Comic Strip History

This is a public service announcement: on Monday beware offers of tinned nuts, requests for you to fetch implausible seeming items, notices of lottery winnings, and check mirrors often for “Kick Me” signs on your back. 

Here we have Archie Gunn’s take on April Fools Day, seen through his bread-and-butter lens of the pretty girl cartoon. And he certainly did a nice job on this New York Journal funnies section cover. I also love these early Journal covers for their contributor lists (see upper left), giving pride of place to the Journal‘s impressive bullpen of writers and cartoonists.

In the 1920s it wasn’t too unusual to add graphic interest to news stories by covering them partially in comic strip form, like this example by a very young Willard Mullin. Mullin at this time would have been working for the Los Angeles Herald, a Hearst newspaper, but we see it here in syndicated form via the Denver Post. Mullin later became famous as a sports cartoonist, but this is before that became his specialty. 

The story being illustrated here is the William Edward Hickman kidnapping and murder trial. The 20-year old defendant kidnapped a 12-year old girl and murdered her in grisly fashion while attempting to extort money from her parents. Thankfully he was caught before he could make a habit of this activity. Based on his testimony he felt he was perfectly within his rights to perform such acts in his own self-interest, and would have continued his behavior in the future to finance himself.

Odd Postscript: As the rest of the world listened in horror to the details of this psycho’s repugnant crime, he became a hero to a young nut named Ayn Rand. She greatly admired him for his unpitying selfishness, and wrote about her admiration extensively in her diary, terming him a “superman.” Hickman would become an inspiration and basis for her sick inhuman philosophy.

Here we have a back cover of the Chicago Inter-Ocean’s Illustrated Supplement, the very first newspaper to print colour using high-speed presses. 

This Art Young page is from the Easter number of the supplement, published April 2 1893, and offers up some interesting Easter customs from around the world. I had never heard of “matching” (upper right), but I think he’s perhaps talking about the Bulgarian custom of tapping Easter eggs together until one cracks. I don’t find a reference to this tradition being called “matching”, though, so maybe I’m guessing wrong?

Should have run this for New Year’s, but naturally it caught my attention too late. Here we have a lovely but unsigned cover by Archie Gunn. Gunn takes a moralizing attitude toward his New Year’s resolutions, while in the surrounding cartoons by (I think) Mark Fenderson we get resolutions in a more humorous vein. 

This is the cover for the New York Journal’s American Humorist section of January 3 1897, only the twelfth issue of Hearst’s color comics section.

An early McClure section gagfest which ran in the Thanksgiving week issue of November 24 1901. 

Going clockwise from upper left, we have a gorgeous drawing by Bert Cobb with a rather hoity-toity gag referring to the Dead March from Handel’s Oratorio “Saul”. Cobb is an almost completely forgotten master. Next we have a funny Thanksgiving gag by William F. Marriner; then a well-worn boarding house gag by Mark Fenderson, and finally George Herriman, with an over-long gag line that isn’t really worth the trip. But I do like the cartoon very much. Love how the tramp has wedged himself into the gate. I do wonder what the thingamajig is on the step, though (no, I don’t mean the old maid).

It’s amazing how ubiquitous black characters were in the comics sections of the 1890s. There was plenty of garden-variety stereotyping and outright racist strips, of course, but then there was also an obsession with gags about exotic animals, primitve lands and jungles. And those strips generally included black characters, too — Africans theoretically, though just about anyone from exotic climes was depicted pretty much the same way, no matter the specific location. So between these strips about exotic lands, and the constant stereotyping of American blacks, these early comic sections are absolutely brimming with black characters. It comes across to these modern eyes as oddly obsessive, a compulsion to uphold the race constantly to ridicule. Did people of the 1890s really need these racist tropes reinforced constantly?

This strip by J.B. Lowitz ran in the New York Journal comic section of March 14 1897.

Here’s a good example of why I feel one-shots are important to the study of newspaper comics history. A fellow named Barnes (I. Barnes? T. Barnes?) produced a boatload of these little weekday strips, all one-shots, for NEA in 1912-13. He’s not represented in my book because he never settled down to producing a consistent series. He wasn’t a tremendous gag-writer, but he had a nice clean stylre and a good sense of staging.

Here’s an early strip by Charlie Payne, who later found long-lasting success with his strip S’Matter, Pop. Given that we have three incompatible elements here — Chinese characters and a tropical bird in an Arctic landscape, I can’t decide whether Payne is incredibly naive of geography, or if that is supposed to be part of the gag. Gotta love the beautiful lettering work on that title, though! 

Thsi gag appeared in the New York Journal‘s comic section of March 28 1897.

Here’s some very early C.E. Toles work from the July 28 1895 issue of the New York Herald. The Herald actually had a colour press by this time, but they often squandered it on non-comic material. The fools! 

The Toles gag cartoon is nothing to write home about, but the comic strip is a wonderful example of Toles’ inventiveness, ably abetted by his incredible drawing ability. The third cartoon is by A.D. Rahn, who was unknown to me but a Google search shows that he did some very impressive work, mostly straight illustration.

Here’s an interesting one-shot by A.T. “Crite” Crichton that ran in the New York Sunday Journal on May 9 1897. When I first encountered it my reaction was one of horror, thinking that Crite was making some utterly tactless gag about the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine. But then I realized that happened almost a year later, so Crite dodges that bullet. But it’s still an odd strip, because Lorenzo, whose rowboat is called “Unkel Sam,” is sparring with and destroys a U.S. battleship. If Lorenzo was not a patriotic American (evidenced by the name of his boat) this could be a comment on U.S. – Italian relations, I suppose, but that’s just not the case. That got me to wondering if Crite had no intention of having that battleship fly a U.S. flag. Looking very closely at the page, I honestly can’t tell for sure whether any of that flag design is by Crite (that is, in black) or if the whole contents of an empty flag were supplied by the Journal‘s colorist. 

Beyond this insoluble conundrum, a few additional comments. First, this is a very early example of what I’d call a Baron Munchausen gag, one in which someone is evidently relating (in the textual portion) after the fact some patently impossible feat they performed. This theme was later picked up by F.M. Howarth who created the classic Munchausen take-off strip, Old Opie Dilldock’s Stories. 

An’ anudder t’ing …. probably wearing out my welcome by now, but I also wanted to point out what an amazing bit of cartooning this is — notice the waves on the sea, how they pitch the boat to and fro, and how Lorenzo’s body reacts to that during his lassoing exercise. Crite could have made things much easier on himself by drawing a calm sea, but he opts to stretch his drawing skills and show us what an impressive artist he is.