Tigwissel Tuesdays #9: Subsequent Egg-Heads: Professors O. Howe Wise and I.B. Schmart
For this week’s Tigwissel Tuesdays, we present some more “modern” examples in the bespectacled scientist buffoon tradition, of which Tigwissel is a part. Professors O. Howe Wise and I.B. Schmart were regulars in artist Ed Payne’s long-running, 1899 to 1955, Boston Sunday Globe comic strip series, Billy the Boy Artist. Billy’s schtick was to make paintings so good, that the adults around him (including the pair of brainless, observation deficient professors) were constantly tricked into reacting as if what he put his brush to was real.
Click on any picture, to see an enlarged version.
The examples shown here (plus in a previous Billy posting — click here to see those), are from the Payne reprint collection, Billy the Boy Artist’s Book of Funny Pictures, sold in 1910 by C.M. Clark Publishing. The below strip involving a comet, is likely referencing the 1910 appearance of Halley’s Comet.
Below, a better than average kid-coloring job, by an anonymous would-be Billy, who at some point enhanced a number of the pages in my copy of Billy.
Next week, we get to the fifth published appearance of Professor Tigwissel!
— Doug
