Howdy and welcome to Herriman Saturday now reborn as Herriman One-Shots. This will be a short series as I only have a handful of these handy for scanning, but they are an interesting look at how a young George Herriman broke into the ranks of the newspaper cartoonists. 

Here we have a one-shot gag that ran on the inside of the McClure Sunday funnies section for January 19 1902. The gag is simplistic and pretty much pre-ordained by the second panel. The art is typical for Herriman in this period, with everything very rubbery-looking. It’s not really unpleasant, but it does look a little slapdash. 

Notice that Herriman will take any excuse to minimize the number of hard to draw human figures. In panel 2 our fellow in the wheelchair is even inexplicably gone. Okay, so the idea there is that this is an entirely different scene than panel one, and the kid is coming up with an invention while the wheelchair guy is off doing non-wheelchair stuff. I get that, but it is awkward. 

Where Herriman offers us a glimmer of his talent is in the word balloon in the final panel. Many cartoonists of the day would have thought that the slapstick was the end all and be all of the strip and left it at that. Pretty lame to us today, but this sort of stuff was all over comic sections in those days and had an  apparently appreciative audience. But where the average cartoonist of 1902 would have given us some lame dialogue in the last panel (“I’ll whale the tar out of ye if I ever get better” or some such line that drops with all the grace of a cow patty) instead Herriman gives us a funny and picturesque turn of phrase “… kindly kick that brat in the neck good and hard.” I mean, we’re not talking Shakespeare or anything, but saying ‘neck’ instead of ‘behind’ puts a funnily implausible picture in your head. Result, at least a little guffaw. Okay, so your mileage may vary.