Next in our run of Victorian Summer Comics, we have another of artist Thomas Onwhyn‘s small beach comic cartoon booklets, Master Franky’s Sea Side Sufferings, created or published on July 15th, 1854. We’ll be back with another Onwhyn beach booklet in two weeks.

Enjoy!

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

Doug Wheeler

SummerVacation

A couple cartoons on Child Labor, to cheer up the hearts of factory owners everywhere…

Above, The Factory Ferocities, by Robert Seymour, from issue 71, April 13th, 1833 of Figaro in London.

Beneath, by Boardman Robinson, Giving Him a Chance, as reprinted in the February 1913 issue of Cartoons Magazine.

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

For previous postings of Wall Street Frauds Make Wonderful Cartoons, click here.

Doug Wheeler

financial reforms

Kids, End of School, Summer.

Above, from the September 1913 issue of Cartoons Magazine, a cartoon from Clare Briggs‘ series, The Days of Real Sport.

The welcoming of Summer, by Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling, in “When the Sun Came Out Again”, below. From August 1913.

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

Also from August 1913, cartoons above by Ole May, Clare Briggs again, and Matthew Caine.

Beneath, from June 1913, cartoon pages by H.T. Webster and Herbert H. Perry.

Doug Wheeler

SummerVacation

I finally saw it! I’ve been mentioning Man of Steel in this blog for weeks, but now I can write from personal experience. Yes, I plunked down my 15 bucks to see the movie in real 3D! *SPOILER ALERT: Warning, there be spoilers ahead.* Well, we certainly know a lot more about Superman now, thanks to this new movie. For one thing, he’s an alien! Yep, he’s actually from another planet with technology so advanced they have spaceships and test-tube babies though they still haven’t invented shaving. It turns out, Superman left the planet Krypton (coincidently the same name as one of the noble gases) and came to Earth in a rusted, blobular space capsule only to live on a farm. Oh! And Superman’s real name isn’t Clark Kent. It’s actually Kal-El. Who knew? Once on Earth, Kal finds out he has super powers so he must put on a cape. Wow! Another shocker. You could have knocked me over with a feather.

*MORE SPOILERS AHEAD* This version of Superman is so shockingly new it takes a while to adjust. For instance, in Man of Steel that plucky, intrepid reporter Lois Lane has RED hair, while Smallville’s Lana Lang is a brunette. Take THAT, 75 years of continuity! This time out Superman doesn’t wear silly red bathing trunks. He’s dressed like a ballet dancer in blue tights, which is more heroic. In this version there is no Jimmy Olsen to get in the way, or to turn into Turtle Boy. But we do get to see perennial Peeping Tom Pete Ross. It’s revealed that Pete the Peeper grew up to manage an International House of Pancakes franchise. I certainly didn’t see that coming!

*CAREFUL, STILL MORE SPOILERS* The plot of the film is pretty much the same as Superman (1978) starring Christopher Reeve. Old weird-beard General Zod was born and bred to defend and protect the planet Krypton and its people. When everyone else from Krypton is killed, naturally General Zod has to kill Kal-El, since he is the only other survivor. This makes as much sense as a screen door on a submarine but that’s just how they roll on Krypton. They are aliens after all! Even though they look exactly like white people in every way and speak English, they are strangely different. Even their alphabet is unlike ours! How messed up is that?

*WHAT? MORE SPOILERS?* The movie clarifies another thing about the Man of Steel that has been speculated about for years: the Bible connection. You can forget about those rumors of religious allegory, comparing Kal-El to Jesus or Moses. For one thing, we find out that Kal-El isn’t circumcised, therefore he can’t be Jewish. Also, he’s not like Jesus because wasn’t born from a virgin. Quite the opposite! Everyone else on Krypton has a virgin birth EXCEPT little Kal. He’s the first one in hundreds of years to be born the old-fashioned way, with lot of huffing and puffing and gnashing of teeth. If this is religious allegory they’ll have to write a Third Testament because the Old and the New simply don’t apply.

To celebrate this unnecessary re-imagining of the most famous character in popular culture since 1938, we’re presenting another piece of completely unrelated music.

Click the link below and enjoy!

Superman - Eddie Meduza

The “inspiration” for today’s Comic Book Compulsive comes directly from Alter Ego #17. It’s one of those “goes without saying” things that really does need to be said at least every once in a while; if you have any interest at all in Gold and Silver Age comics you absolutely must read Alter Ego on a regular basis. Because no matter how much you think you know on the subject there’s always more you don’t know; case in point, L.B. Cole’s Star Publications and it’s connection to Novelty Press, one of my favorite Golden Age publishers.

Novelty Press only published a handful of titles, chief among them Blue Bolt and Target Comics, but for the first couple of years Novelty had creators like Carl Burgos, Bill Everett, Jack Kirby, Tarpe Mills, Joe Simon and Basil Wolverton working for them and their stories were full of wild energy and exciting characters. But slowly but surely all that was interesting about Novelty started to disappear and the strips became rather blandly wholesome; I always said that they started producing the kind of comics that parents and grandparents would want their kids to read. I always wondered why that was but while researching this I discovered that Novelty was an imprint of Curtis Publishing, publisher of the blandly wholesome Saturday Evening Post.

