Some comics ephemera - postcards

Bought at the last Civitan flea market in Arlington, these were donated to the Library of Congress for the Prints and Photos division this week.

 

RCA Radio and TV Tubes 3 F-44

I can't quite make out the actual meaning of the message on the reverse.

 

Looking with Luke ink blotter from Yellow Pages

Strange that the horses don't kick!

RCA Tubes 3 F-47

 

 

Flea Market Finds: Drew Struzan caricatures, the Archies, and the Far Side

I didn't buy much at the Civitan flea market in Arlington this past weekend. Just 4 items for $6 in all. I got two record albums - I used to collect more cartoonist-covered albums, but most of them got destroyed a few years back in my basement flood. Still I could't resist The Watergate Comedy Hour because the cover is by noted poster and postage stamp artist Drew Struzan. Wikipedia says he actually did a lot of album covers,* but this one was particularly of interest due to his caricatures being so obviously influenced by Jack Davis and also probably Mort Drucker of MAD.

 

My actual first purchase was this less-visually-interesting Archies album. Notice that while Everything's Archie, the actual musicians and singers are never mentioned in the liner notes. And don't those cover models look exactly the way you picture rock fans to look in 1969?

     

Here's a transcript of the liner notes shown on the back cover below:

The Archie phenomenon seems to get more phenomenal every year. Having begun life

as comic-strip characters, the perennially teen-aged brain children of John L. Goldwater

have been translated into more than ten languages, known radio and TV stardom and are

now in the process of creating a sensation in the record world. Who could ask for a more

diversified career than that?

Maybe the secret of the Archie characters' popularity has something to do with the fact

that they have always been so tuned into the times. When they made their debut back in

1942, they were, like all American teen-agers, wearing bobby-socks and sloppy sweaters

and dancing the jitterbug to music known as "jive." Today Betty and Veronica are teenyboppers

in miniskirts, Jughead wears love beads and Archie plays rock 'n' roll music on

his souped-up electric guitar.

Proof that though Archie and his cohorts have been around for more than two decades

and, yet, fit perfectly into the world of the "now generation" lies in the current success

of the weekly animated Archie cartoon series which made its CBS-TV bow during the

1968-69 season. The show, with its zany skits, hip dance lessons and groovy musical

numbers, made such a hit it will soon be expanded to a full hour and renamed "The

Archie Comedy Hour."

It was Don Kirshner, the series' music supervisor, who decided to make recording stars

out of Archie and his friends. Following his spectacularly successful association with

The Mo11kees, it was perhaps only natural that he should want to give another new group

the benefit of the Kirshner touch-and it was a lucky move for everyone concerned! The

Archies' first album, THE ARCHIES, took a big step toward establishing them as an important

new vocal-instrumental team, and their first single release, Bang-Shang-A-Lang,

soared on the charts. That song, and the groups' second single, Feelin' So Good

(S.K.O.O.B.Y.-D.O.O.), was written by the young, talented composer Jeff Barry who has

produced and written most of the songs that have appeared on the two Archies albums.

Barry has captured the cool, contemporary Archies style, and the selections run the

gamut from youth-oriented songs like Circle of Blue and Melody Hill {both written

by the young writing team of Mark Barkan and Ritchie Adams) to rock-based dance numbers

like Don't Touch My Guitar and Rock & Roll Music. You have only to hear them to

realize that the world-famous Archies have gained an exciting new dimension.

DEBBIE SHERWOOD

Contributor,

Who's Who in TV

Watch for "THE ARCHIES" in color every Saturday morning on the CBS-TV network.

The same person who sold me the album had this comic book. One of my favorite Archie comics artists is Al Hartley due to the sheer insanity of his work. By the 1970s, he was doing art on regular Archie comics, but also on a licensed religion line.** This issue of Archie's Parables has 6 stories squeezed into it with settings varying from the Middle Ages, science fiction, and a Western (described by the GCD as "In the old West, the Sheriff [Archie] comes to the school marm's aid. She [Betty] complains about the Bible being taken out of schools, being forced to teach evolution, and the filthy books being sold at the trading post." The World War I story features Archie and Jughead being bombed by Germans (including Principal Weatherbee and Reggie) raining down entertainment, including tv sets and golf clubs, that kept people out of church on Sunday. Archie & Jughead take to flying to shoot down the distracting barrage balloons.

 

 

 

 The last item was this Far Side mug with a "Midvale School for the Gifted" cartoon by Gary Larson. I passed on it, and then went back when I realized that I didn't see these everywhere the way one used to. 

And no wonder. It's been 38 years since this was made. I'm not sure this cartoon would make it onto a mug anymore either.  Note that Larson owns his creation in 1986.

 

 

Here's an older one from my kitchen cabinet, "The real reason dinosaurs became extinct."

Note here in 1982 that Larson did not own the copyright to his strip, but his syndicate, Chronicle Features (now defunct) did.

So that's my cartoon gleanings. There were plenty of comics for sale, but nothing else caught my eye.

Endnotes!

*After graduating from college, Struzan remained in Los Angeles, and a trip to an employment agency found him a job as a staff artist for Pacific Eye & Ear, a design studio. There he began designing album covers under the direction of Ernie Cefalu, relishing the creative aspects the 12x12" size the record packaging afforded him. Over the next 5 years, he would create album cover artwork for a long line of musical artists, including Tony Orlando and Dawn, The Beach Boys, Bee Gees, Roy Orbison, Black Sabbath, Glenn Miller, Iron Butterfly, Bach, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Liberace. He also illustrated the t-shirt that George Carlin wears on the front and back cover of his album Toledo Window Box.^[8]

Among these, Struzan illustrated the album cover artwork for Alice Cooper's Welcome to My Nightmare, which Rolling Stone would go on to vote one of the Top 100 Album Covers Of All Time.^[9] Despite the burgeoning demand for his talents, however, Struzan was still only earning $150 to $250 per album cover.^[10]

**He began writing and drawing for Archie Comics, infusing some of the stories with his Christian beliefs. At one point he was directed to cut back. "I knew God was in control, so I respected my publisher's position and naturally complied".^[4] He later received a call from publisher Fleming H. Revell, for whom he then freelanced a comic-book adaptation of David Wilkerson's The Cross and the Switchblade in 1972, quickly followed by adaptations of God's Smuggler by the pseudonymous Brother Andrew and The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom. Inspired, Hartley helped launch the Spire Christian Comics line, and pitched Archie president John L. Goldwater to let him license the Archie characters. The Jewish Goldwater, himself religious, agreed, and Spire went on to release 59 comics – at least 19 of them Archie titles, along with six Bible stories, 12 biography adaptations, four other book or film adaptations (including Hansi: The Girl Who Loved the Swastika), and nine children's comics.

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.