Secret History of Comics includes Crumb, courtesy of Warren Bernard

Warren writes in with a modern piece:

I went last month to Stripdagen, the biennial comics show in Haarlem, The Netherlands. Found myself at the booth which does the printing for lithos and prints by Chris Ware and Joost Swarte. While poking around their amazing collection of prints, I struck up a conversation with one of the people running the booth. In the middle of the conversation the guy stops and asks, "Are you a Robert Crumb fan?". After saying yes, he handed me the flyer you now see.

It's for a concert in Paris and I was real lucky to get this. I am sure thousands were printed, but how many will actually make it to America?

So, regardless if it's Crumb or Gluyas Williams for Texaco or Charles Schulz for Metropolitan Life, there is a ton of commercial art by great and famous cartoonists that needs to be revealed by SHOC.

Comics in strange places

Today was the Folger Shakespeare Library's celebration of Big Will's birthday (which was actually last Wednesday). The Library opened their reading rooms to the public so I took a look and found this chair (or throne as the case may be):


The image of Shakespeare is purported to be by or "attributed to" William Hogarth.



Comics, comics, everywhere...

OT: Underground comics mag find part two - A Secret History of Comics Special

As you can see in the comments for part one, Steve Rowe notes that these were an attempt to sponge off National Lampoon's readership and were definitely ground-level, available in newsstands. However, due to the cartoonists involved, I'll keep calling them underground. Here's the 2nd issue with cartoonists I have, Apple Pie July 1975. The two issues from 1976 didn't have cartoonists in them. All four are going to Michigan State University's Comic Art Collection this spring, should one need to see them for research. Or a laugh.



Another Terry Austin editorial cartoon.


An ad for the mag by Howard Chaykin using some of his usual tropes of the time.


Two one-pages by Justin Green.



Michael Kaluta draws Buster Brown!



Two pages of pirate violence from S. Clay Wilson.



Four pages of vegetarian activism from Kim Deitch.

OT: Underground comics mag find part one - A Secret History of Comics Special

I picked up a couple of underground magazines - well they were probably ground-level for the time - that are going to be passed along to MSU's Comic Art Collection soon. Before I do that, here's some of the more famous underground cartoonists from Apple Pie May 1975.



Neal Adams art on this.


Terry Austin, the great inker, apparently did editorial cartoons too.


A couple of one-pagers by Justin Green.





Paul Kirchner did the surrealist strip The Bus for alternative weekly newspapers, until I seem to remember that he came into money - Ninja Turtle money maybe?



And a three-page strip by Kirchner:

Kliban on pot, not cats, or A Secret History of Comics post

This is from the well-known Cat cartoonist, the late B. Kliban.



It appeared in Apple Pie, January 1976.

Comics action in Cosmo 1957

Robert Day ad for Bell Telephone from Cosmopolitan, April 1957, in which they kindly define 'ubiquitous' for the reader.

Boy, public telephones certainly aren't 'ubiquitous' now, are they? In fact, this ad is incomprehensible to anyone under 20, isn't it?


Florida Cartoonists Poke Fun at Their State, p. 1, Cosmopolitan, April 1957. Featuring Lowell Hoppes and Charles E. Sharman.


Florida Cartoonists Poke Fun at Their State, p. 2, Cosmopolitan, April 1957. Featuring Martin Filchock and Bandell Linn.

92 years yesterday ... the SHOC of McCay!

Another Secret History of Comics entry by Warren Bernard:

92 years ago this past Sunday, March 23, 1916, the members of The Albany Legislative Correspondents Association got together for their annual dinner. Not unlike the Gridiron Club, it was a boys night out to rib and celebrate the then occupants of the New York State Legislature and the sitting Governor, Charles Whitman.

The program for this event features a Winsor McCay drawing that to my knowledge, has not been reprinted before. This dinner and its associated program was done for over 60 years, and each year political cartoonists did both the covers and in some years, up to a half dozen specialty pieces for the inside text.

How many more did Mccay do? For what other obscure organization did he do such material? The former I do not know the answer to, the latter, one day soon this question will be at least partially answered.

So stay tuned to the SHOC...

Warren

I had to reduce the image dpi from 300 to 150 to get a reasonable size to post - if anyone wants the supersize original, click here.

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.

C.D. Batchelor's anti-VD campaign

C.D. Batchelor was a Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist whose career lasted for almost 50 years in New York. One can see similarities in the 1937 Pulitzer winning cartoon and the anti-venereal disease cartoons reproduced below from the collections of the National Museum of Health and Medicine.


"Warning: these enemies are still lurking around. Syphilis.
Gonorrhea." Cartoon by C..D. Batchelor of the New York Daily News for the American Social Hygiene Association, 1790 Broadway, New York, N.Y. (Reeve79101-67)


"Two girls I know want to meet you in the worst way." C.D. Batchelor, American Social Hygiene Association. (Reeve79101-62)


"The glory of manhood is strength. Keep clean for the heritage of the cleanly is strength." Cartoon by C..D. Batchelor of the New York Daily News for the American Social Hygiene Association, 1790 Broadway, New York, N.Y. (Reeve79101-52)


"Boys your sweetheart, your wife or your parents may never know it if you contract a venereal disease - but I'll know it and I'll suffer from it." Cartoon by C.D. Batchelor of the New York Daily News for the American Social Hygiene Association, 1790 Broadway, New York, N.Y. (Reeve79101-11)


