Catch up time! Back last Summer, we were having website issues, and I stopped uploading “new” old material for awhile. Once I did return, it’s been with less frequency of posting than I had been before. One reason, is that I simply burned out on scanning, organizing, and posting Cartoons Magazine material — I thought it would be fun to do a month-by-month Centennial as each issue came out, but I hadn’t realized when I started, how predominant it would become, squeezing out material from other sources. A second reason, is that I actually end up damaging the things as I was pressing them flat against a scanner.

Well, I’m restarting our Cartoons Magazine coverage, this time hopefully without overdoing it. And I just bought a new digital camera, testing first that it can produce high enough definition images for use here on SuperITCH. This posting is the first one (from me) making use of photographed instead of scanned pages. So, on with it!…

It’s been July since we’ve done a “Focus on Cartoonists” feature, presenting pages from Cartoons Magazine that focused on the cartooning itself. I plan to run a couple of these each month, until we catch up with a truly “Centennial” schedule again. Above if the front cover of the August 1913 issue (my copy of September is coverless, so, can’t show it to you). The subject of this cover by cartoonist Fred Morgan, is Summer Heat/Humidity (perfect timing for those of us who experienced the recent “Polar Vortex”). Immediately below — also from the August issue — are two quick bios on cartoonists James H. Shonkwiler and H. Robert Manz.

Click on the above & below pictures, to view the cartoons in detail, and read the text.

Above, an ad for bound sets of the first three volumes of Cartoons Magazine (almost certainly made from returned/unsold copies — these bound volumes typically are missing the covers and advertising pages, as it was general policy for magazine stands to tear off at least part of the cover, as proof of the copies they had failed to sell.)

Beneath, from August, a three-page article by artist James E. Murphy, accompanied with some of his cartoons (the last one created for this article).

Above & below, from the September 1913 issue, short bios of cartoonists Gaar Williams and Terry Gilkison.

Finally, below, an ad for the Landon School for cartoonists, from the rear cover of the August 1913 issue. (The September issue also had a (different) Landon School ad, but again, I don’t have that cover.)

Doug Wheeler

H.R. Manz

This being New Year’s Day, when better to present a comic story in which the central character deals with the morning after results of over indulging!

Ten years ago, when I was working with Richard Olson and Robert Beerbohm to create the first instance of a Victorian Age Comics section, within the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, the listed items & photos mostly came from my collection (since then, plenty of other people have contributed material, so, no, don’t begin to think that I own a copy of everything you see listed there). Anyway, one of the items highlighted, was the paperback book The Clown, or The Banquet of Wit, published no earlier than 1851, by Fisher & Brother. Containing multiple sequential comic strips plus numerous cartoons, by a variety of artists, most (maybe all) of it reprinted from earlier sources, it was notable as the earliest example of such collection by an American publisher, that we knew of. (A few years later, Gabriel Laderman would contribute knowledge from his vastly larger Victorian Age Comics collection, revealing at least half a dozen equally rare similar type books, from the same time period (early 1850s). What their sequence of publication was, is currently undetermined.

Some of the material in The Clown, or The Banquet of Wit, I recognized as ripped off from foreign (mostly British) sources, some of it from American sources (which in turn still might have originated in Britain), and some, who knew? (Enforceable international copyright laws had yet to come into existence, and publishers stole material from foreign sources, in both directions of the Atlantic, with impunity.) The majority of the cartoons (and this applies to all the early 1850s paperbacks), had appeared before, inside American comic almanacs.

One of the comic strips in The Clown whose origin was unknown, was “The Adventures of Mr. Gulp” (which appears not only in The Clown, but in a few other titles later contributed to Overstreet by Laderman). I had taken an uncertain guess, based both on the artist initials “BR”, that the story might have been created by the American Read Brothers (cartoonists/creators of the Gold Rush graphic novel, Jeremiah Saddlebags). The Overstreet guide still lists that guess, followed by question marks to identify it as uncertain.

Just this past year, however, I discovered whence the story of Mr. Gulp truly originates — it is an unauthorized, pirated copy of the circa 1847 to 1850 comic strip book, The Glass, The Bottle’s Companion, by British cartoonist Thomas Onwhyn. It’s title an obvious attempt to capitalize on artist George Cruikshank’s highly successful 1846 temperance tale, The Bottle, Onwhyn’s The Glass likewise has an over-the-top warning about the dangers of drink.

Presented above, are the covers of both versions. (If you’re thinking, the cover of The Glass looks like something rigged up after the original cover was lost, all I can say, is that I own five different Onwhyn booklets in this identical format, acquired separately from different dealers, over several years, and all five have this same type of cover. )

Below, we first have the original Thomas Onwhyn version, which unfolds into a single long strip of panels. After that, we show the American piracy, in which not only the text has been altered, but the entire story was redrawn! (Being unauthorized, the publisher would have lacked the original printing plates, and so resorted to having it reillustrated & newly engraved.) Somebody had to do that redrawing. The initials “RB” in the final panel, do not appear in the original, thus, the Read Brothers still might have been involved. (Or, also likely, John H. Manning might have performed the task, given that he definitely illustrated the story which followed “Mr. Gulp”.