After a nine year run Novelty went out of business and in 1949 L.B. Cole bought their assets and started Star Publications. In the beginning he did very well just repackaging unpublished inventory material featuring his signature covers, but eventually he created new material featuring some of Novelty’s characters. Including a fairly obscure one, Toni Gayle, a young model/detective who operated in the back page of the title Young King Cole.

The character continued, sort of, at Star though in this version Toni Gayle became “Toni Gay” stopped all that detective nonsense and became a would-be model who along with would-be actor boyfriend Butch Dykeman attended the Adonis School of Arts and had typical teen type adventures. It’s easy to read all sorts of salacious intent into Golden Age comics for cheap laughs, but for the most part you have to assume that the creators intent was most likely entirely innocent, but with names like “Toni Gay” and “Butch Dykeman” it’s pretty clear that somebody at Star was having fun slipping in something that went flying over the heads of most readers. Exhibit #1; this page from the Toni Gay story from Popular Teenagers #6 (which was reprinted in Mr. Monster’s Super Duper Special way back in 1986)

To be absolutely honest the contents of Popular Teenagers #5 are pretty much mediocre teen comics, though it should be noted that these weren’t direct Archie imitators, and the main reason I’m including this issue here is due to the strength of L.B. Cole’s cover alone. It’s a beautiful image, an attractive design, and then there’s the title. The existence of a comic called Popular Teenagers holds out the possibility that one day there could be a title called Unpopular Teenagers (I can write some real life stories for that one), but that’s not what I’m talking about. For some reason someone decided to abbreviate “Popular” into “Pop”, in spite of the fact that (supposedly) the term “pop” (as in popular music) wasn’t in common parlance until the late 50′s — and this comic was published in 1950. And for some reason I just like idea of their being “Pop Teenagers”.

As you can see for yourself the interiors are OK, but nothing sensational. Except for Ginger Bunn which was drawn by Manny Stallman, even the Grand Comic Book Database has no idea who drew these stories. Still if nothing else they’re interesting artifacts for another time which increasingly seems like another world.

Being the First Day of Summer, we begin this year’s run of Victorian Summer Comics, with Our Trip to the Sea Side, published in 1857. It is one of several small comic booklets involving beach vacations, created by comic artist Thomas Onwhyn in the 1850s. Random panels from several of these pamphlets were later collected together, circa 1860, in Onwhyn’s Royal Sea Side Albums, which we posted previously.

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

We’ll be showing more of Onwhyn’s beach booklets in the coming months.

Doug Wheeler

SummerVacation

Once again, in honor of the new Man of Steel movie, we’re going to completely ignore it and focus instead on the Superman of days gone by. By the way, if you’re my age (which is to say, old) you probably think of the George Reeves portrayal as the definitive Superman.

The definitive Superman for kids in the 1940s was the Bud Collyer version, whereas people of my generation think of him as the host of To Tell The Truth. To tell the truth, there is no definitive Superman for every generation. Every generation has its own Superman to look up to. Look! Up in the sky! For today’s kids it’s Henry Cavill. Who will be the Man of Tomorrow tomorrow?

I sure don’t know, but for this Tuesday it’s George Reeves. Instead of a sing-along, why not speak along with the opening theme from Adventures of Superman? Come on, you know the words!

Click the link below and recite the most famous narration ever!

Adventures of Superman

From the June 22nd, 1892 issue of Fun magazine, comes “A Superfluity”, involving the consequences of a man’s brain operation.

Click on the above comic, to view it in geater detail, and be able read its text.

For prior postings involving comics & the advance of science, click on Tigwissel Tuesdays.

Doug Wheeler

BritFun

The Gumps is another one of those once incredibly well known, loved and influential comic strips that have almost completely vanished from living memory. Joseph Patterson, editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribute, the guy who (or so the story goes) turned Little Orphan Otto into Little Orphan Annie, had an idea for a comic strip soap opera about “regular people” whom he called “gumps”. Cartoonist Sidney Smith came up with the characters including Dick Tracy villain ugly Andy Gump; we toss about the term “comic grotesque” pretty casually, but Andy Gump was supposedly inspired by a real person who due to an infection lost his entire lower jaw. According to Wikipedia when he met Smith the cartoonist thought him “an ideal comic character”. Boy, times were different back then.

The strip itself was in fact a low level soap opera which followed Andy, his wife, sons and rich Uncle Bim, who shared Andy’s unique profile (so, happily, it appears to be some sort of a genetic defect and not the result of some sort of industrial accident). If the strip is remembered at all it’s because it was the first comic strip to feature the death of a major character; you can see for yourself in IDW’s Library of American Comics, The Saga of Mary Gold (1928-29). But me being me, I’m more interested in the Sundays which had more kid appeal thanks to some adventure strip style plots.

Smith died in 1935, and the strip was taken over by Gus Edison who wrote and drew the strip for 24 years (in the 50′s his assistant was actor Martin Landau) and he later went on to create Dondi with Irwin Hansen. In 1947 the Lafayette Street Corporation published five issues of a Gumps comic; I’ve been able to find one which features this long adventure by Edison featuring Canadian dinosaurs; you read right, Canadian dinosaurs. I wish I could find the other four issues because this is wonderful stuff.

Our Father’s Day posting (coming to you late, thanks to a power outage), comes from the 1930 booklet Health in Pictures.

Doug Wheeler