To help cheer in the New Year, following below is a cartoon on cheers years past! From the front page of the December 2nd, 1875 edition of the (New York) Daily Graphic, comes Arthur Burdett Frost’s, “Crooked Whiskey” in a Crooked Age.

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

Have a Happy New Year!

Doug Wheeler

temperance NYDailyGraphic

132 years ago today, on December 31, 2025, Thomas Edison illuminated his Menlo Park laboratory complex with the first public demonstration of an incandescent lighting system. Building on the works of other inventors, Edison created an inexpensive, long-lasting (40 hours!) lamp and a prototype distribution system.

On the same day, a new issue of Puck Magazine hit the streets. It contained a large lithograph by Joseph Keppler that celebrated the great promise of Edison’s endeavors.

Edison’s incandescent bulb dominated the domestic lighting market for over a century, but it always had an efficiency problem: 90% of the power consumed by incandescents is emitted as heat rather than as visible light.

In 2007, Australia passed legislation to phase out incandescent bulbs as an energy-saving measure. The European Union passed a similar mandate to remove incandescent bulbs from the market by 2012. In the U.S., the Bush Administration and Congress passed energy laws in 2007 that regulated new efficiency standards scheduled to take effect in 2012. It seemed as if Incandescent bulbs were doomed to be replaced by compact fluorescent light bulbs.

But wait! Spurred by the government mandates, some bulb manufacturers, such as General Electric, Osram Sylvania and Philips, are producing new incandescents that meet the new energy standards! One energy efficiency consultant said, "There have been more incandescent innovations in the last three years than in the last two decades.”

The future will be bright! Happy New Year!

Little Nemo in Slumberland‘s creator, Winsor McCay, had an equally impressive career as an editorial cartoonist and here’s an absolute ton of evidence as to just how good he was at it.

http://goldenagecomicbookstories.blogspot.com/2010/12/winsor-mccay-1867-1934-as-things-change.html

Leonard Starr is best known as the veteran cartoonist who did On Stage for decades and then revived Little Orphan Annie. Here we see a look at his 1950′s comic book work on National’s Ghost Breaker series.

http://allthingsger.blogspot.com/2010/12/starr-on-stage-friday-comic-book-day.html

This video appears to be an early nineties clip from some sort of children’s show. We see artist Dick Locher penciling and inking a Dick Tracy Sunday strip and making a color guide, then we see the various stages of coloring and printing required (at that time at least) to get it to the newspaper

http://booksteveslibrary.blogspot.com/2010/12/dick-tracy-from-pencil-to-paper.html

Finally this year, we end with some lovely and rare art by Al Williamson, one of many we lost this past year, in two unsold samples from what would have undoubtedly been an amazing strip entitled Robbie.

http://potrzebie.blogspot.com/2010/12/here-is-robbie-scripted-by-len-brown.html

HaPpY NeW YeAr from all of us here at I.T.C.H.

Mr Door Tree shares his personal copy of 1977′s Frazetta Memory Book, the catalog to the very first official exhibit of the work of the man who was even then considered the greatest fantasy painter of them all.

http://goldenagecomicbookstories.blogspot.com/2010/12/frank-frazetta-frazetta-memory-book.html

How about a wintry war story from 1965 in which Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert’s unstoppable Sgt Rock meets on of his most memorable enemies, the Iron Major, for the very first time.

http://www.comicbookwar.com/2010/12/iron-major-rock-sergeant.html

Speaking of war stories, here’s a 1952 Ajax-Farrell Fighting Man Annual story from an unknown writer and artist that can only be described as “Tarzan vs the Reds!”

http://fourcolorshadows.blogspot.com/2010/12/traitors-island-fighting-man-annual.html

Finally, here’s some nifty seventies sci-fi/fantasy comics art in two stories from Marvel’s Worlds Unknown, one by the great Gil Kane (with Mike Esposito) and the other by the woefully underutilized Ralph Reese.

http://www.kingdomkane.com/2010/12/he-that-hath-wings-plus-ralph-reese.html

Usually at Christmas time I like to post “Deck Us All With Boston Charlie” and one of Walt Kelly’s wonderful Pogo Sundays from some long ago Christmas. I did it on December 22, 2025 and on December 24, 2025.

But since we’ve been there, done that twice already, I thought I’d forgo “Deck Us All” and instead offer one of Kelly’s own recordings, “Go Go Pogo.” Yep, that’s Kelly his own self singing on this track. And it’s just as well he stuck to drawing for the most part as you’ll hear.

