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

I’ve mentioned many times on the I.T.C.H. blog (use the search box in the upper right if you don’t believe me) that the 1966 Batman TV show inspired more comics-oriented songs than anything else under the sun. But examining the cartune landscape in detail, I see that Spider-Man is running a close second! Wow! As with Batman, many of the songs are versions of the cartoon TV show theme, “Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can…” There are fast versions, slow versions, vocal versions, instrumental versions, jazz versions, punk rock versions, and more! While this accounts for a lot of the Spider-Man-related songs, there are plenty more from the Spider-Man movies. Of course, there are batloads of Batman movie themes as well, and Batman has the edge because there have been more Batman movies than Spider-Man movies (so far). If you take away the film soundtracks, I’d estimate that Batman and Spider-Man are pretty close in terms of number of song tributes. Since I’ve covered Batman so many times in the past, I’m going to balance that out with a bunch of Spider-Man music. Okay with you?

Click the image for a huge close-up

We begin with the first (and so far, only) Rockomic. Browsing the blogosphere I see that several others have beaten me to the punch on this one, so I’ll be brief.

Not based on a movie or a TV show, this is an album of Spider-Man songs along with a story. You can even kind of read along with the panels as you listen. A neat idea that didn’t quite take off, but still a historic artifact in the nexus of comics and music that we call home.

Click the picture for a giant-sized view.

Click the link below to hear the “hit” from this collectible LP. In the weeks to come we’ll bring you more Spider-Music to enjoy.

Amazing Spider-Man Rockomic - The Webspinners

As previously noted, in the 60′s a trio of titles, Fantastic, Pow and Smash, which mixed black and white reprints of Marvel Comics, the Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder comic strip and indigenous original material, both humorous and adventurous. As it happens so often the weaker selling titles were merged with the better selling ones until the last one standing was Smash.

This issue from 1968 is a particularly eclectic mix. First and foremost there’s pages reprint from Fantastic Four Annual #1 and The Mighty Thor #149, as well as a sequence from the Batman comic strip guest starring Superman (!). Amongst the indigenous material were the usual humor strips as well as some fairly conventional straight up adventures serials that could have appeared in any British boys comics of the era. I’ve already discussed the decidedly oddball Brian’s Brain so the only two really worth mentioning are The Spectre, who isn’t an undead guy working the supernatural menace side of the street ala our Spectre, but rather a ”guy believed dead” kind of crimefighter Though this one doesn’t even the figleaf of a domino mask to conceal his true identity of anyone. But lastly there’s Laird of the Apes.

There is absolutely nothing in the entire history of comics, British or American, like Laird of the Apes, Nothing.

When it comes to secret agents, there are none with as many secrets as Agent Coulson, the star of ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. For everything we know about this cool-under-pressure head of our favorite S.H.I.E.L.D. team, there are five things we don’t know!

Was he really dead? Did he actually recuperate in Tahiti? Is he an android or an LMD? (That’s Life Model Decoy for those of you who haven’t been paying attention.) Where does he get his hair cut? Does he wear his Bluetooth in his right ear or his left? So many questions, so few answers.

But tonight we find out the senses-shattering answers to these cataclysmic questions! This is The Big One!! You dare not miss it!!! The Earth-shaking answers will be revealed!!!! (I have to stop writing like Stan Lee now, I have run out of exclamation points.)

So tune in at 8:00 pm tonight to find out what really happened in Tahiti and whether Agent Coulson is really some kind of crazy Six-Million Dollar Man. (That’s a $40 Million Dollar Man, if we adjust for inflation.)

Meanwhile, click the link below and listen to a song all about Agent Coulson.

Super to Me (Agent Coulson) - The Doubleclicks

Here is another one of those oddball one-shots from the publisher Holyoke that featured a jumble of reprints from approximately one of one of their previous comics. This was how stories from Crash Comics Adventures #2…

…ended up as Holyoke One-Shot #7 with, for some reason, a random splash page from a Secret Agent Z-2 story with a white box with the word “Comis” slapped on it serving as a kind of a cover.

First up is a story featuring Strongman The Perfect Human, a Bruce Wayne type bored millionaire playboy secret identity who gained Superman 1939 type powers by years of studying a secret book of yogi, except Percy van Norton was such a languid fop he sported an honest to gosh monocle. In his brief career (Crash Comics Adventures #1-5) he pretty much specialized fighting international bad guys.

The Blue Streak was another international bad guy fighter, but one who worked without the benefit of superpowers.

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