Saturday, January 02, 2016

 

Herriman Saturday


Tuesday, October 27, 1908 -- The election is mere days away, and Herriman predicts rightly that the voters will once again give the snub to William Jennings Bryan. Not only is Bryan a bit of an anachronism at this point, but he is now identified with major actors in the Standard Oil scandal as well. 

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Friday, January 01, 2016

 

Walt McDougall's This is the Life: Chapter 6 Part 2




This is the Life!

by 

Walt McDougall


Chapter Six (Part 2) - WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG


I learned many things that first year about human nature—far more than ten years of engraving had taught me. One thing was the surprising and mortifying fact that even the greatest men, almost without exception, were sensitive about being caricatured. This petty foible of celebrities has been exposed to me so often that I long ago stopped trying to spare the victims' feelings, just like a doctor or a dentist. I think that during, say, thirty-five years I must have affronted thousands. To this day several hoary-headed actors in the Friar's Club scowl venomously at me, stirred by dim memories of a daily dramatic column which I ran for a lively year in the Evening Journal, brightened by sketches from life.

Not that all persons resent the liberty taken by a caricaturist. I myself, indeed, enjoy it. Yet many who, it would seem, should be above this weakness show tender feelings. The elder J. P. Morgan once asked Pulitzer by letter to restrain me from depicting his nose in such extravagant proportions, and to my surprise, for I had believed him to be animated by the bitterest of feelings against the great banker, J. P. advised me to moderate my zeal. I learned how small can be the great, the near-great and the would-be great.

One day I was crossing the park as Mayor Grace descended the steps of the City Hall. I had met him in a crowd of politicians several times but had not the least notion that he remembered me. However, I said:

"Good morning, Mr. Mayor," with the unctuous deference with which one should always greet the mayor of any city.

"Ah! Good morning!" he responded affably enough, and added: "One minute, Mr. McDougall. Will you please do me a favor?"

"Certainly, Mr. Mayor, of course," I gasped, detecting a hint of asperity in his tone.

“When you next make a picture of me, will you be good enough not to make my pants bag so damn much in the knees?"

Of course, I instantly promised to conform my frolicsome pencil to his ideas, but I never had the same respect afterward for that eminent merchant.

I had many other illustrations of the pettiness of great men. I had gone with Julius Chambers as his guest to a dinner given by the Lotos Club to Mark Twain, and after the banquet Clemens had held forth in his usual drawling manner for about two hours, standing with an elbow on the mantel as he talked to the members grouped about the room. When he had concluded, many of them gathered about Chambers, while Clemens still stood with one or two at the big fireplace, and in my youthful bumptiousness, recollecting a brand-new yarn, I told it to our little group. It was a genuine new-model pippin, a "wow," as John Drew and Otis Skinner call them, and it knocked them for a row of traffic-towers, as the banal vaudevillians say.

Mark Twain's resentment was instantly apparent. He moved quickly away, evidently greatly shocked, and for several years he took pains to let me see that he held a grudge against me for my presumptuous crabbing of his act.

A similar exhibition of a strange and inscrutable pettiness occurred at Lake Champlain when President McKinley was summering there. On leaving the hotel one morning with a railroad manager, I perceived a man on the opposite side of the road busied with a bicycle equipped with a novel kind of tire. I went over to his side and asked:

"Isn't that one of those new Vim tires?"

Glancing at me with scowling brows, he grunted incoherently, snatched up his bicycle hastily, and carried it across the road. I was amazed and greatly disconcerted, naturally.

"Did you see that exhibition of politeness?" I asked of the railroad manager.

"Sure. Do you know who that pickled cucumber is?" he replied.

"I don't, nor do I want to!"

"That's Rudyard Kipling. He lives across the lake yonder, and has biked over to call on President
McKinley."

I charitably concluded that the great writer was saving his politeness for that important occasion.

One more instance. At the banquet, before mentioned, given by Erastus Wiman, I was introduced by William Arkell to Thomas Nast, who had been my boyhood's ideal and whose fame as the destroyer of the Tweed Ring was as yet merely dimmed by time. I was rather overcome, and for an instant did not observe the animosity plainly perceptible on his countenance. He did not extend his hand, but in a loud angry tone snarled:

"I know you! You're the first man who ever swiped one of my ideas! Only last week you put a card on the coat-tail of somebody in one of your cartoons. That was my specialty in the B. Gratz Brown pictures, and nobody ever had the nerve to use it but you!"

I could see on the faces of all those about me a certain astonishment and disapproval, but as I did not then know of Nast's personal unpopularity and unpleasing manners, I could not know its cause. As he followed up his charge with other bitter remarks, I grew slightly angry. Knowing that many of his cartoons were really originated by a clever brother-in-law, with whom he had quarreled, with a resulting speedy fade-out, I saw in a flash the real man, a vain egoist. Looking him in the eyes, and with my left arm crooked for a short-arm jab in case he put his threats into action, I said in pretended contriteness:

"I'm sincerely sorry, Mr. Nast, that I, unwittingly, through pure carelessness, borrowed the only original idea you ever had, but I won't do it again, I assure you."

It was a grand, a glorious knockout, but as we were compelled to live in the same house and eat at the same table for a week in Montreal, it may be imagined that he made life for me as unpleasant as possible. Several years later I bought some of his cartoons for the Elevated Railroad Bulletins of the World and completely mollified the old man by telling him how Major Hopkins, our Commandant at the Military Academy, had caught me making sketches on the blackboard in school hours and how, instead of reproving me, he had announced to the class that "this boy will be another Thomas Nast."

