We close up our coverage of the May 1912 fifth issue of Cartoons Magazine, with a hodge-podge of topics.

Above, two cartoons concerning the Post Office using the Interstate Commerce Commission, to limit private carriers of packages, out of fear that such competition would drive the Post Office itself out of business. Much, much later, this competition was allowed. Since, the Post Office has survived but struggled (only to next come head-to-head against electronic transactions…). Cartoons are by Rollin Kirby and Frank Michael Spangler.

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

Above, the new Republic of China, coming up against Russian aggression concerning Mongolia. Below, an openly racist cartoon from the Cuban publication, Havana Discusión, showing white or light-skinned Cuba, rejecting the “Colored Independent Party”.

Above, Kaiser Wilhelm depicted by cartoonist Charles Henry Sykes, knocking at the door of the Ananias Club. “Ananias Club” — named for a man who fell dead when he lied to the apostle Peter — was understood in the day to be a round about way of calling someone a “liar”.

Below, Charles Lewis Bartholomew (“Bart”) and others, regarding tariffs.

Doug Wheeler

Here’s another chapter of the forgotten Wander series from Charlton by a pseudonymous Denny O’Neil and a young Jim Aparo.

http://diversionsofthegroovykind.blogspot.com/2012/05/amazed-by-aparo-fastest-gun-in-de-wast.html

Pappy gives us two stories of Timely’s Miss America and throws in an added plug for Yoe Books’ new Zombies book, out this week.

http://pappysgoldenage.blogspot.com/2012/05/number-1166-all-american-flying-two.html

Speaking of Golden Age female protagonists and horror, here’s Madame Satan.

http://atomic-surgery.blogspot.com/2012/05/madam-satan-vampire-frame-up-1941.html

Finally today, here’s a review of Frazetta-Funny Stuff from The Big Blog of Kids Comics.

http://www.bigblogcomics.com/2012/05/finally-frazettas-funny-animals-and.html

Today, on the centennial of the death of aviation pioneer and inventor, Wilbur Wright, we present the cartoons gathered in the July 1912 issue of Cartoons Magazine — collected from various newspapers paying tribute to Wright.

Amongst the cartoonists seen here honoring Wilbur Wright, are Cy Hungerford, Billy DeBeck, and William Charles Morris, plus, Raymond Oscar Evans, cartoonist of the Wright Brothers’ hometown Ohio newspaper, the Dayton Daily News.

Click on the above & below pictures, to view the cartoons in greater detail.

Doug Wheeler

Science Tigwissel Tuesdays

I first discovered Archie Andrews in comic books when my cousin showed me some 1966 copies of LIFE WITH ARCHIE circa 1968. I had at least some familiarity with the character and his friends before that, however, courtesy of Bob Montana’s long-running newspaper comic strip version.

For last year’s history of Archie Comics-ARCHIE: A CELEBRATION OF AMERICA’S FAVORITE TEENAGERS-I researched and wrote the chapter on Bob Montana. After I wrote it (but before it came out) IDW published their collection of the artist’s first few years of the daily strip which went on to win the Eisner Award! I got it as a Christmas gift from my wife in 2010.

This year, Craig Yoe’s book-the one I helped write-is up for an Eisner Award itself! And IDW has just released its follow-up Bob Montana book- a collection of the early years of the ARCHIE Sunday strips in full color!

Thanks to the good folks at IDW, I have on hand a review copy of the new book and I pronounce it-GREAT!

There was just something about the Sunday funnies in those days. They were bigger, more colorful, better drawn and somehow looked and felt more respectable than their comic book cousins or than even modern newspaper strips.

And the artists themselves got more respect! Successful cartoonists of the Golden Age were well-paid, well-respected and often became quite the celebrity to the public at large. Once Bob Montana started the ARCHIE newspaper strip, it was considered “separate but equal” to the comic book version. He never looked back. In a way, his-as co-creator-is a more authentic vision of the Riverdale gang. A couple of folks interviewed for the Archie history book pointed out that it was always a big deal when Montana made his annual pilgrimage to the Archie offices (usually for the Christmas party). Even for folks now thought of as celebs by comics aficionados, meeting Montana was meeting a STAR!

ARCHIE’S SUNDAY FINEST starts with the seemingly required introduction-in this case a more detailed piece on Bob than I had room for in the big history. It all seemed so familiar to me but if you hadn’t heard it, it’s well done and a more fascinating story than one might expect from a cartoonist bio.

