the weight of the world and "worries for the entire universe."
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| A Pilgrim's Progress by Winsor McCay From Winsor McCay The Early Works Volume 2, page 174 (Checker) |
Signing his series as "Silas," McCay reminds me of Hank Williams posing as "Luke the Drifter" -- both men adopting a new persona to deliver sermons in the form of entertainment.
In his lilting musical sermon, "I've Been Down That Road Before," Hank Williams recites:
"To bully folks and play mean tricks was once my pride and joy
Till one day I was toted home and mama didn't know her little boy
'My head was swelled up so doggone big I couldn't get it through my front door
Now I ain't just talkin' to hear myself, cause I been down that road before"
The image of a man's head swollen so large seems oddly resonant with Winsor McCay's dream imagery, not to mention some scenes from the Foozland stories which explicitly feature swelled heads and other physical transformations. Compare William's "doggone big" head with McCay's giant hammer in the last panel of the Pilgrim's Progress example above.
Note also William's use of the allegory of the Road as spiritual path. This is the same road McCay's Pilgrim and Ahern's Paul Bunyan-gnome travel.
Williams adopted the alter-ego of Luke as a way to deliver sermons to 1950s America without lessening the marketability of his name, popularly associated with "honky tonk" country and western songs like "Your Cheatin' Heart."
You can here the entire Luke the Drifter sermon of "I've Been Down That Road Before," here:
The "Dull Care" suitcase Winsor McCay's pilgrim totes -- a burden he cannot share -- also resonates with another 20th century musical icon, the 1968 song The Weight. Composed and performed by The Band, and appearing as the centerpiece of their first album, Music From Big Pink, the song was inspired by Luis Bunuel's symbolic films of spiritual quests through absurd situations. The Weight seeks to create an allegory of a burdened man wandering, very much like McCay's Pilgrim and William's Luke the Drifter. The wanderer carries a "bag" (which in 1968 America had a double meaning, since "bag" was a slang for "purpose" -- as in "what's your bag, man?") and encounters a dizzying variety of odd characters.
"I picked up my bag, and went looking for a place to hide
When I saw old Carmen and the Devil, walkin' side by side
I said "Hey Carmen, let's go downtown."
She said, "I gotta go, but my friend can stick around."
- The Weight, The Band
One of the characters in The Weight is named Luke, perhaps a tip of the cowboy hat to Hank.
The actual full title of McCay's strip is A Pilgrim's Progress by Mr. Bunion. The readers of 1905-1909 would have been more familiar with the comical, self-depreciating reference to John Bunyan, author of the 17th century bestseller, A Pilgrim's Progess.
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| John Bunyan - not a screwball artist, but pretty screwy |
Bunyan, who began writing Pilgrim's Progress while in prison for preaching without a license, would have fit right in with the strange characters of The Weight, McCay's worlds, and Foozland. He spent much of his adult life seeking to redeem his wild youth in which he committed such immoral acts as dancing and bell-ringing. He was -- to give him credit -- legendary among his young peers for his ability to swear like a sailor. Bunyan apparently turned his wordsmithing talent to a higher purpose, and wrote one of the most famous books in the English language, A Pilgrim's Progress, a book that perhaps the younger Bunyan might have said was damned good and fucking weird.
Here's a small part of the Wiki summary of the book:
"On his way to the Wicket Gate, Christian is diverted by Mr. Worldly Wiseman into seeking deliverance from his burden through the Law, supposedly with the help of a Mr. Legality and his son Civility in the village of Morality, rather than through Christ, allegorically by way of the Wicket Gate."We can go back further than John Bunyan and the 17th century, to Dante's early 14th century Divine Comedy, an exploration of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, filled with surrealism and some of the best allegory money can buy. Modern day cartoonist-allegorist Gary Panter has recreated two of the books of The Divine Comedy, with Jimbo in Purgatory (2004) and Jimbo's Inferno (2006).
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| Milt Gross' Count Screwloose witnesses widespread insanity in a spectacular panel from April 5, 1931 |
The witnessing of humanity's suffering and unconscious insanity that McCay's Pilgrim provides is not that different from the adventures of Milt Gross' Count Screwloose, who regularly escapes from the looney bin (sometimes with a Rube Goldberg machine) only to see so much craziness in the outside world that he is happy, at strip's end, to return to the relatively sane world of the Nuttycrest asylum for the mentally disturbed.
When you look at it, there seems to be some sort ongoing discussion, first in strange books and then in strange comics, about journeys through screwball worlds.
Can it be mere co-incidence that Ahern shifted his wacky screwball strip about two inventors and a little hitch-hiker into an allegory by way of a character called Bunyan? Perhaps the DNA of the secret history of screwball comics looks something like this:
When we consider the dreamlike imagery found in The Squirrel Cage (and The Nut Brothers, an earlier Ahern surreal romp) it makes sense, then to look at the first page of the first publication of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and see the word "dream" write large:
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| Title page for John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress |
The Fun of Going Nowhere
When he created the Foozland continuity in The Squirrel Cage, Ahern built a serial dream that lasted years and went nowhere. The very title of the strip is a natural extension of the many squirrel and nut labels used in screwball comics, from Rube Goldberg's Boob McNutt to Ahern's own Squirrel Food and Nut Brothers. But there's another layer to the strip's title, since a squirrel cage is a confining environment in which a squirrel can run forever without ever getting anyplace -- just like the Buyan-gnome in Foozland.
With his invention of Foozland in The Squirrel Cage, Gene Ahern built one of the most elegant and incisive tools for social commentary in all of American comics. The strip below, from 1945, the first year of the Foozland continuity (at some point, something must be said about the meaning of Foozland's birth coinciding with the end of World War 2 and the arrival of The Bomb), provides an allegory on leadership with some dreamlike lampoons of government and social responsibility.
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| The Squirrel Cage by Gene Ahern - April 8, 1945 (from the collection of Paul C. Tumey) |
The impulsive King of Foozland encounters the Bunyan-gnome, who is always on The Road, and makes him King. The crowned gnome, now bowed to, has no idea how to be a King. He stands on a path that has mysteriously developed a set of steps leading down - an allegorical symbol that he may be headed for a moral descent if he doesn't use his newly acquired power well.
