Pin the Bow Tie on Buster Brown game heading to the Library of Congress

I picked up this cloth game over the weekend at a flea market. It's 119 years old, according to the ad that someone on the Platinum Comics history list found for me.

For modern parents who think merchandising of comics and cartoon characters are something new - nope! When characters such as Ally Sloper in the UK, and Yellow Kid, Buster Brown, and Foxy Grandpa in the US got a following in print, merchandising followed.

The Morning Call Wed Oct 18 1905

I don't know when the Library will get this cataloged but it'll be in the Prints and Photos division as of this week. Here's a few details.

Some more recent material was handed over too including the print edition of the 2023 Comics Research Bibliography, a complete set of 2024 Free Comic Book Day comics, and these gems.

From Artomatic, this print of tattooed Kewpies amused me, but I can't find the artist's name at the moment.

Life on Other Worlds, a 1978 portfolio I saw on Heritage  auctions that I was curious about so I bought it on e-bay for much less. The art by Al Williamson, Walt Simonson, Paul Gulacy, Howard Chaykin and P. Craig Russell is fine, but only Williamson's is accomplished.

And this has nothing to do with comics, but was a lovely steel engraving bookplate from Virginia Otis to add to the collection they already have.

An "unknown" Clifford Berryman self-portrait

This surfaced recently in the National Geographic archives before being sent out for deep storage. Berryman apparently drew it for the editor Gilbert H. Grovesnor as an RSVP to a luncheon invitation because it's on a piece of his stationary.

Berryman is hurrying to see artist / explorer Alexander Iacolevff who had worked on a story about Vietnam for them in 1935. Presumably he was back in the States by the beginning of the year, because Berryman's dated his cartoon to March 15, 1935 for a lunch on the 18th. Here's one of the artworks Iacolevff did at the time. Here's a painting that National Geographic used to own before they auctioned off a good bit of their patrimony in 2012, including more by him, and paintings (plural for both) by NC Wyeth, and dinosaur artist Charles Knight, and a lot of famous photographs. Browse the whole list here. They made $3,776,587 before selling themselves to Fox a few years later.

Framish Yuk Yuk minicomic and Family Circus 'bootleg' in the Secret History of Comics

 

Family Circus bootleg political ad from the  Nicholas County News-Leader May 29, 1974 p. 2-13

and this is a link to a 'make it yourself' minicomic gag and joke book, probably cut out of a newspaper. I will donated it to either the Library of Congress or the Billy Ireland Library.

Framish Yuk Yuk minicomic: https://archive.org/details/framish-yuk-yuk-minicomic-as-printed

Warren Bernard's Willard Mullin collection (pre-Columbia U donation)

 Warren Bernard spent years collecting sports cartoonist Willard Mullin artwork and ephemera. Before he donated it to Columbia University this month, he had a showing of material at his house. With his permission, here are photos of the material that went to NYC (with a few ringers that stayed home with him).  

Prof. Joseph Witek sent me a note about this post. "In one of the random projects that came my way back in the helter-skelter pioneer days of comics studies, I wrote the Dictionary of American Biography entry for Willard Mullin (who I had never previously heard of). Mullin was just an excellent cartoonist / caricaturist from back in the day when sports cartoons were the sports-page counterpart of editorial cartoons, during an era when boxing (Joe Louis), thoroughbred racing, and East Coast college football were the premier sports in US culture (the Army-Navy game was once a huge deal).  But Mullin covered a bit of everything."

And the ringers, Winsor McCay, Gluyas Williams, and Bringing up Father posters.