Then we get to the meat of the matter: more than 150 beautifully drawn, full-color Sunday comic strips reprinted in large size and covering the earliest years of the strip in the late forties. Without the continuity of the early daily strips, the first thing the reader notices is that the Sundays are akin to pages from ARCHIE’S JOKE BOOK, only with more humor per page and generally funnier punchlines.

As you might expect, everyone is present-Archie, Jughead, Betty and Veronica, Reggie, Miss Grundy, Mr, Weatherbee and even prototypical versions of some of the later Archie gang like Dilton. Something that adds to these strips now is the warm familiarity of the cast, at the time still relatively new to readers. Veronica is a bit more shallow than she is later on, Betty a bit more scheming, but they’re all recognizable. In a way, this is a very pure version of Archie and friends as we have yet to have decades of changing with the latest fads.

The real star here, though, is Bob Montana himself. With most of his work long unavailable for reevaluation, Montana’s name has settled into being a trivia question, the answer to “Name the co-creator of ARCHIE.”ARCHIE’S SUNDAY FINEST, along with last year’s dailies collection and, to some extent, the Eisner-nominated Archie history, have given us some basis to revisit his work…and it’s good!

As with many of the great strips, one can simply savor the detail that went into the art in each panel. As is traditional, in spite of their ages, Archie’s girls are drawn to be very attractive. Montana’s facial expressions go a long way toward making the jokes-some of which are admittedly labored-seem even funnier.

Overall, ARCHIE’S SUNDAY FINEST works as a fun and funny book but works even better as an art book, yet another tribute to one of the great unsung cartoonists of the Golden Age of comic strip art, Bob Montana. Can’t wait to see more volumes, daily and Sunday!

Here at Comics Tunes Tuesdays – the nexus of comics and records – you never know where the comic connection is going to be found.

Sometimes it’s a song about a comic strip character, like “Barney Google” (which is about Barney Google, FYI). Sometimes it’s the theme song to an animated cartoon like Atom Ant or Peter Potamus (which is nicely alliterative, unlike Peter Ant or Atom Potamus).

We’ve had songs sung by cartoonists, songs written about comic books, even songs played by groups named after cartoon characters!

This Tuesday it’s something new. A single comic page inspired by a song. I can’t think of another single page in comics history, or perhaps just that one single panel (!) that had as much impact as R. Crumb’s Keep On Truckin’ - which obviously gets its name from the song “Keep On Truckin’.” I suspect that it wasn’t Donovan’s version that lit Crumb’s candle, but since Donovan mentions Superman and Green Lantern in a big hit record, it’s his “Keep On Truckin’” we’re sharing today.

Click the photo for a closer look.

Click the link below to listen. And please truck responsibly.

Keep On Trucking - Donovan

This week’s comic swipe at science, comes courtesy of writer/artist Richard Felton Outcault, and his creation, Buster Brown.

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

“Yep! It Exploded!” appeared first in the New York Herald Sunday comics section, and then was reprinted in the 1916 Buster Brown collection, The Little Rogue (front cover shown below)

To find the prior comic science episodes of Tigwissel Tuesdays, click here.

Doug Wheeler

R.F. Outcault

You’ve heard of Youtube but have you heard of The Yoe Tube? Craig has decided to get into the video swing of things and has just debuted videos for two Yoe Books!

Here’s one for the just shipping Zombies, with both book and video made in conjunction with Karswell from The Horrors of it All.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZzHMXAFt1s

And here’s a somewhat surreal video for the very first Yoe Book, The Art of Ditko (with a side plug for its upcoming sequel, The Creativity of Ditko).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uwsAutLto4

More to come! Keep watching The Yoe Tube!

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheYoeTube

Having spent a great deal of my life as a great big fat guy naturally I’ve taken an interest in how my kind was depicted in North American comic books and strips. I’ve made an extensive study of the subject and found, interestingly enough, few of them were obsessively interested in food. J. Wellington Wimpy, Homer Simpson and professional Homer Simpson impersonator Ralph Drabble immediately spring to mind, but these are the exceptions which prove the rule. Which is what made Britain’s Billy Bunter such a revelation. I first discovered him in the comedy two-pagers drawn by Reg Parlett in 1960′s issues of the British boys adventure weekly Valiant.

But I quickly learned the character has a rich history going back decades (George Orwell was a fan) which included appearances in novels…

… and his own television show.

To quote Wikipedia Billy was “dishonest, greedy, pathologically self-centered, snobbish, conceited, lazy, cowardly, mean-spirited and stupid’. He lived to eat and was endlessly plotting to pilfer food from the school kitchen or off of one of the younger boys and honestly believed that by virtue of his appetite (and make no mistake, to Bunter gluttony was no vice) he was legitimately entitled to it.

