I believe this is Week 6 of Road Runner Month, and incredible as it may be, we have another Road Runner record to rock your world! It’s all part of our ongoing attempt to prove that there are more songs about Road Runner than about any other cartoon character. If anyone knows of an animated character with more songs, let us know here at I.T.C.H. headquarters and we’ll post a retraction.

The Ventures are today’s featured act and quite apropos, at that. I think they have recorded more comics- and cartoon-related songs than any other group (as I noted back on August 29th, 2008). How fitting that they had a Road Runner song!

Click the link below and hear for yourself.

Roadrunner - The Ventures

To Close out this year’s April Fools’ Month, we bring our focus not on fools, but on some of the orchestrators of fun — the cartoonists. Above and below are the pages concentrated on cartoonists, from the April 1913 issue of Cartoons Magazine.

Above, a brief auto bio written by artist Billy DeBeck, along with an Income Tax cartoon appropriate for this month.

Click on the above & below pages, to enlarge them enough to read the text.

Beneath, short bits involving cartoonists William Kemp Starrett, Harry Murphy, Homer Davenport, and B.F. Hammond.

Above, nostalgia from 1910, about the good old days of the 1890′s, by artist Frank Wing, known for his series of cartoons — Yesterdays — which looked back to that past (and I suspect, from a 1920′s published collection I have, came across as dated, even then)…

In the fourth entry of Henry C. Williamson‘s articles about 19th century cartoonists, below, he writes about artist Bernhard Gillam‘s “Tattooed Man” series, depicting 1884 G.O.P. Presidential nominee James G. Blaine, as a man whose sins are written on his body, head-to-toe (and ran in Puck magazine, during that campaign). Clicking on the above links will take you to our postings of those same cartoons, last year.

Above, a short bio on cartoonist Karl K. Knecht.

Beneath, commentary about some of the cartoon subjects appearing in the April 1913 issue (which I’ve been gathering with cartoons from other months, into theme-based postings). Subjects include the ongoing Mexican Revolution (we’ll see many of those this coming Sunday); Cubist & Futurist Art, and the Women’s Suffrage Movement.

Finally, we have an article on “The Influence of Cartooning”, written by cartoonist J.E. Whiting.

Doug Wheeler

NYPuck Tattooed-Man James Blaine

We have one more cartoonist-illustrated theater giveaway for April Fools’ Month, advertising the travelling comedic play Turn to the Right, showing at Garrick Theatre in Philadelphia during the Christmas Season. (An internet search shows this play was at that theater during Christmas 1916, so unless it played there in other years on Christmas as well, we can deduce that this pamphlet was distributed in 1916.)

The advertising angle here, was to show big name cartoonists and their characters, sitting enjoying the play, sitting in a theater box and enjoying the play, as drawn by the cartoonists themselves. (Who drew the play scenes they are watching, is not given.)

Above, we have the back & front covers of the pamphlet, with photos of the five cartoonists who depicted themselves within.

Click on the above & below pictures, to enlarge them and read the text.

Beneath, Rube Goldberg‘s self-portrait, of himself with some of the characters from his Boob McNutt strip.

Next, we have Clare Briggs (left page), known for his cartoons featuring kids.

On the right page, we have Richard Felton Outcault, seated with his creations, Buster Brown & Tige.

Beneath, left page, is T.E. Powers with his Joys & Glooms characters.

Right page, George McManus, with his characters from Bringing Up Father.

For prior postings of cartoons involved with theater, click here.

Doug Wheeler

TheatricalCartoons AdvertisingStrips Focus on Cartoonists R.F. Outcault

We reach the end of our April Fools’ Month presentation of Box Set 1 of the Rube Goldberg‘s “Foolish Questions” card game, published in 1919 by the Wallie Dorr Company. Beneath, the final twelve cards of the 52-card set.

Click on the above & below pictures, to view them in greater detail, and be able to read their texts.

Below, the last page of the list of cards in Set 1:

Doug Wheeler

As shown in these cartoons, 1913 was a year in which puritanical America looked at all forms of theater — Vaudeville and silent cinema — as sources of sin, moral decay, and danger.

Above, from when America had a patchwork of local censor boards, controlling movies, books, publications, and shows could be shown or sold within their towns and cities, cartoon by Ole May, depicting the kind of movies (on the billboards behind the cop), that the local censor boards would like to see in theaters. From the February 1913 issue of Cartoons Magazine.

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

Above, by Boardman Robinson, from February 1913, a stage actress collecting her paycheck, in The wages of sin is — among other things — cash.

Beneath, James H. Donahey depicting a worried mother, waiting for daughter’s safe return from the dens of sin, known as theater… From the March 1913 edition.

From April 1913, above, cartoonist Charles MaCauley labels theaters “fire traps”.

Beneath, Robert Minor, Jr. (from March 1913).

Click here to find previous postings involving Theatrical Cartoons.

Doug Wheeler

TheatricalCartoons

It’s been awhile since we last focused a post on the Vanity Cartoon Books of the early 20th Century, in which local business people & others of import, paid to have themselves caricatured by local newspaper cartoonists. Being in such a book with other local leaders, was both a status symbol, as well as good advertising. We go back to look at the 1911 New York City version of Them As Is Because. We’ve previously shown Theatrical Cartoons from this book, but we did not run through them all. Here are the remainder.

