Oglethorpe strip? Gibson Girl sketch? Wrightson Batman?

These and other questions were raised by some of my new acquisitions at the flea market. Here's some crummy pictures to illustrate the questions.



This is labelled "Oglethorpe" in pencil at the top of the strip. It's not one I've heard of, nor have I heard of the artist Jorge Mercer. A Google search didn't turn up anything for the strip or the artist, but I haven't checked my reference books yet. The gag is lame, but the art is interesting.



"The Story of His Life" looks like a Gibson Girl. It's signed G.F.T./08. Who? It's definitely a 1908 piece - the artwork is acid-burned by the mat, the cardboard backing is disintegrating...



Obviously a bit newer item than the others, I was ignoring this radio-controlled Batman motorcycle until Claire asked for it (that's my girl!). What's of interest about this is that a better look reveals that the Batman is completely modeled after Berni Wrightson's version as seen in The Cult below(picture from the GCD). That's got to be off the model sheet - why choose this version?



Comments, questions and especially answers are welcome!

Al Hirschfeld and Flash Gordon

Now how often do you see a duo in a title like that? Here's a couple of pieces I picked up recently, which is the only thing they have in common.


Al Hirschfeld cover for Man of La Mancha - note there's one Nina in there (click on the picture to open a larger one in Flickr). Record albums frequently used to have covers by cartoonists. I pick up a few, but there's some hard-core collectors out there with big collections.


Ming the Merciless paper toy from Playboy, January 1981. Print and make it now!


...and the instructions.

I love paper...

Mark Chiarello interview

I saw the Mark Chiarello "Heroes of the Negro Leagues" exhibit today at ArtInSights Gallery and enjoyed it, as well as meeting the artist. I'll post a review of the exhibit (and the whole store actually) here soon as IJOCA's deadline isn't remotely close, but you can read an interview done by the gallery owner starting here and continuing here.

There's a book that the artwork came from too so I picked up a copy of it as well.

Here's a picture of the gallery owner co-owner Leslie Combemale (red hair) and Chiarello (center with beard).

A comic strip?

Brian, a friend at work saw this in an antique store in New Orleans and took this picture for me.

After mulling it over for a week and talking to two other historians of medicine who write on comics, I called up and ordered it. I haven't printed it yet, but flopping and inverting the picture lets you see it:


So it's a printing block for a fundraising ad campaign for the March of Dimes to conquer polio. Pretty neat especially the iron lung in the center. I'm going to try to ink it and print it, and we'll see what results I get. Perhaps we can make prints as write-in prizes!

Another Batchelor VD poster

This one wasn't in the National Museum of Health and Medicine's collection, so when I spotted it on ebay I bought it. I scanned it yesterday and added the e-version to the Museum's collection; since we don't have an acquisitions budget to buy things, there's no conflict of interest. I'll probably donate it someday, but at the moment I'm enjoying ownership.

Other countries have cartoon stamps too

Here's the stamps from a package a French friend sent with Tintin and other cartoon stamps. Unfortunately, when I mailed a package in return to him, the clerk didn't hear when I asked for $36 worth of stamps and instead gave me a printed postage label.


Material like this will appear on my new Cartoonphilately blog.

Comics in Smithsonian's American Art journal

The next issue from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (or whatever they're calling themselves this week) has several articles on comics, including one by the Library of Congress's Martha Kennedy (who recently passed a copy in a plain brown wrapper to me). See http://americanart.si.edu/education/art_journal.cfm and follow the links for ordering info, but since the issues not live yet, here are the citations from the Comics Research Bibliography's holding slush pile:

Roeder, Katherine. 2008.
Looking High and Low at Comic Art.
American Art 22 (1; Spring): 2-9

Kennedy, Martha H. 2008.
Drawing (Cartoons) from Artistic Traditions.
American Art 22 (1; Spring): 10-14

Coyle, Heather Campbell. 2008.
Caricature and Criticism in Art Academies.
American Art 22 (1; Spring): 15-17