Next, the King must sign a law -- the lawmaker acknowledges the power of the crown, whil ealso acknowledging that the gnome is not the real King. The law itself is comically huge, a giant scroll that is
so heavy (the Weight) he struggles to carry it.
The law is against beards, but as the lawmaker explains this, a long full beard appears on his face.
In the early 1990s, I lived in Leominster, Massachusetts, a small town filled with plastic factories and -- ironically -- famous as the birthplace and home town of Johnny Appleseed. One day, while walking home through the city cemetery, I came across a curious gravestone:
It seems that in the late 18th century, Leominster citizen Joseph Palmer was intolerantly attacked by his fellow townsmen for wearing a full beard. The book, Weird New England, tells us his clean-shaven peers thought Palmer's full beard was "antisocial and sinful." This resonantes with John Bunyan's self-persecution for dancing and bell-ringing. He was jailed for causing a disturbance of the peace and kept for a year. Palmer was finally released, refusing to cut his well-groomed beard. His jailers tied him to a chair and threw him from the jail. The "no-beard" law in Gene Ahern's April 8, 1945 Squirrel Cage reminds me of Palmer. In effect, when the beard magically appears on the man who wants to outlaw beards, something is being said about human versus moral law. Realizing he has a beard (without ever questioning why or how that he could grow a long beard in a second), the lawmaker instant shifts his focus to outlawing people WITHOUT a beard -- thus he has become an allegorical figure for Intolerance. In the background a Herriman-esque tree appears to have a fuzzy hat, or perhaps a beard.
Realizing that he almost signed into law something that "put people in trouble," the gnome begins to question whether it is right for him to wear the crown. There's an old saying that the best leaders are those that do not wish to lead -- it seems the gnome has common sense, and perhaps even moral sense. The tree he touches is multi-colored and oddly shaped -- it seems to resonate with a meaning, but its unclear what that meaning may be.
In a small heroic gesture, the gnome divests himself of the power and responsibility of rulership, and bestows it upon a scarecrow -- a "fake" human.
In the last panel, the former King of Foozeland, now a mere subject, bows to the crowned scarecrow. It's almost as if there's no importance placed on who leads, but only that thereis a leader -- even if it's only a scarecrow. Woody Guthrie once famously said, when asked of about his political affiliation, "right wing, left wing, chicken wing -- it's all the same to me." Of course, this was nonsense, since Guthrie was a well-known radical activist of his time, but in this nonsense -- like the nonsense of The Squirrel Cage -- is valuable -- and shocking -- wisdom.
Your Screwball Scribe,
Paul Tumey
All text copright 2012 Paul C. Tumey
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Some Winsor McCay Pilgrims for Thanksgiving
My latest discovery is Winsor McCay's A Pilgrim's Progress by Mister Bunion. So, for Thanksgiving 2012, I'll appropriately share with you a selection of my favorite Pilgrims.
McCay, famous for his Little Nemo In Slumberland comics (which ran concurrently with his Pilgrim series), was incredibly hard-working and productive. As such, there are hundreds, if not thousands of fascinating, lesser-known comics by this master (dare we say genius?) of the form to discover. Of these, A Pilgrim's Progress (which McCay signed with the pen name Silas, apparently for contractual reasons) is certainly one of the strangest -- and, in my opinion, one of the most wonderfully screwy comic strip series ever done.
According to Allan Holtz's American Newspaper Comics: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide (University of Michigan Press, 2012), A Pilgrim's Progress by Mister Bunion was entirely written and drawn by Winsor McCay and ran on weekdays in the New York Evening Telegram from June 26 1905 to May 4, 1909, with a 4 month hiatus in early 1906.
The strip's anti-hero, Mister Bunion, is aptly named, for he seems to be forever walking through cities, countrysides, American landmarks, shops, theaters, and just about anywhere you can imagine. Bunion is tall, thin, dressed in a solid black suit, and wears an impossibly high stovepipe hat. McCay used a short, fat version of this character design for Dr. Pill in Little Nemo.
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| A still image from the 1911 film, Winsor McCay and His Moving Comics in which Dr. Pill is quickly sketched. |
I love that silent last panel. In some of the strips, Bunion seeks Glad Avenue in a continual futile but fascinating search that would be echoed generations later in the Foozland strips of Gene Ahern's The Squirrel Cage, in which the anti-hero seeks escape from an alternate universe. It may only be co-incidence that Ahern's character is also named Bunyan -- Paul Bunyan, the mythical lumberjack. In the next example, Bunion is walking down Rocky Road, seeking Glad Avenue. In the process, he finds some relief from his burden, but it only temporary.
McCay's forgotten comic resonates with a notable episode from the early Julius Knipl strips by a similar-minded comics creator, Ben Katchor. Consider this strip in which photographer Mr. Knipl finds a place to relieve himself of his "negatives" for perpetuity (or, say, 30 years), reprinted in the great 1991 collection, Cheap Novelties (I highly recommend this book).
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| A modern comic strip allegory by the great Ben Katchor, similar in tone and approach to McCay's |
The Buddha taught we create our own suffering through desire. Buddhism teaches us that it is our reaction to something that makes us happy or unhappy. In other words, there is nothing outside of us that can actually create happiness or unhappiness. There is an essential truth to this, I think -- and I find it useful. However, if I were in a Nazi concentration camp in WWII, I seriously doubt that I would be able to find a way to not suffer and make my reaction peaceful -- although perhaps some did. In any case, McCay's strip, not Buddhist, but also not explicitly Christian, is concerned with the suffering of a mundane life and how to escape it. In the strip below, Mr. Bunion, inspired by spiritual advice, decides to see his valise in a new light.
The man that Mr. Bunion meets in the above comic thinks of himself as a good person who is sincerely interested in the affairs of others, but in reality, he's fearful, grasping, and selfish. In the above comic, I am also extremely fascinated by the very tall and narrow chapeau Mr. Bunion dons.
In his Progress towards spiritual growth, Mr. Bunion also encounters animals. In the brilliant strip below, Bunion learns that not even a dog is free from suffering.
In this next episode, the DULL CARE valise is X-rayed, with predictable but still funny results -- offering a comment on the inability of technological progress to help with spiritual advancement. Note how Bunion's comments morph from excited sincerity to barely veiled disgust. McCay's lettering is surprisingly poor and hard to read for such a precise artist, suggesting his dialogue is an after-thought. I've discovered that it's worth taking the time to carefully read his dialogue, as it's quite good.