Click the link to listen!

Go-Go Pogo - Walt Kelly

We start today with the well-kept secret that is the Prankster, an Ellison-inspired Denny O’Neil/Jim Aparo one-shot character who turned up as a back-up at Charlton in 1967 and has been beloved by aging fanboys ever since!

http://www.thecharltonstory.com/2010/12/prankster-of-ultrapolis.html

Some of the funniest and best drawn (by Wallace Wood and others) newspaper comic strip parodies ever appeared in a 1961 Mad reprint collection as an actual folded up newspaper section, seen here today.

http://hairygreeneyeball2.blogspot.com/2010/12/worst-from-mad-sunday-funnies.html

Speaking of newspaper strips, today is the birthday of the one and only Stan Lee and here we have a link to the rarely seen first few weeks of daily strips from his little-known 1959 Willie Lumpkin, as drawn by Dan DeCarlo.

http://allthingsger.blogspot.com/2010/12/its-wonderful-strip-tuesday-comic-strip.html

Finally today, from that same period, let’s head across the pond for a number of beautifully illustrated girls’ comics from a 1960 British School Friends Annual.

http://kb-outofthisworld.blogspot.com/2010/12/british-girls-comics-school-friend.html

One of the things I love about Golden Age comic books are their covers; the big, bold logos, the wildly frantic action scenes which tended to have little if anything to do with their contents featuring iconic images of heroic figures in action sprawled across them. At first they were just illegitimate imitations of pulp magazine covers but quickly became something wonderfully garish and grotesque that was all their own. But whether the product of a keen sense of design honed from decades of working in the publishing industry or just unbridled adolescent exuberance at work they got the job done. They provided their readers with the promise of the impossible made possible and in the process sold comic books by the millions.

But I also love them when they’re none of those things. And since I’m still recovering from the Holidays, here’s a bunch of covers that I like for no other reason than I like them. About the only thing they all have in common is they all look remarkably generic — as if a major Hollywood movie studio was making a movie and for plot or legal purposes they couldn’t use an actual comic so had their art department created a couple of mock ups.

I mean, Atom Bomb? Really? I would have bet $20 that there had never been a comic book named Atomic Bomb…

From the fairly snazzy mystery man on the cover you’d expect X-Venture to be a pretty standard Golden Age anthology comic book but sadly he’s just the villain in a trite crime story. And sadly neither “Atomic Wizard” or “Holy Dervish” were superheroes.

And, finally, nothing quite captures the “gosh, fighting a war sure is fun!” attitude of the popular culture of the times quite like this curiosity; American Air Forces wasn’t a comic book but rather a collection of text pieces and black and white photographs on the war that had, for no apparent reason, a comic book cover.

Almost a year ago, we posted Snow Storm Special 1, by Frank Bellew, Sr.

Today from his son, Frank Bellew, Jr. — better known as “Chips” — we bring you another winter weather inspired cartoon… This comes from original Life magazine. I would tell you the specific date — except that info is located on another computer which I’m temporarily unable to get to… because of the current East Coast storm.

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

Doug Wheeler

NYLife

Rounding out our Christmas cartoons for this year, comes A Disconcerting Question, from Judge magazine, 1908, with art by Petersen.

Merry Christmas!

Doug Wheeler

JudgeMag Christmas Comics

We begin our post-Christmas itch with the first part of an almost belated 70th anniversary oral history of Fawcett’s Captain Marvel, at one point the single biggest-selling superhero of the Golden Age!

http://www.newsarama.com/comics/oral-history-captain-marvel-1-101224.html

If you just want to look at some pretty pictures, here’s a nice, big portfolio of meticulously detailed comics covers, magazine and book illustrations, posters and prints, all from the talented mind and hands of MW Kaluta!

http://illustrateurs.blogspot.com/2010/12/michael-william-kaluta.html

Here’s “Who’s Afraid of the Big Red ‘S’?”, a leftover Christmas story that featured the first appearance of Superman in Batman and the Outsiders, drawn in a rare turn by that series’main artist, Jim Aparo.

http://swords-and-veeblefetzers.blogspot.com/2010/12/batman-and-outsiders-19-whos-afraid-of.html

Finally, for your Boxing Day enjoyment, there’s always room for Ditko-in this case the oft-reprinted short sci-fi tale of “The King of Planetoid X,” here with the missing page six restored!

http://ditko.blogspot.com/2010/12/unusual-tales-king-of-planetoid-x.html