Enjoy!

Click on the above & below pictures, to view the cartoons in detail, and read their captions.

The last panel shown in the above portion of the fold-out, captioned, “Mr. Gulp is carried to bed, and when there, is impressed with the idea that somebody is making an anvil of his head ”, is patterned after earlier broadsheet cartoons by George Cruikshank and Robert Seymour, in which tiny imps bang on the heads of those suffering from a hangover.

Beneath, start of the pirated American version. Art differences can be spotted in every panel. For instance, Panel One in the American version was widened to fit the new page arrangement. It now shows people reaching in from the other side of the table, plus a wall clock which had been behind the waiter’s head, is now found off to the left. For fun, you could open a second window of SuperITCH, and spend hours of enjoyment finding all the differences!

Beneath, the final two panels of the American “Mr. Gulp”, followed, on the right, by the first page of “Mose Keyser the Bowery Bully’s Trip to the California Gold Mines”, by John H. Manning, which I decided to show, since I had to scan the two open pages together, anyway. Note the “BR” initials in the final panel of “Mr. Gulp”. Again, those initials are not found in the original.

Doug Wheeler

— Doug

Click on the above picture, to open a larger version.

By Lawson Wood, from the British publication, The Sketch, December 1920. Scanned here via its presentation in the January 1921 issue of Cartoons Magazine.

Doug Wheeler

On Christmas morning of 1913, one hundred years ago today, those lucky enough comics enthusiasts — and followers of Buster Brown in particular — rushed to discover beneath their Christmas Tree, a copy of the latest collection of their favorite prankster, that they’d been drooling over since Summer (and hopefully not that drooled copy)! Buster Brown At Home, by artist/creator R.F. Outcault, reprinting Buster‘s Sunday Strip misadventures, was published in July 1913 by the Frederick A. Stokes Company.

Extracted beneath, are several of the stories from that collection.

Click on the above & below pictures, to view the comic pages in detail, and read their balloons.

To view previously shown “Comic Book Christmas Gifts of One Hundred Years Ago”, click here.

Merry Christmas!

Doug Wheeler

Richard Felton Outcault Christmas Gift

Continuing our series of comic books that could have been given as Christmas Gifts 100 years ago, we have extracts from the remnants of one such gift — Mr. Twee-Deedle by Johnny Gruelle, published in 1913 by Cupples & Leon, and reprinting the Sunday newspaper strip by the same name.

(Guess which picture — the above or the below — was the work of artist Johnny Gruelle, and which was the work of the budding artist recipient of the book, drawn on the backsides of the pages! Let us hope that they made it in the art world. Or, some other career.)

The Gruelle page — if you’ve guessed which one it is — has lost its companion second half (each Sunday strip presented over two pages), but it still enough of a story to stand on its own. All of the other examples beneath, are (surviving) paired pages.

Enjoy!

Click on the above & below pictures, to view the cartoons in detail, and read the balloons.

Doug Wheeler

— Doug

This being the last Friday the 13th in a year ending 13 that we’ll see for a century (or in other words, that no one reading this right now, will see), we present artist W.A. Ireland‘s cartoon on the subject, from one hundred years ago. Found in the August 1913 issue of Cartoons Magazine.

Doug Wheeler

Billy Ireland

Next in our run of 1913-published cartoon books that could have been received as Christmas gifts by comics fans one hundred years ago, is a rather scarce collection of which we know every copy was given away as Christmas presents. Cartoonist Robert Satterfield’s self-published 50 Cartoons by Satterfield, collecting a selection of Satterfield’s editorial cartoons from 1913, was limited to a run of 150 signed and numbered copies, the entire run of which he distributed for Christmas. As far as I’ve been able to determine, 1913 was the only year Satterfield did this, but the possibility that Satterfield printed such collections in other years, can’t be ruled out. The low print run from the start, means few enough surviving copies have surfaced (plus did so when I was looking), for me to definitively state that only the 1913 edition exists.

Who the gift recipients were, is unknown. But as a purely speculative guess, I would think that Satterfield would have kept numbered edition #1 for himself (I would), plus given a few copies to family and friends, after which the majority of the run was likely distributed to editors of newspapers that published Satterfield’s cartoons.

Some of the cartoons found in the book are also found within the 1913 run of Cartoons Magazine. Nearly all of them involve topics which have been the focus of postings here on Super I.T.C.H. Beneath are a few extracted examples.

Enjoy!

Click on the below pictures, to enlarge them.

Above, Satterfield on British Suffragette Emeline Pankhurst, about whose visit to the U.S. we just recently posted (click here to see).

Beneath, Satterfield’s view on then traditional Women’s work.

Above & below, a pair of cartoons that would fit into our annual Back-to-School and College Graduation themes.

Above, Teddy Roosevelt during his hunting trip in South America.

Below, a baseball-themed cartoon from Satterfield, on the 1913 World Series between the New York Giants and the Philadelphia Athletics.

Finally, we close our extracts, with the Christmas-themed cartoon that Satterfield used to conclude his book.

Doug Wheeler

Women’s History T.R. Christmas Comics CollegeComics

— Doug