Goerlitz, Amelia A. 2008.
An Interview with Cartoonist Jessica Abel.
American Art 22 (1; Spring): 18-22

Nel, Philip. 2008.
The Fall and Rise of Children's Literature.
American Art 22 (1; Spring): 23-27

Wang, ShiPu. 2008.
Japan against Japan: U.S. Propaganda and Yasuo Kuniyoshi's Identity Crisis [World War 2 caricature].
American Art 22 (1; Spring): 28-51

OT: The philosophical implications of Captain America

I was in a Borders recently with our man RT*, and saw the British magazine to the right and immediately scooped it up and rushed to the cash register. "Popular Culture and Philosophy" - who could resist? Inside is Major Todd A Burkhardt's article "Operation Rebirth: Captain America and the ethics of enhancement,"
Philosophy Now (November / December 2007). Major Burkhardt, who teaches at West Point according to his bio blurb, asks, "...What would be the moral ramifications of creating a real Captain America? Is the intentional creation of super-soldiers by cell engineering morally permissible?"

After a review of the concepts of freedom and supreme evil, Burkhardt concludes that the creation of a super-soldier was moral for 1940. He leaves aside the issue of whether it would be today.

*Richard Thompson, cartoonist and bon vivant

More additions to the Rhode stash

Barbara of the Netherlands by way of Canada sent these faux Pez 'Klik' X-Men yesterday. Hoo-hah! Note the Taj Mahal in the background - site of the 4th low-budget movie?


Boy, they're just horrible, aren't they? Another great addition to the collection!

Secret History of Comics with Richard Thompson's mother

Seriously. Richard's mother Anne Hall Whitt wrote an autobiographical book The Suitcases, a moving story about being orphaned with her two sisters during the Depression. I read it over Thanksgiving weekend, and found it very touching. I don't think I'm giving anything away when I say it all appears to have worked out well in the end, but it was pretty harrowing getting there. It was a good book to read around Thanksgiving since she gave you something to think and be thankful about. Copies of the book can be found on Amazon and other book sites. Oh, and it's illustrated by Richard, but in a non-cartoony art style that you wouldn't recognize.

Actually, this might make a good graphic novel, Richard...

OT: New Yorker cartoon issue out and going...

The November 26th issue turned out to be the Cartoon Issue which gets earlier every year. I just got the first December issue in the mail, so if you want the Cartoon one, better go to a newsstand soon. It's got a nice Bruce McCall cover gag on recycling, Gahan Wilson, and "how do you get your ideas" cartoons.

Vip, Bok, Ware and Fish N Chips

A few new acquisitions can also make points about the Secret History of Comics.

The first is a set of three in-house books by CACI, a defense contractor. While these types of companies aren't usually known for their sense of humor, CACI's had the good sense to have their books initially illustrated by 'Vip' aka Virgil Partch. He was followed by gag and Playboy cartoonist John Dempsey and then most recently by editorial cartoonist Chip Bok.

Front cover to one of the three books with art by Vip.

Vip interior art.

John Dempsey cartoon.

Chip Bok cartoon.

Back cover of boxed set with art by Bok.

All three of these are major cartoonists, but I don't think their work here would be easily found.

The next item is the interior cover page of Chris Ware's Quimby the Mouse.

This is actually what a book signed by Chris Ware looks like - it's so subtle it's not something you'd really notice if you were in a hurry. Chris signed this for me at PENFaulkner, so I guarantee this is what you should be looking for.

Finally, at the Small Press Expo, I picked up Fish N Chips by Steve Hamaker. This book's apparently available now since I bought it two months ago, so one could ask 'what's it doing in a secret history post?' Steve's book, nominally from Vigil Press, is apparently self-published and there's no info in the book on how to order it. These days, Google tosses up his website with more information on the book, but parts of it appear to be last updated in 2005 and there's no guarantee that he'll keep the site up and a library or collector of the future might be confused by the lack of information in the book. Buy a copy from him to help comic scholars of the future and because he's a nice guy who did a fun fish sketch for me. BTW, he's coloring Bone for Jeff Smith.