Another favorite episode of mine in this screwball series is the one where Mr. Bunion visits his family home, and we learn about his ancestors, each one of which had their own burden to carry...
There is the idea, in some spiritual works, that emotional pain is accumulated throughout life and inevitably passed on from parent to child. McCay's strip above is a delightful play on this idea. IO love the room fullof family "heirlooms" that include debts, anxiety, and bad luck.
In this dreamlike comic, in which we can jump around in time and space, Mr. Bunion also appears to have a "normal" life, with a wife. In my last episode, McCay is particularly inspired. Mr. Bunion tries a scheme to rid himself of Dull Care at a pawn shop....
"You find only pain if you seek aftee pleasure
You work like a slave if you seek after leisure
Watch out for
the trap door."
Lastly, I offer the observation that McCay's allegorical comic strip is echoed in his editorial cartoons, in which people and objects are labeled as various symbols. Here's just one example of hundreds, this one from 1928, almost 20 years after McCay stropped creating his Pilgrim strips.
In any case, I've noticed that the Checker Winsor McCay books are currently available on Amazon and Ebay for a mere fraction of their original retail prices. I bought a few volumes for less than a dollar! Given that Checker is no longer in business, and these books must have had small print runs, I'd say that it's a wise move to snap these up and stash them in your own Dull Care valise.
I am also thankful for Reid, Claire, Olivia, Zamfir, and all my wonderful friends -- you guys are the best!
I'm Thankful I Can Still Carry My Own Suitcase,
Paul Tumey
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Gene Ahern Does Rube Goldberg (Our Boarding House 1933)
Rube Goldberg began his cartooning career in 1904, when he was 21; Ahern in 1914, at age 20. If Rube Goldberg is the premier first generation screwball cartoonist, then Ahern is one of the top second generation screwball comics masters, with Milt Gross following along about 6-7 years later.
The first official Rube Goldberg invention cartoon, an automatic weight reducing machine, appeared in August, 1914. Over the next few years, Goldberg perfected his formula and created a unique cartoon format that made him famous, putting his name into the dictionary.
In this example, from Carl Linich's blog on Gene Ahern, The Squirrel Cage, we see Ahern employing a very similar approach, with -- as Carl observes -- a Dr. Seuss flavor.
By 1919, Ahern's comics appeared in some newspapers directly underneath Goldberg's. In this example from 1919, we see a masterful Rube Goldberg daily from his Boobs Abroad series, detailing the comic misadventures of his third European vacation. While Rube is a seasoned pro, Ahern is still finding his voice as cartoonist -- note how similar the title of his nascent strip, Squirrel Food, is to his later Nut Brothers and The Squirrel Cage.
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| Rube Goldberg gets top billing over Gene Ahern in 1919. Two screwball masters at two different stages of their careers |
The scan is from my own collection, and also features a surreal Nut Brothers topper strip as well as a Silly Snapshots panel -- another play on a tried-and-true Goldbergian formula, complete with a grotesque caricature. The Nut Brothers is also an invention tour de force, anticipating the early years of The Squirrel Cage.
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| January 29, 1933 - from the collection of Paul Tumey |
Too bad that Ahern and Goldberg never collaborated.
That is all,
Screwball Paul
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Major Hoople's Guide to the Island of Jujuwok (1931) With Side-Trips to Goldberg and Walt McDougall
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| The "Legend" |
Major Hoople is a legend in his own mind. The contrast between Hoople's imagined heroism and his considerably more humble "real" life as an overstuffed blowhard layabout is the essential comic engine that Gene Ahern drove nearly every day for 14 years on Our Boarding House (1922-36), and then for another 17, with Room and Board (1936-53). Within this comic formula, Ahern devised endless variations. One of the richest, and a personal favorite, are what might be called The Alvin Stories.
Alvin, nephew to Major Hoople and his wife Martha, is the perfect foil for the Major's self-aggrandizing Falstaffian boasting. The pie-eyed boy hangs on every word, encouraging the Major to concoct one improbable, fantastic adventure after another. From feats of absurd bravery as a soldier, to Paul Bunyan-like achievements as a logger, to Olympic athlete (see an example here), to genius inventor, to intrepid world explorer -- the Major's (and Ahern's) capacity for imagined adventures is richly entertaining. Essentially, the fantasy worlds of Major Hoople are the structural inversion of the actual fantastic world of Foozland that Ahern would explore in his multi-year comic strip masterpiece, The Squirrel Cage.
The formula of The Alvin Stories is simple, but richly entertaining. First, the Major spins his wild yarns to Alvin's delight. Alvin -- who believes every syllable the Major utters -- then asks an innocent question, and the Major sputters out some excuse, realizing he has painted himself into a corner, his bubble burst. Often, there's a hint of pathos in Ahern's comic, even as we laugh at Hoople's buffoonery.
In today's example, the Major imagines Jujuwok, an impossible South Seas island that sinks into the ocean every night. The payoff is in the silly drawings of walking fish and web-footed cats.
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| A classic Alvin Story" episode of Gene Ahern's Our Boarding House -- March 22, 1931 (Collection Paul Tumey) |
How wonderful it would be to have an uncle capable of spinning endless imaginative yarns. One wonders if the Alvin Stories were perhaps an inspiration to a comics master of the generation after Ahern, John Stanley, famous for his Little Lulu comics. Filling monthly comic books, Stanley created a variation in the Lulu adventures in which Lulu, forced to babysit her bratty little boy neighbor (or sometimes simply ward off his swaths of destruction), makes up a series of wildly imaginative stories. These stories are stream-of-consciousness wonders, and some of my favorite comics. Could it be mere coincidence that Lulu's little boy neighbor's name is also Alvin?
For more on John Stanley's Alvin stories, be sure to visit Stanley Stories, the blog of my pal and colleague, Frank Young, by clicking here.