When he was thwarted (which he inevitably was, barring special occasions such as the Christmas strip posted above) he would become righteously infuriated and would deal with his inevitable violent comeuppance with his signature yowl of “Yarooh” (“horray” spelled backwards). As you will find there is absolutely nothing remotely likable about Billy Bunter, and yet there is something almost admirable about the way such a meticulously detailed monster was completely immune from outside opinion regarding his habits or person.

He rolled through life driven by equal parts hunger, undeserved self esteem, rage and utter contempt for all things not Bunter and faced down the loathing of the entire world with utter indifference. If he even knew he was fat (and there is some question that he did) he couldn’t have cared less.

Originally William George Bunter was just a supporting player in the Greyfriars School stories by Charles Hamilton that were written under the pen name Frank Richards. They appeared in The Magnet a ’story paper’ , the English equivalent of America’s dime novels which predated their weekly comics. In America the pulps of course killed the dime novel but this wasn’t the case in the UK where the format didn’t entirely die out until the late 1950′s.

And when I say ‘school story” I mean stories devoted to life in British boarding schools. It’s a genre usually considered to be either antique or extinct but what is Harry Potter if not a perfect example of the species — just with, you know wizards and such. School stories have never been particularly popular in America, no doubt due to our (relative) lack of same sex educational institutions where students lived during the school year. The closest the US has to this are boys novels, movies and comics set in military academies.

The Greyfriar School stories usually focused on The Famous Five (no relation to Enid Blyton’s more famous Famous Five); Harry Wharton, Bob Cherry, Hurree Singh, Frank Nugent and Johnny Bull. They were your standard issue squad of virtuous British boys who invariably became involved in adventures revolving around a sport, mysteries and the uncovering of foreign spy rings which conveniently enough tended to operate campus adjacent. At first Bunter just provided occasional comic relief to their exploits, as you can see from a 1950′s Greyfriar story from the weekly Sun.

But Bunter quickly became the break out star of the feature, spinning off into his humorous one-pages, but he still had time to frequently dominate the Greyfriar feature. as seen here in “Billy Bunter’s Birthday”. If you first experience Bunter drawn as a complete cartoon grotesque it’s really more than a little disturbing seeing him drawn in a more realistic fashion.

Even if Bunter’s actions are indefensible, after seeing him kicked him down a flight of stairs it’s kind of hard not to see ‘The Famous Five’ as a bunch of toffy nosed bastards. But Bunter would have his revenge…The Famous Five disappeared without a trace, and when The Magnet ended in 1940 Bunter transferred to Knockout and then Valiant and then TV Comic (I’ve yet to find a copy of TV Comic that had a Billy Bunter strip in it, but hope springs eternal). And the rest of the Greyfriar boys became just nameless extras; it was Bunter’s world, they were just living in it.

And finally, for today anyway, here’s a couple more Billy Bunter strips from Comet which for reasons beyond understanding used a Prince Valiant format of pictures and block of text plus word balloons. Which seems an unnecessarily suspenders and belt sort of format hybrid, to me, anyway.

During the First Great Depression, unemployed W.W. I veterans sold pamphlets with titles such as “Hello Buddy”, as a means of asking for money while retaining their pride that they were not begging. Many of these pamphlets did not have a set price, but instead asked people to “Pay What You Please.”

We’ve show a number of extracts from these pamphlets the past two years — click here to see those. I thought I’d exhausted the examples I have in my collection in these prior postings, but, I managed to find a few more images yet for this Memorial Day. Enjoy!

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

Doug Wheeler

T.E. Powers

Here are some recent cool posts from my Rondo-nominated blog, Four-Color Shadows.

Al Capp’s once phenomenally popular Shmoo turns up in the form of Super Shmoo in a fun, Bizarro World kind of tale from 1949.

http://fourcolorshadows.blogspot.com/2012/05/super-shmoo-al-capps-shmoo-1949.html

From the department of odd superguys, here’s The Lynx, with Blackie the Mystery Boy from 1940.

http://fourcolorshadows.blogspot.com/2012/05/lynx-with-blackie-mystery-boy-norton.html

Mort Drucker had some beautifully drawn Beatnik cartoons used as DC filler pages in the early sixties, like these seen here.

http://fourcolorshadows.blogspot.com/2012/05/beat-nick-mort-drucker-1961-63.html

Finally, here’s a whole big bunch of classic Sunday Funnies with all your old favorites!

http://fourcolorshadows.blogspot.com/2012/05/sunday-funnies-1930s-1960s.html