Simpson's mag in stores

In the new acquisitions pile is this Simpson's cover for E, the Environmental Magazine (November / December 2007), that I picked up at Busboys and Poets before the PEN/Faulkner event. Interestingly, although 'signed' by Matt Groening, the art is credited inside to Julius Preite. (The fish, blinded by the flash, has three eyes, by the way).

The Nebbishes

One of my finds in Columbus is this mug by Herb Gardner of his comic strip, The Nebbishes. Bob Harvey identified the strip for me just from Gardner's name, and Allan Holtz's Strippers Guide said it ran Sundays-only from 1959-1961. So this can't be too common.

Thomas Fleming, Washington caricaturist

I picked up a damaged copy of Around the Capital with Uncle Hank by Thomas Fleming, New York: Nutshell Publishing Co, 1902 yesterday.

Actually, the web says he studied worked at the New York Sun, New York World, and Commercial Advertiser, and the most famous of his cartoons was "Senator Tillman's Allegorical Cow" whatever that might have been.

In this book, every other page is a cartoon, usually a caricature of a large-headed politician, like the ones that follow, but he also did line illustrations that look influenced by Phil May. An example can be seen here in the Corcoran Gallery cartoon where the old maid is admiring the Venus de Milo's breasts; for those wondering, back in the Museum's early days it had lots of displays of casts of classical sculptures for study. Actually, I would like to see that come back as you get a tactical sense that photography and books can't convey. And the tyranny of the art world for the original object can get tiresome.

I have nothing to say about the sheep-hugger though.

Today's new acquisition - Jo Fischer's From Nine to Five

While attempting to find something else entirely, I ran across this piece of original comic art - so I bought it.



The strips is From Nine to Five by Jo Fischer from December 4, 1950. According to Allan Holtz's Stripper's Guide it ran from June 17, 1946 until sometime in 1971. For our younger readers, as the bookstore's note on the back helpfully read, "The applied toning film is usually called Zipatone." Also the gag might not be obvious anymore. Once upon a time, before sexual harassment training, there was a whole genre of gag cartoons about bosses seducing (or preying on, depending on your viewpoint) one's (definitely female) secretary. One can see the New Yorker's Cartoon Bank for more examples, I'm sure. (Oh, yeah, that works.) So, getting back to this cartoon, the secretary is turning tables by implying that she'd like to be hit on by the boss. Ahhh, the good old days.

Postcards from Zito, Bill Crouch and Percy Crosby

I hit a local antique show this weekend and picked up some prints of Opper, Nast and the Puck gang including Keppler. They're big - too big to scan easily - but these postcards I also picked up weren't.

I don't know anything about Zito. At first judging from the above cartoon, I thought he was a girly cartoonist.

Then as I found a couple more, it became obvious that he was a dog cartoonist. The third seems to be a World War II cartoon, but it's hard to tell. The top two are credited to the Novel Art Picture Co of New York while the "Victim" doesn't say anything.



This one is signed by Bill Crouch - anyone know if it's the comics historian? This is from the Mayrose Co. Publishers, Linden, NJ.

Finally, I think this is an early Percy Crosby. The postmark is Nova, OH, January 20 1912 and Pa asks his children to try to buy some clover seed when they're downtown and notes Mrs. Amos Woolfe died suddenly of a stroke of paralysis. Percy Crosby did the excellent "Skippy" comic strip for many years and it's overdue for a reprint.

Victor Vashi cartoons

Last weekend, I picked up some original cartoons by Victor Vashi at a flea market. These were originally done for the Plumbers Journal. The bookseller who had them wrote a note saying Vashi was the author of Red Primer for Children and Diplomats, Viewpoint Books, 1967 and illustrated the Handbook of Humor by Famous Politicians by Stephen Skubik.

Here's scans of all the cartoons, only a few of which still have their captions.