The Goldberg Variations
In earlier articles, I've mapped the artistic connection between Gene Ahern and Rube Goldberg's penchant for building wacky cartoon inventions. Ahern also walked in Goldberg's footsteps across pulpy Sunday pages to exotic and improbable lands, such as the one above. In his long-running Sunday comic, Boob McNutt (1918-1934), Rube Goldberg (whose very name means "mountain of gold") visited a wacky South Seas island in "Boob's Ark" (1931-32), his longest and most ambitious continuity. The story arc of "The Ark" spans two year's worth of Sundays, with the first several months occurring on a jungle island populated by strange animals.
In this sequence, for example, we encounter the gong-tailed bumpzozzle:
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| The gong-tailed bumpzopple, from the 1931-32 Boob's Ark continuity in Rube Golberg's Boob McNutt comic. That's Mike and Ike (They Look Alike) in the bottom tier. July 5, 1931 (Collection Paul Tumey) |
Of course, the idea of visiting a bizarre land filled with invented creatures is not something that originates with Goldberg or Ahern. The concept stretches back much further in comics. For example, we see it in Walt McDougall's breathtaking 1904 Queer Visitors From The Marvellous Land of Oz comics (in that variation, the strange land was the United States, as the Oz characters visited our world!). Pete Maresca'sjaw-dropping book on McDougall's Oz comics is highly recommended.
Even before the Oz comics, McDougall spun elaborate tales of exotic lands and queer creatures in his Good Stories for Children newspaper stories,featuring both his prose writing and illustrations. Here's an example from my collection, featuring the unforgettable spookissimus:. This is a huge image, so you can read the werra werra tiny print -- so give it time to load.
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| Walt McDougall's astonishing Good Stories for Children featured surreal, beautifully screwball imagery August 24, 1902 (Collection Paul Tumey) |
Going back further, the concept appears in Jonathan Swift'sGulliver's Travels. And in Dante'sInferno. And Homer'sOdyessey. In other words, the concept of travels to imaginary lands populated by strange creatures is probably as old as storytelling itself.
A real life, true version of this tale is detailed in art critic Robert Hughes' book, The Fatal Shore, in which exiled criminals land on the shores of Australia and discover a world of bizarre natives and odd creatures (the kangaroo is a pretty fantastic critter, when you think about it).
Ahern's and Goldberg's variations on the exotic land concept are uneven and not always successful. However, I applaud their willingness to take chances and follow their own creative impulses. When they do manage to pull it off, the result is a refreshing and delightfully screwball experience.
Hat is Tall,
Screwpaul Ball
See also:
Gene Ahern's Icthyological Screwballism
Rube Goldberg's Amazing Boob McNutt's Ark: The Man-Eating Biffsniffle
Ohio State University's page on Walt McDougall, with many great scans
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Rube Goldberg's The Boob Family (1917)
A few months ago, as I worked on the forthcoming new Rube Goldberg book in the offices of Abrams Books in New York City, it hit me: Rube Goldberg is the Jack Kirby of American newspaper comics. Just as Kirby created an astonishing flow of new ideas, new characters, and new stories -- so did Rube. As much as there is a Jack Kirby "Universe," so is there a Rube Goldberg Universe. I sat in an office where every square inch was covered by Rube's cartoons. Every surface, every tabletop, every desk held little piles of his cartoons. We filled shelves with his works as we sorted them. We were literally hip-deep in the man's work.
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| Two of several piles of Rube Goldberg cartoons sifted for the upcoming book from Abrams (and my 12-year old son's ipad, borrowed for this work) ________________________________________________________________ |
For a few weeks in early 1917, part of this matrix included The Boob Family, a trenchant satire of family life featuring Mr. and Mrs. Boob, and their homely infant, Otto. Here's Rube's full daily from January 17, 1917 -- the first appearance of The Boob Family.
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| The first appearance of The Boob Family by Rube Goldberg - January 17, 1917 (Collection Carl Linich) |
By all accounts, Rube and Irma had a very successful marriage. In fact, they were married 54 years, until Rube's death in 1970. In his Boob Family strip, however, there is very little respect or love bestowed upon Mr. Boob in his family. Most of the episodes center around Mr. Boob vainly trying to retain his stature as head of the family in the face of Mrs. Boob's imposing presence. The baby Otto also seems to trip up the schemes of his Dad -- although Goldberg has little feel for the actual experience of raising a child, yet. In fact, the whole scheme seems to be less about the adventures of a new family and more about how the whole family concept is rigged against the dad from the start. It's interesting to realize that in 1952, Rube Goldberg presented cartoonist Hank Ketcham a National Cartoonist Society award (called a Reuben after Rube) for his Dennis the Menace series -- a concept Rube had briefly explored in his own way before Ketcham was even born. The combination of the silly drawings and the deadpan delivery of a screwball family dynamic in the 1917 Boob Family comics have some promise, and it's too bad that Rube only explored this concept for a couple of weeks before discarding it and moving on.
We see this pattern over and over in Rube's career. Comics historian Bill Blackbeard called Rube:
"... the San Francisco cartoonist who spent the undeniable talent to produce at least one great comic strip on half a dozen less than properly accomplished and sustained works over a long and busy lifetime." (introduction, Bobo Baxter, Hyperion Press 1977).
Rube Goldberg's genius for a continual flow of invention created a brilliant, but chaotic body of work. This may be the reason that most of the work of such a seminal and important figure in comics history has remained largely out of print for generations. In any case, The Boob Family is a fun read, even in its brevity.
Here's a selection from the short run of wonderfully screwball Boob Family by Rube Goldberg. I've put in a little work on digital restoration of these.
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| January 17, 1917 - The first episode |
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| January 18, 1917 |
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| January 19, 1917 |
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| January 20, 1917 |
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| January 22, 1917 |
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| January 23, 1917 |
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| January 24, 1917 |
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| January 25, 1917 |
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| January 26, 1917 |
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| January 27, 1917 |
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| January 29, 1917 |
Many thanks to Carl Linich for supplying the original comic strips for this post from his own collection. Check out his blog devoted to Gene Ahern's great screwball comic, The Squirrel Cage.
For a different screwball pitch entirely, be sure to check out my other blog, Cole's Comics, devoted to a study of the life and work of the comics and cartooning master Jack Cole. Currently, I'm running a 12 Days of Cole-Miss event, where I'm sharing coll new Jack Cole discoveries every day until December 25!