"Enemy agent. U.S. War Effort. Venereal Disease." Cartoon by C.D. Batchelor of the New York Daily News for the American Social Hygiene Association, 1790 Broadway, New York, N.Y. (Reeve79101-16)


"'My boy was wounded in the African landing.' 'Mine was wounded in this country by a street walker.'" Cartoon by C..D. Batchelor of the New York Daily News for the American Social Hygiene Association, 1790 Broadway, New York, N.Y. (Reeve79101-31)

Note the difference in quality between Batchelor's original above, and the Army's copy below:


"My boy was wounded in the African landing. Mine was wounded in this country by a street walker." World War 2. "Cartoon by C.C. Batchelor of the New York Daily News for the American Social Hygene Asociation, 1790 Broadway, New York, N.Y. Reproduced by Div. S.S.C. for distribution by Surgeon 3rd Armored Div." (Reeve74964-6.jpg)

Collections of his papers are in Witchita State University's Library in THE CARTOON COLLECTION OF C. D. BATCHELOR, MS 90-16 and C. D. Batchelor Papers - An inventory of his papers at Syracuse University.

SHOC: Ads from Liberty Magazine

A few scans of Liberty Magazine wandered my way lately, so I pulled some comics material out of them. First we have 3 comic strip ads of Ol' Judge Robbins for Prince Albert tobacco. The artist changes, but I can't tell who any of them are.

Liberty Magazine November 11, 1936

Liberty Magazine October 2, 1937

Liberty Magazine June 10, 1939. This issue has an unfortunate editorial about how there will be no war in Europe in 1939. Whoops.

This ad agency obviously thought Ripley had a good idea, so why not borrow it?
Liberty Magazine November 14, 1936

And this ad is the one that made me decide to put these up for the Secret History of Comics - Fontaine Fox's long-running Toonerville Folks / Trolley (1911-1955) advertising laxatives.
Liberty Magazine, Jun 10, 1939

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.

Film & TV Adaptations book available

I got the proof copy and reviewed it today, so now Film & TV Adaptations of Comics - 2007 edition by Rhode and Vogel is available for order.

149 pages long, it's a listing of the thousands of adaptations to film and television of hundreds of comic strips and books. Worldwide, it includes the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, the Netherlands, Senegal, India, Turkey, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and Australia among others. Cross-referenced by cartoonist and translated titles, it includes a bibliography and index.

You can buy it via Lulu.com for $12.99 (plus shipping) or $3.00 for a pdf download at http://www.lulu.com/content/1677433.

This is not a book that you can sit and read - it's a reference book, and one that might spark a bit of curiosity. Lulu will let you see a preview, and here's a sample section of late additions from the Errata page:

Titles of strips samples:

Suramu Danku [Slam Dunk] (Takehiko Inoue)
Suramu Danku (Japan: Toei Animation, 1993-1996; 101-episode anime tv series)
4 DTV anime movies (Japan: Toei Animation, 1994-1995)

Oldboy (Nobuaki Minegishi)
Oldboy (South Korea 2003)

Scary Godmother (Jill Thompson)
The Scary Godmother, Vol. 2: The Revenge of Jimmy (USA 2005; animated DTV movie)

Wulffmorgenthaler (Mikael Wulff and Anders Morgenthaler)
Wulffmorgenthaler? (Denmark 200?; tv series)

Cartoonists cross-reference sample:

Eliot, Jan (Stone Soup cartoonist)
Oregon Art Beat Episode# 915 - Illustrator Jan Eliot (Oregon Public Broadcasting, 2008; segment on January 10, 2008 tv show)


Bibliography samples:

• Ehrenreich, Ben. 2007. “Comic Genius? Before there was even a comic book to adapt, 'Cowboys and Aliens' had a movie deal [Platinum Comics],” New York Times Magazine (November 11).
• Kohanik, Eric / CanWest News Service. 2008. “Painkiller Jane comic-book heroine,” Saskatoon Star-Phoenix (January 5).
• Takahashi, Rumiko and Stephen Ayres (trans.). 2005. The Art of InuYasha (2nd Edition), San Francisco: Viz Media.
• Unknown. 2008. “New cartoon series in ‘Wiener Zeitung’: Danish duo ‘Wulffmorgenthaler’ to feature daily on the new English page,” Wiener Zeitung (January 4).

OT: Allan Holtz's Strippers Guide

On his Daily Cartoonist site, Alan Gardner put a link to Allan Holtz's Strippers Guide project. For years, Allan's been doing research on comic strips and in the 1990s he had a subscription cd service where you could buy a cd of his research. It was a great resource and I'm glad to see an update is going to be coming along. Click on the video and let him know what you think. Nobody has more information on obscure strips than Allan and I still use the earlier version regularly.

SHOC: Hoiman & Douglas Aircraft

Warren Bernard contributes a Secret History of Comics bit to start off the new year right:

The first scan shows the cover of the book called "Hoiman", below it is the paper wrap around that was fortunately intact. This is because nowhere in the book itself is there any reference to where this stuff was published, which the wraparound says was for the Douglas Aircraft Plant in Chicago, IL.

Douglas Aircraft at this time had its main plants out in California, some others in Oklahoma, there were 7 total Douglas plants in operation during World War II. Now the question is, were these cartoons just done for only the in house mag for the Chicago plant? Did the other plants also use "Hoiman"? If not, what cartoons did they use? And who is Phil Brown? What else did he do? Where there other "Hoiman" books? How long did "Hoiman" run? Was "Hoiman just for Douglas Aircraft, or did other manufacturers also use the cartoons?

The Secret History of Comics does not give its secrets up easily...