Click on the above & below cartoons, to enlarge them, and read their accompanying text.

Above, we have partners Frank Forsyth & Fuller, of the Metropolitan Booking Office theatrical agency. Below left, actor & silent film star Raymond Hitchcock; below right, Vaudeville Comedy Club Secretary, Gene Hughes.

Above, song writer Jean Schwartz.

Below left, theater owner & real estate investor, John J. Reisler, had a checkered future, including not paying actors, bankruptcy, and perjury in the Herman Rosenthal murder case. Below right, Vaudeville agent L. Marinelli.

Above, circus & burlesque promotor Samuel A. Scribner. Beneath, composer Harry Von Tilzer and famous Florenz “Flo” Ziegfeld, creator of the Ziegfeld Follies (who I placed side-by-side, because — at least from the way the cartoonist drew them — they appear to be separated-at-birth identical twins…).

Finally, we have musical comedy producers Louis Werba & Mark Luescher.

Doug Wheeler

TheatricalCartoons

Oh yes! This is the fifth week of Road Runner Month and we’re not done yet. In an attempt to prove that there are more songs about Road Runner than about any other cartoon character, we’re presenting one song a week for an entire month (which at this point is looking like six or seven weeks). What a month!

This Tuesday we have one for the detractors and disbelievers – those I.T.C.H. readers who allege we’re cheating and sneaking in songs about road runners and not The Road Runner. Listen closely and you’ll hear lyrics than can only be about our friend Beep Beep and his antagonist Mr. Wile E. Coyote.

Click the link below and listen.

Roadrunner - Boris the Sprinkler

One of my all-time favorite comics would have to be the UK’s Lion, home to one of my all-time favorite characters, Robot Archie. Yet it has occurred to me as much as I’ve written about it, I’ve never presented an entire issue of the publication. Well, almost complete. I have helpfully edited out both the WWII series Treleaway of the Guards and one featuring proper football, Carson’s Cubs (“Can Boy-Star Twiggy Flint Score A Hat-Trick Against Mighty Northcroft?”). Your mileage may vary, but I’ve never been able to develop a taste for either sort of strip, and believe me, I’ve tried. The title of this particular issue is titled Lion and Champion because, in accordance with the laws of British boys comics when a weaker title folded instead of being cancelled it merged with a more popular one and most of it’s popular features were absorbed into the stronger comics mass. While of course sad these sort of shotgun mergers tended to make for a stronger surviving title. So, from April 15, 1967, here’s an issue of Lion and Champion .

If you know The Spider at all it’s probably it’s as ruthless antihero, but unfortunately in this incarnation of the strip he had switched to crime fighter for pretty much the same reason Modesty Blaise did (i.e. they got bored with crime). Even in his villain days The Spider kept his crimes pretty exclusively to grand theft and general menacing; oh, he might have threatened to kill the odd policeman who dared pursue him in a fiendish death trap, but he never actually followed through. Oh, he was cold, prideful and contemptuous, but you just got the feeling that he wasn’t a homicidal maniac at heart, not out of any moral squeamishness but rather a general lack of interest in killing.

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Robot Archie. *Sigh* Here’s the start of a story set during the period when he was no longer operated by a remote control box, could speak and was actually more or less sentient.

Lesser known than the above features was Code Name Barracuda, a super secret agent feature which definitely had it’s moments.

“Spot the Clue With Zip Nolan Highway Patrol”" was a reliable two pager feature that ran for years which gave the reader the opportunity to solve a Minute Mystery type mystery. As well as the thrill of riding along on Zip’s motorcycle in America; that kind of freedom undoubtedly had a lot of appeal to 60′s British boys.

Thanks for the offer, but, no thanks. And for the record, I never ask for a dinky.

And finally, The Phantom Viking, for all intents and purposes a British version of Marvel’s Mighty Thor, though not a bad one. Though my favorite part of this outing was undoubtedly the size of the hatband the chief gangster is sporting; you had have the balls of Sinatra to pull that look off even then.

With yet another major oil spill (the oil pipeline rupture spilling tar sands-derived oil, in Mayflower, Arkansas), and oil industry representatives using spin to try to deivert attention from facts, this year’s Earth Day posting returns to the theme of Big Oil.

Above, “Bubble, Bubble, Oil and Trouble” by Fred Ellis, from the February 14th, 1924 issue of The Daily Worker, scanned from its reprinting in the 1926 book, Red Cartoons.

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

Beneath, Ellis’ “I Didn’t Do It…”. From the book Red Cartoons 1928, which reprinted this cartoon from the February 24th, 1928 issue of The Daily Worker.

Beneath, I’ve shown this image before (two years ago), but it’s just so appropriate! We have a portrait of Chicago coal energy man, W.T. Delihant, from the 1904 cartoon vanity project, Illinoisans As We See ‘Em. Delihant apparently was proud of his sideline as a magician, promoting (in 1904) that not only was he a “washed coal” man, he also was a “Sleight of Hand Performer”…

Two more from Fred Ellis. Above, “The Forty Thieves”, from the February 25th, 1925 Daily Worker, and the 1926 Red Cartoons.

Below, “The Leaning Tower”, from the February 17th, 1928 Daily Worker, and the book “Red Cartoons 1928″.

(Note that these are only some of artist Fred Ellis‘ oil cartoons. These just happen to be ones I had available to scan.)

Doug Wheeler

— Doug