That is All,
That is All,
Screwball Paul Tumey
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All text copyright 2012 Paul C. Tumey
All text copyright 2012 Paul C. Tumey
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Season's Greetings From Major Hoople 1930
Wishing you a happy holiday season. I had intended to share more holiday-themed comics from my collection but, alas, there rarely seems to be enough time to do it all. That's a good thing, I reckon.
In any case, while cleaning up today, I ran across these two crumbling Our Boarding House Sundays and noticed they are both from Christmas, 1930. These comics are so accessible and funny to me today that it's hard to believe they are 82 years old! Perhaps that says something about my tastes being old-fashioned, but I also like to think it also speaks to the greatness of Gene Ahern. I found a few minutes to gently place the pages on my scanner, and so here they are, for your enjoyment.
First, we find the Major desperate to raise some cash for the holiday. This page contains some classic flustering about the need to work to earn money, confound it! The second Sunday from the next week, is Ahern's Christmas strip for the year and he pulls out all the stops with the Major's grand recounting of his past Christmas adventures. The page ends with a Christmas Card to Ahern's readers, something often found in holiday episodes of American newspaper comics of this period.
I hope you enjoy these, and please be sure to check over at my other blog, Cole's Comics, where I have posted a new Jack Cole "find" every day for the 12 days leading up to December 25 -- I call it the
12 Days of Cole-Miss
Happy Holidaze, my friends ~
Paul Tumey
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| Our Boarding House by Gene Ahern - December 14, 1930 (Collection Paul Tumey) |
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| Our Boarding House by Gene Ahern - December 21, 1930 (Collection Paul Tumey) |
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Taking the Bate: The 1922 H.M. Bateman Punch Cartoons
I am super busy at the time of this posting, thus I can only offer brief comments on these beauties, which all appeared in the pages of various 1922 issues of the English magazine Punch. Harvey Kurtzman cited Bateman as a major influence. In looking at these adept examples of caricature and sequential design, the connection between an early 20th century staid English cartoonist and a mid-20th century New York Jewish master of satire becomes clearer.
A hallmark of Mad creator Harvey Kurtzman's work is the dense, rectangular comic tableau, usually a double-page spread (and often burnished to a dazzling gleam by Kurtzman's collaborator, Will Elder). Consider then this dense, insane 1922 spread from the summer number of Punch:
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| Prefiguring Kurtzman and Mad: H.M. Bateman in Punch, 1922 |
And speaking of connections to other cartoonist, here's a two page sequence by Bateman filled with sublime surreal images that show Winsor McCay wasn't the only early cartoonist to explore dreams on paper:
Aside from Bateman's panoramic compositions and his surreal forays, the most notable thing to me about Bateman -- and what makes his work truly great -- is that his cartoons are genuinely funny. The guy, like Rube Goldberg, Milt Gross, and E.C. Segar, could just plain draw funny. Check out the facial expressions and poses of these two characters as they escalate a silly competition to absurd heights -- a similar comic structure to Milt Gross' comics, come to think of it:
Bateman also published several single panel cartoons in the pages of Punch. Here's a particularly great one. The heroic portrayal of a scrawny, self-important man in shorts and tee shirt is the first serve of humor. After we parry with a guffaw, we are served a rich cast of screwball characters in the wings. Match point.
Lastly, here's a hairy page by Bateman that shows a Monty Python playfulness with words. It's doubtful that "beaver" had the slang association in 1922 England that it possessed a few decades later (including an unforgettable literary use in Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions). The prickly cartoon images are, as always, funnier and funnier as your brush up against them:
Many thanks to cartoonist and comics scholar James Gill who shared with me the link to this wonderful Punch archive. Be sure to check out his rich and varied blog devoted to essential cartooning by everyone from Dali to Dylan: Cartoon Simple.
This makes 108 postings in 2012 -- most of which contain good quality paper scans from my own collection. WIshing you all the best for 2013.
That is All (for 2012) ,
Screwball Paul
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Roots of Screwball: The Lost 1904-06 Gus Mager Sundays - Part One
I just completed an essay on the birth of American newspaper screwball comics that will be included in the forthcoming Sunday Press book, Society Is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip 1896-1915. While no release date has been set, it seems a safe bet that the book will come out before the end of 2013. This is a book that I'm sure every fan of screwball comics and the comics on this blog will cherish!
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| (Here and above) Gus Mager's contributions to the 1909 and 1910 programs for the Kit Kat Club, a small organization of avant-garde New York artists that included many cartoonists. |
In order to create the Sunday Press essay, it was necessary to sift through my personal collection of fragile old funny papers and my archive of scans to pull together an ersatz, rough-hewn framework for understanding the development of screwballism in early American comic strips. In an upcoming essay on this blog, I will share this framework with you, as imperfect as it is. But, for now, in true screwball fashion, I'll start randomly and share with you one of the many screwball delights I discovered in early American newspaper comics:
The Lost 1904-1906 Sunday Comics of Gus Mager - Part One
Known primarily for his Sunday comic Sherlock Holmes spoof, Hawkshaw the Detective, which ran off and on from 1913 through 1947, Gus Mager (1878-1956) was a fine cartoonist and accomplished painter. Mager was born in New Jersey to German immigrant parents. The self-taught cartoonist was influenced by the work of German cartoonists represented in his parent's library, including the great Wilhelm Busch. Details of his life are chronicled by comics historian Allan Holtz here.
Much of Mager's earliest comic strips of the 1900s are filled with rich humor, joi de vivre, and innovations stemming from a fine arts sensibility. His work from 1904-1913 anticipates where the form and screwball genre would go in ensuing decades. While there appears to be nothing screwball in his paintings, which hang in many galleries and museums today (including the Whitney), Mager certainly had a flair for the artful expression of exaggeration in his comic strips.
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| Gus Mager, circa 1905-1910 |
In his cartooning career, Mager created well over 30 individual series, mostly dailies (see the Illustrated Gus Mager Comicography below). Many of these creations were spawned between 1904 and 1913, sometimes only running for a few days or weeks before being discarded. In several cases, there is overlap between his various series. This speaks both to the more casual, freewheeling attitude newspaper editors and cartoonists had in the early days and to the ambitious Mager's quest to find a subject that would strike a chord with the public. As we'll see in this and the next article, Mager's early work has a satirical edge to it that reminds me of Roald Dahl's stories for kids, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. For readers of 1905, who delighted in the slapstick antics of the Katzenjammer Kids, Mager's early satirical bent may have been a bit too droll -- which could also explain his numerous short-lived series. It's difficult to really know exactly why Mager had so many brief series in his first eight years as a professional cartoonist.
