McFadden’s Row of Flats
In honor (a day early) of St. Patrick’s Day, a pair of (non-Outcault authorized) Yellow Kid ephemera. Above, a rear cover advertisement, found on the back of an 1890s music sheet, featuring an obvious Yellow Kid rip-off. Below, the front & back covers plus interior from a flyer advertising one (of several) theatrical versions of [...]
Them As Is Because, 1911 NYC Women; Local Vanity Cartoon Books, Part 5
March is Women’s History Month, and while I’m still working under the handicap of a mid-Winter move (and the wrong winter to do it!) with all the material I use for my scanning & research still boxed up — resulting in the long running Theatrical Cartoons I’ve presented much of this year — I did [...]
Them As Is Because, 1911 NYC Vaudeville; Local Vanity Cartoon Books, Part 4
First, I’ve posted a day late this week, to allow the report of Dwayne McDuffie’s unexpected death to sit at the top of the blog yesterday, daytime. I’ll always remember McDuffie, who I hadn’t previously met, for his stopping me at the San Diego Con while he was in the middle of promoting his newly [...]
Bringing Up Father & Katzenjammer Kids Plays
This week in our ongoing Theatrical Cartoons series, a few examples of ads for plays based on popular comic strip series. Above, a flyer for Bringing Up Father in Gay New York, based on the newspaper strip by George McManus. Below, two more Bringing Up Father ads, this time in the form of ink blotters. [...]
The Romance of a Hammock; (or, How Daddy Lost His Head), 1882
Once again we merge our Theatrical Cartoons and Valentine’s Day/Romance series into one post, with the 1882 fold-out booklet, The Romance of a Hammock. This short tale of love-gone-wrong, was recited in comic verse by actor & producer Gus Williams (pictured on the cover in his role of John Mishler, the lead character in the play One of the Finest, by Joseph Bradford). The [...]
The Drummer’s Train Mash
For the month of February, we are continuing our series on Theatrical Cartoons, plus, for Valentine’s Day/Month, adding a focus on those involving Romance. Above is a five-card fold-out strip, advertising a performance of Sam’l of Posen; or, the Commercial Drummer, a highly successful 1881 play by George H. Jessop. On the reverse side of this fold-out, is [...]
Lookin’ ‘Em Over, Nashville 1920s Theatre Owners; Local Vanity Cartoon Books, Part 3
Continuing our series on theatrical cartoons, we return to Lookin’ ‘Em Over — a 1920s vanity cartoon book, wherein local business & community leaders appeared in city-based cartoon books in which they paid to be caricatured. Illustrated by Donald H. Grant, and published in Nashville, we showed a few sample pages from this book last [...]
B.F. Keith’s Theatre, 1911 Philadelphia Vaudeville
Next in our series on theatrical cartoons, we feature a small sampling of pages extracted from a souvenir booklet (given away? sold?) in 1911, in the B.F. Keith’s Philadelphia theatre. Benjamin Franklin Keith owned a chain of theatres in the northeast U.S., in which he featured a travelling circuit of vaudeville acts. Artist Charles Bell [...]
Jack Ward’s “The High-Kicking Kellys”, 1926 Vaudeville
Click on the above & below pictures, to open larger versions. This week — and for the next several weeks — I’m engaged in an activity which makes many book/comics collectors cringe, and question their sanity in having accumulated such a quantity of stuff (weighing one down, like the chains gathered by the ghost of [...]
Hood’s Sarsaparilla Saves Oscar Wilde’s Life & Romance…
Comic strip ad from 1883, artist unknown. Installment 3 of this week’s commercialization of romance… Doug Wheeler TheatricalCartoons ValentinesDay AdvertisingStrips
