Secret History of Comics courtesy of Warren Bernard

Here's another article by Warren Bernard on comic art in unlikely places:

SHOC Part 1,235,641



For this next installment of The Secret History Of Comics, here is a nice piece by Percy Crosby. This is from a football program for the October, 1935 game held between Navy and Notre Dame. Being close to Annapolis, Crosby did a few covers for their football games.

Now, he was not the only famous cartoonist to do college football program covers - Willard Mullin, The Dean of Sports Cartoonists did a lot, but did you know know that such luminaries of the cartoon field such as Ellison Hoover, John Held Jr., James Thurber and Milton Caniff all did football programs?

The length and breadth of the cartoonist contribution to the football program field would not have occurred if not for the efforts of Andy Moursund. His methodical and exhaustive research into the field of college football programs has turned this information up. I recommend going to his site to see the length and breath of the cartoon and illustration world that exists in the college football program arena. His site is now in browse/test mode, but soon you will be able to order poster reproductions of any of the program covers he has online.

Needless to say, some great unknown cartoonists and illustrators did work on these covers, and its a shame that no one, save Andy, has bothered to gather them up. No question, Andy has a great resource that hopefully will be a springboard for a more thorough treatment of the subject.


Now, to make things even more interesting, inside a lot of the programs were specialty cartoons and ads by cartoonists that appear nowhere else. The Crosby program has cartoons by Johann Bull and E. Simms Campbell as well as the ad you see here by James Thurber.

How many ads/cartoons are there buried in these programs? How much of comic history lies undiscovered in these programs? What does this type of work tell us about the length and breath of the work these cartoonists did and their impact on popular culture?

The SHOC series will never end.

Secret History of Comics courtesy of Warren Bernard UPDATED

Here's two pieces in three images from Warren's collection that deal with forgotten works by famous cartoonists.


Percy Crosby for the January 1924 Telephone News from the Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania

A Bill Mauldin booklet.

The Mauldin booklet should be reproduced in one of the new Fantagraphics books, courtesy of Warren.

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.