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The Roots of Screwball: The Lost 1904-1906 Sundays of Gus Mager (Part 3)
Directly on the heels of his sublime five Sundays of What Little Johnny Wanted, Gus Mager created another fascinating, short-lived Sunday comic strip, The Troubles of Pete the Pedlar, which only lasted...
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Ed Carey's Lunatic Dictionary Jaques - The Roots of Screwball (1913)
Ed Carey (1870-1928), a master of early American comic strip art, specialized in comic portrayals of idiots. Once seen, his grotesque faces and anatomy are hard to forget. His most well-known strip was...
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More Screwball Dinky Dinkerton and Art Huhta
Hmmm... studying the panel at left, one wonders what the "surprise" is in the pocket of world famous detective Dinky Dinkerton's rotund, loyal woman-chasing assistant Sniffy.Presenting... another dose...
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Double Your Fun With This 1927 Rube Goldberg Boob McNutt
From 1907, when he created the Irish-Jewish twins Mike and Ike (They Look Alike), Rube Goldberg had a thing for depicting doppelgangers in his comics. Below you will find an excellent example of this...
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Harvey Kurtzman's Pigtales for Parkinson's - Sizzling Screwball Comics From...
Ya gotta admit: cartoon pigs are funny. One of the undisputed masters of screwball comics is Harvey Kurtzman, who certainly seemed to appreciate the comedic possibilities of porcine antics. In today's...
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The First Dave's Delicatessen by Milt Gross - 1931
Here's the very first Dave's Delicatessen Sunday by that inimitable achiever of screwballosity, Milt Gross. Dave's Delicatessen ran as a Sunday from June 7, 1931 to January 13, 1935. It was accompanied...
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Rube Goldberg Machine For Testing Liquor In 1930s Prohibition America
Here's a rare 1930 Rube Goldberg invention cartoon to celebrate this year's Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. Check back every day this week for more Rube Goldberg machines!Since the 1950s, various...
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The Origins of Rube Goldberg's Professor Lucifer Gorganzola Butts, A.K.
In 1928, Rube Goldberg created one of his most famous characters, the screwball inventor, the sage of the test tube, Professor Lucifer G. Butts, A.K. We don't know what the "A.K." means, but some have...
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Rube Goldberg Machine Cartoon: Simplified Can Opener (1929)
Continuing our week-long extravaganza of Rube Goldberg inventions, here's his Simplified Can Opener, originally published in the July 27, 1929 issue of Collier's weekly magazine.Of course, nothing...
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Rube Goldberg Machine Invention Cartoon: An Automatic Cigar Cutter (1930)
Rube Goldberg's pseudo-scientist alter-ego, Professor Lucifer G. Butts, A.K., first appeared in a 1928 Collier's short story by Rube Goldberg called "It's the Little Things That Matter." You can read...
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Rube Goldberg Machine Cartoon Invention: The Only Sanitary Way To Lick A...
How many invention cartoons did Rube Goldberg create? Thus far, no one has actually successfully cataloged the entire output of this seminal American humorist-cartoonist.We simply don't know. Certainly...
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Rube Goldberg Machines Found in Bobo Baxter and Lala Palooza
Rube Goldberg first created his famous invention cartoons around 1914. They appeared sporadically in his daily newspaper comics, randomly rotating with a host of other series such as Foolish Questions,...
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The Roots of Screwball Comics: Dink Shannon
Little is (yet) known about Dink Shannon, a notable, if unknown, graphic stylist of the early comics page. Shannon's work offers one of the more distinctive visual styles of the early comics with...
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The Art of Rube Goldberg (Abrams ComicArts, 2013) New Book!
Web Exclusive! Here's a preview of the cover art for THE ART OF RUBE GOLDBERG comic from Abrams ComicArts in November, 2013.I believe this blog is the first place on the Web to unveil this art! We've...
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The First Rube Goldberg Invention Cartoon (1912) -- Two Years Earlier Than We...
In his excellent Rube Goldberg biography, Rube Goldberg: His Life and Work (Harper and Row, 1973), Peter Marzio -- the man who also curated the 1970 Smithsonian Institution's 1970 retrospective of...
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Rube Goldberg's Cartoon Machine Inventions of 1913
About 10 months passed between the production of Rube Goldberg's first and second invention cartoons, from July 17, 1912 (view that cartoon here) to May 7, 1913. As with the first cartoon, Rube's...
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Rube Goldberg's 1918 Fourth of July Cartoon - War and Pieces
Happy Fourth of July, 2013!As you probably know, Rube Goldberg was born on July 4, 1883. To my knowledge, Rube never trumpeted his own birthday in his daily cartoons, but he always seemed to make a...
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Before Bob Clampett and Will Elder, There Was The Comic Anarchy of H.C. Greening
I love this guy. H.C. (Harry Cornell) Greening -- forgotten today -- was a screwball master of the first order. He wrote and drew numerous short-lived comic strips and Sunday features from about...
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New Sunday Press Extravaganza Unveiled at Comic-Con 2013
Sunday Press publisher, editor, and comics historian Peter Maresca has unveiled his wondrous new creation, SOCIETY IS NIX - GLEEFUL ANARCHY AT THE DAWN OF THE AMERICAN COMIC STRIP 1895-1915, at the...
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"I Seen Yo' Ad In Dep Paper" - SAM and His Laugh (1905-06): Joyously Subversive
One of my favorite screwball artists is James "Jimmy" Swinnerton (1875-1974). Born in Eureka, California. In 1892, Swinnerton began his career as a staff cartoonist for Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner,...
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