More likely, however, it simply took Mager a while to settle down. His restless early career was not uncommon. The form of comics allows for a great deal of experimentation and development of ideas -- and in the 1900s, the business of comics also allowed for this.
Gus Mager was born in 1878 to German immigrant parents in New Jersey, and grew up enjoying the cartoons of Wilhelm Busch and Karl Arnold. Thus inspired, he sold cartoons to American magazines in his teenage years. At some point in his mid-20s, Mager landed a position as staff cartoonist at the Hearst-owned New YorkAmerican and New York Journal. These papers provided spot cartoons, art and comics to the other Hearst papers around the country.
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| Members of the Hearst stable of New York cartoonists, 1904. T.S. Sullivant is on the far left. |
Mager's first comic strip work appears to start in April, 1904. From the start, he seemed inclined to draw charming hippos and monkeys, possibly influenced by the work of fellow staffer T.S. Sullivant whose humorous animal cartoons were highly regarded then and now:
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| T.S. Sullivant's version of hippos and monks |
But where old-school renderers like Sullivant put the emphasis on detailed funny drawings, Mager seemed to understand the need for a different kind of visual approach in sequential comics. His clothes-wearing animals are simpler, but no less charming. One of his first strips was called, alternatively, Jungle Land, The Jungle Society, and In Jungle Society. It began as a series of separate panels with typeset captions and featured animals in their au natural state.
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| October 15, 1904 |
The cocky mouse character in this next example reminds me of something we'd see in 1930s and 40s animated cartoons and comic books:
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| October 8, 1904 |
At some point, Mager's Jungle comic morphed into a sequential strip. The animals began to wear clothes, Mager's drawing style became more refined, and his humor became more slapstick. In the example below, Mager cleverly plays with the central panel border as a separating wall between two rooms. Four years later, in 1910, George Herriman would build an entire strip around this concept, called The Family Upstairs. Mager's early comics are filled with this sort of playful innovation and experimentation.
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| May 27, 1906 |
In a circa 1920 issue of Cartoons magazine (in which his name is misspelled as "Gus Mayer"), Mager's early career development is discussed:
"Gus Mayer (sic), the author of the famous "Monk" series, always did like to draw animals. Hippos and monkeys were his favorites, and in order to indulge his hobby to the fullest extent he gave up a position as a jewelry designer, and went to the New York American where they allowed him to make animals by the yard. Finally somebody suggested that he take the little monkey which appeared usually in the corner of his weekly "jungle" page and develop him into a full-fledged comic character. So Mayer (sic) dressed up the little beast, clipped his tail, and introduced him to polite society as "Knocko the Monk," a gentle satire on those individuals who are always taking the joy out of life."In addition to spelling Mager's name wrong, the article's description of how Mager's second early weekday series, the "Monks" came about is also erroneous, for Mager started both his Jungle comic and the Monks series in April, 1904. Here's an early Knocko the Monk that mentions Teddy Roosevelt:
- From Comikers and Their Characters by William P. Langreich (Cartoons Magazine, 1915)
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| August 13, 1904 - dropout lines indicate a second color the microfilming process did not pick up |
These strips appeared three or four times a week, usually on weekdays. Sometimes Mager drew two tiers, approaching the half page Sunday format.
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| September 3, 1904 |
The Cartoons article goes on to explain:
"Knocko had his day and was succeeded by 'Grafto the Monk,' a sort of a simian panhandler. 'Rhymo' then gave Mayer (sic) a chance to inflict some of his 'made in Newark' poetry upon his readers. Finally came 'Sherlocko the Monk,' a creature endowed with the uncanny instincts of Sire Arthur Conan Doyle's world famous character."- From Comikers and Their Characters by William P. Langreich (Cartoons Magazine, 1915)
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| Left to Right: George Overbury 'Pop" Hart, Walt Kuhn, Gus Mager on banjo. Kuhn was also an early cartoonist with an original flair who became a famous painter -- and is also known for organizing the seminal 1913 New York Armory Art Show -- which included paintings by Mager, Kuhn, Rudolph Dirks (The Katzenjammer Kids), and cartoonist T.E. Powers. |
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| 1910: Some of the Monks shown here include, left to right, Groucho, Nervo, and Knocko (on tuba). |
The bulk of Mager's 30-odd cartoon series were single tier weekday strips, but he did produce three short-lived Sunday funnies 1904-1906 -- each one so filled with humor and style that they beg to be re-discovered an appreciated.
In September 11, 1904, Mager created the half-page Sunday feature called And Then Papa Came, his first run at a Sunday feature.
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| September 11, 1904: The first of only sixepisodes |
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| October 9, 1904 |
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| October 18, 1904 |
The character designs of the monkeys are compellingly ugly and funny. Mager has developed his craft in both funny animals and in comic strips. As with Frederick Opper and James Swinnerton, Mager has created a six panel sequence where the chaos explodes in the fifth panel, followed by a denouement in the sixth panel. From week-to-week, the series grows funnier as we learn to expect the final scene of the suitor scampering towards the horizon. Mager's staging in the final panel, where we see the characters from the back and from a distance, encourages us to step back and laugh, similar to the way Carl Barks sometimes ended his 10-page Donald Duck stories in the 1940s and 50s. Sadly, the series ended after just six episodes, and Mager's work was not seen in the Sunday pages for two years.
On September 30, 1906, What Little Johnny Wanted, a true forgotten gem of comics first appeared, and lasted for only five episodes. The comic was a sharp, satirical reversal of warm and fuzzy kids fantasy adventures, and represented a far more refined and sophisticated accomplishment.
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| September 30, 1906 - Note the title, which was refined in later episodes (From the collection of Paul Tumey) |
All the Best,
Screwballo
An Illustrated Gus Mager Comicography
Most of this information comes fromAmerican Newspaper Comics: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide by Allan Holtz
Sunday Halves and Full Pages
And Then Papa Came (9/11/04 to 10/18/04)
What Little Johnny Wanted (9/30/06 to 10/28/06)
Troubles of Pete the Pedlar (11/11/06 to 12/16/06)
Hawkshaw the Detective (1913 to 1947, with some breaks)
Main Street (10/15/22 to 10/7/23)
Weekday Panels and Strips
Jungle Land/ The Jungle Society/ In Jungle Society (4/14/04 to 2/27/06)
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| Oct 15, 1904: In the first strips, Mager drew a series of panels with typset captions and no speech balloons. Each panel was a separate gag. This strip may be a jam with his friend and colleague at The Evening Journal, Paul Bransom, who possibly drew the snail, man, and grasshopper. (from microfilm) |
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| May 27 1906: At some point Mager shifted into drawing a sequential version of this strip, with speech balloons. In this one, we are treated to a Mager alligator. (from microfilm) |
[Various names such as Knocko, Braggo, Coldfeeto, etc.] the Monk (4/22/04-3/613)
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| July 2, 1904: Mager's first Monk was Knocko, who knocked everything down a peg. Satisfyingly, Knocko always got knocked himself in the last panel. (from microfilm)
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Trouble Bruin (12/16/04 to 12/19/04)
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| If Swinnerton's bears were a big hit, why not give a new bear strip a go? Mager did -- for exactly three days! Good title, though. (from microfilm) |
It's Too Bad that Willie Stammers (1/20/05 - 1/28/05)
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| February 4, 1905 - this strip barely lasted long enough for Willie to get a complete sentence out. (from microfilm) |
Everyday Dreams (3/2/05 to 5/29/05)
Cecil in Search of a Job (7/29/05 to 9/27/05)
Oily John the Detective (9/20/05 to 10/10/05)
Louis and Franz (12/23/05 to 1/23/06)
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| January 21, 1906: Let's mix Swinnerton's bears with Opper's mule! (from microfilm) |
The Nerve of Some People (1/15/08 to 1/18/08)
What Little Sammy Knows (1/28/08 to 2/4/08)
The Merry Widower (4/20/08 to 5/29/08)
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| May 31, 1908 (from microfilm) |
A Misfit Fable (2/24/09 to 3/19/09)
Ain't It? (3/2/09 to 3/1/09)
And Not Only That (3/16/09 to 5/3/10)
O. Heeza Boob (9/21/12 to 1/3/13)
Millionbucks (1/18/13 to 6/3/13)
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| Millionbucks (Sometimes called Millionbucks and Kandykiddo) |
Obliging Otto (6/21/13 to 8/2/13)
Time-Table Tompkins (12/17/13 to 1/6/14)
Trewtulyfe Family (1923-24)
Radio the Monk (1/2/24 to 3/29/24)
Sherlocko (1925)
Fifty-Fifty Family (1925, dates unknown)
Oliver's Adventures (1926-34)
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Roots of Screwball: The Lost 1904-06 Gus Mager Sundays (Part 2)
In 1906, Gus Mager was on the verge of something great.
Working mostly in weekday comic strips, Mager created two knockout Sunday comics: What Little Johnny Wanted, and The Troubles of Pete the Pedlar. These are unknown early high points of the form -- with sharp wit, superb cartooning, and a modernist use of artistic elements such as repetition, flattened planes, minimalism, and negative space. Their appearances were so brief, it's questionable that these comics had any influence at all, but nonetheless they are worth our study and appreciation today.
I'm proud to present in these articles 10 of these 11 wonderful rare comics, some from paper scans in my own collection and some excavated from microfilm archives of old newspapers.
It's hard to believe, but each of these great Sunday funnies lasted only a few weeks, and then Mager's modernist experiements, allowed to bloom in the larger space of his 1906 Sunday half pages, abruptly ended, as he continued to work in the more cramped confines of the weekday comics, producing his famous Monks series, among others.
In early 1907, Mager was at a crossroads. His Monks series, begun in April 1904 with the ever-changing titles (Knocko, Coldfeeto, Rhymo, Henpecko, Nervo,Braggo, etc.) was catching on in a big way. Here's a section from Harpo Marx's autobiography, Harpo Speaks! that talks about the popularity of the strip and it's notable influence on entertainment culture of the time:
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| Harpo Marx got his famous stage name from Gus Mager's comic strips. |
In Rockford, the four of us and a monologist named Art Fisher started up a game of five-card stud, between shows. At that time there was a very popular comic strip called "Knocko the Monk," and as a result there was a rash of stage names that ended in "o." On every bill there would be at least one Bingo, Socko, Jumpo, or Bumpo.
There must have been a couple of them on the bill with us in Rockford and we must have been making cracks about them. because when Art Fisher started dealing a poker hand, he said "A hole card for -- 'Harpo.' A card for 'Chicko.' One for --" Now that he'd committed himself, he had to pass "o-names" all around the table.
The first two had been simple. I played the harp and my older brother chased the chicks. For a moment Art was stuck. Then he continued the deal. A card for 'Grouch" (he carried his dough in a grouch bag), and finally a card for "Gummo" (he had a gumshoe way of prowling around backstage and sneaking up on people).
We stuck with the gag handles for the rest of the game and that, we thought, was that. It wasn't. We couldn't get rid of them. We were Chicko, Harpo, Groucho and Gummo for the rest of the week, the rest of the season, and the rest of our lives. (Harpo Speaks! by Harpo Marx.1961)
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| Knocko the Monk -- September 17, 1904 - poetic justice, no ifs, ands or butts... |
As stated in part one of this Mager article, there can be no clearer screwball lineage than that between Gus Mager's comics and the Marx Brothers.
With a weekday strip that was such a hit, it's a mystery as to why Mager didn't extend it into a Sunday series, as well. Perhaps Mager's editors didn't want to monkey around with a winning formula. In 1913, when Mager left Hearst to work for Pulitzer, he finally did migrate his weekday series, now completely given over to an entertaining and sharp satire of Sherlock Holmes, into a weekday and Sunday series called Hawkshaw the Detective. His Sunday was a continuing story, where the weekday version was episodic -- the reverse of the usual treatment. It's also worth noting that Mager's Hawkshaw Sunday was an early example of continuity in comics, which didn't catch on in a big way for another ten years or so. Mager's career had some interesting creative choices.
Also, as stated earlier, it's my own theory that Mager was playing off the words "hippo" and "monkey" when he hit upon his naming scheme. As stated in a Cartoon Magazine article, "hippos and monkey were his favorites." However, according to a May, 1910 Bookman article, the original inspiration for Mager's "o-clan" came from James. J. Montague, a fellow Hearst staffer who wrote humorous verse, columns, and short stories.
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| Gus Mager, from a 1911 paper, now established as the "Monk" cartoonist |
It is significant that the first of this clan to be pictured was "Groucho" [as far as I can tell, the first strip was called Knocko -- but Groucho may have turned up earlier ]. The idea for it came to James J. Montague, who did not hand it over to Mager until he had first extracted enough inspiration from the cloud which hung over the artist to give him the dark plot of a light verse. (Some Figures in the New Humor, Bookman, May 1910)Perhaps at some later date, I can find the original Montague verse that inspired Mager and in turn numerous Vaudeville performers, including The Marx Brothers.
In any case, the Monks weekday comics were a sensation. In late 1906 and early 1907, Gus Mager was at a crossroads. He could continue to develop the charming, artful animal Sunday comics or he could pour himself into the Monks series, which was starting to climb the tree of success. He chose the ladder -- unh, that is -- the latter. And, sadly, as far as I can tell, except for a few lovely pieces of banner art for other strips, Mager abandoned this particular cartooning style and apporoach.
What follows, then, is a look at what could have been -- and briefly was. Mager's early Sundays are among hundreds of such experiments made with comics in the freewheeling days of early American newspaper comics. From the vantage point of more than a century later, we can see that Gus Mager was on to something, creating an early version of a visual storytelling style that would emerge into the mainstream of American culture some forty or fifty years later with comics like Crockett Johnson's Barnaby and the UPA animation studio's celebrated stylized cartoons.
What Little Johnny Wanted
Foreshadowing Sendak, Watterson, and even Eisner (a bit)
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| Calvin and Hobbes... the 1906 model |
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| The first episode of Gus Mager's first Sunday comic, from September 11, 1904 |
Two years later, aside from a slightly different wording in the first episode, Mager is consistent in his presentation of What Little Johnny Wanted -- just one of many ways he has injected formalism into his work. His idea is both clever and a pure distillation of the form, since he is basically presenting in each episode a simple sentence: "What little Johnny wanted -- and -- what he got." Extracted from the comic as pure prose, the sentence makes little sense. As part of a graphic narrative, it works beautifully, offering a world of depth,, detail, and a wry commentary on the nature of child fantasy versus adult reality -- the two worlds that early American comic strips straddled.
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| September 30 1906 (collection of Paul Tumey) |
On the same Sunday the first Johnny appeared, Mager contributed the first of his brief spate of banner art drawn for other Hearst comics. Functioning as a sort of proto-topper, Mager's comic is a vignette from What Little Johnny Wanted -- not lifted from any episode, but an original scene. Interestingly, Mager's signature is different than his usual cursive scrawl. This is the first appearance of the wide-eyed little girl.
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| And Her Name Was Maud banner art by Gus Mager featuring Johnny - September 30, 1906 |
In the next week's episode of Johnny, a wild animal is a friend rather than a creature to be vanquished.
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| October 7, 1906 |
While the episodes of Johnny are structurally repetitive, each strip actually explores a different angle of a child's fantasy. In the next week's episode, Johnny is the uber-hero, effortlessly defeating buffalo, Indians, and a lion. In the end, we learn he was inspired by a dime novel adventure.
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| October 14, 1906 |
By presenting his figures in relative perspective with no background details, Mager creates in the above example a perfect cartoon. He's even removed the chair the angry man (Johnny's dad?) sits on in panel six. Mager has stripped out every extraneous detail, allowing us to see the world through a young boy's mind, where buffalo, Indians, and lions co-exist and things like chairs are unimportant and unseen.
Also on October 14, Mager's tigers-and-trees march across the banner for Richard Outcault's Buster Brown Sunday page.:
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| Buster Brown banner art by Gus Mager - Oct 14, 1906 |
Continuing the adventure theme the following week, Mager turns on the most visually detailed episode of the series, with a battle at sea. Johnny is the pirate raider, and the little girl from last week returns, charmingly hanging around the fantasy as an astonished observer of Johnny's prowess.
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| October 21, 1906 (collection of Paul Tumey) |
Also that week, Mager drew the Buster Brown banner art. This time, it's not from Johnny's world, but instead a classroom with a stern hippo teacher -- one has to admire Mager's playfulness.
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| Buster Brown banner art by Gus Mager - October 21, 1904 |
In the last episode of the series, Mager brings one of the sanguine tigers from episode 1 back. This time, instead of an enemy to defeat, the tiger is an ally -- prefiguring Calvin and Hobbes, if only for an eyeblink in comics history. Still, perhaps the greatest aspect of What Little Johnny Wanted is the celebration of the richness and sheer, delightfully snarky kid-ness of a boy's fantasy world.
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| October 28, 1906 |
Also this week, Mager contributed the banner art for another Buster Brown Sunday page, with another cameo by Johnny, serving almost as a mini-version of the strip, this time. It's interesting that Mager's banner art has nothing whatsoever to do with Buster Brown. This is the last appearance of Little Johnny, and I'm grateful that the pie-eyed little girl is here, too. I love that she has a be-ribboned pet pig. Ah, if only Mager had continued Johnny!
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| Buster Brown banner art by Gus Mager - October 28, 1906 |
Sadly, What Little Johnny Wanted ended with the above examples. With this comic, Gus Mager was decades ahead of his time. Perhaps audiences of the 1900s weren't as ready to celebrate the psychotic fantasies of the common boy as they were in the 1960s with the sucess of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are and in the 1980s, when Calvin and Hobbes became a hit.
After a short vacation of a week, Mager returned to the Sunday supplement with a new comic, equally formal in structure and eccentric in nature - The Troubles of Pete the Pedlar. In the third and last part of this series on Mager's lost Sundays, I'll share the Pete Sundays with some notes, as well as more of Mager's charming banner art comics for Buster Brown. In the meantime, here's a sneak preview:
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| The Troubles of Pete the Pedlar by Gus Mager - Novemeber 18, 1906 |
That is all,
Screwball Paul Tumey
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