Early in that first year I suggested to the head of an engraving concern which did our work that they utilize an arc light for photographing at night. The hint was promptly taken and they changed the name of the concern to the Electric Light Engraving Company. Yet, when its owner offered me a half-interest at a very moderate price, I was foolish enough to decline on the ground that I was too busy to go into business. Similar hard luck has often pursued me. My many charms had so endeared me to generous ex-Governor Roswell P. Flower that one day he informed me that he was carrying for me a block of Brooklyn Rapid Transit stock, and a few weeks later he announced that there was a profit of thirty thousand dollars to my credit. I was jubilant, but had too much Scotch blood in me to do any public rejoicing. He had similarly favored George Arnold, a bright, lovable reporter.

Returning from a fishing trip one day, I found Park Row seething with the news of the collapse of B. R. T. and Flower's disastrous downfall. I promptly sought the Times Cafe, the first-aid resort of all salaried journalists, and there I found poor Arnold amid a crowd of ribald mock-sympathizers, a human watering pot, wetting down the marble floor with bitter tears as he deplored the loss of his thirty thousand. Saddened but somewhat buoyed up by the consoling thought that had my hard luck been really acute, some of the sum might have been in cash, I resolved to avoid all Wall Street miracle-workers thereafter.

This pledge I kept until the dazzling Napoleon Ives rose to brief glory, when I occasionally borrowed his steam yacht and with Henry Guy Carleton, the playwright, chaperoned a party of simple chorus girls on a moonlight sail up the Hudson. Carleton once advised Ives, at the height of his spectacular career, to grab all the cash he could get hold of and sail for a South Sea Island, but the infatuated man scorned this good advice and in the end he walked the plank in his B.V.D.'s.

Twenty-third Street was considered uptown then, Union Square the center of town, and the Rialto was still along Fourteenth Street. Even then, however, the northward movement was well started. The Eden Musee, a musty, red-plush chamber of horrors, was in Twenty-third near Sixth Avenue; farther along was Koster and Bial's Music Hall, beneath the stage of which was a secret and select wine room haunted by all the sugar babies and stage-door Johns of that period. This place was the subject of sermons in Brooklyn and Newark, and horrified newspaper protests against its "living pictures" of nude voluptuous women (in warm woolen tights and very stiff, painful, but too often suggestive poses) 

were very frequent, but nothing was ever done about it. Koster and Bial girls often figured in the divorce courts. Some of them were merely beauties, but others, like Dottie Neville, Delia Fox and Jennie Joyce, were talented. The place was actually nothing more than a Western variety house gilded and carpeted.

The Eden Musee was ultra-respectable and then some; to be sure, comment was made now and then by old fogies who wanted their horrors unrelieved, that too many lovers seemed to select its crannies as spooning places. This was true. The lovers discovered that by clinching and holding still, most of the hick visitors took them for wax groups of Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton, Romeo and Juliet, or Paul and Virginia, and with pitying glances passed on. Sometimes even one of the blear-eyed attendants who had grown old and purblind down in the subterranean dungeons where the wienerwurst of the horrors were installed, would stop and absent-mindedly dust off a pair of these lovers without detecting that they were of the quick variety.

In the Musee was one real marvel. This was "Ajeeb, the Mechanical Chess-Player," within which was concealed Pillsbury, afterward the great chess champion. The figure was wrapped in mystery, and the belief that it was unbeatable was firmly established in the minds of all chess addicts. I remember Vice-President Hendricks gloating over the fact that he had almost won a game from this "purely mechanical" effigy.
I knew Pillsbury very well and occasionally wasted my time playing with Ajeeb in order to encourage shy hayseeds to come forward and get something to brag about afterward. On one of these occasions I had him cornered, with but two moves, either of which, properly met, meant defeat for him. I was somewhat excited, of course. His wife used to stand beside the figure, in receipt of custom, and to remind slow players that even in the Eden Musee time had a habit of passing. She sourly cautioned me twice as I pondered that the rule was "a move a minute," although her skinny husband hidden within the concealing wires of Ajeeb's abdominal cavity had devoted several minutes to the preceding move. In my exasperation I looked up into the eyes of the solemn Arabian figure and bleated out:

"See here, Pill, your wife keeps me down to the limit, but you took a nap over that last move. All I want is a square deal, and only a little of that!"

Instantly all the bystanders fled from the room, convinced that I had gone crazy, thus enabling Mrs. Pillsbury to reprove me sharply for risking an exposure of the secret. I lost the game, which I have always believed was owing to her interference. Pillsbury admitted that I had him guessing and showed me how I could have beaten him. Coming that near to winning from the unbeaten champion has always been something to be proud of.

About this period there came into being a modest, smoky little cafe in 36th Street just off Sixth Avenue, kept by one Nick Engel, where the food and the beer were perfect, and it attracted artists, writers and actors alike, but mainly actors. From its methods and customs, its atmosphere of good-fellowship and brains combined, came the first inspiration of the Lambs' Club, followed in time by the Green Room and the Friars', but none of them ever quite caught the real inherent quality of Engel's. There was a sociable homeliness about the place that must have clung to the famous old-time taverns we read about but have never seen.

Nick, a big-bodied, cheery chap—and when I last saw him three years ago in Florida he was the same—had the knack of keeping his cageful of lions at peace, although there was roaring now and then—once or twice a real ruckus—for actors are jealous creatures, strangely sensitive to praise of other actors. I had a portfolio for many years filled with sketches of notables, all gathered in Engel's; some were to be seen there only occasionally, others seemed to be always there at specific hours of the day or night. There I caught Booth and Barrett, William H. Crane, James A. Heme, Oliver Doud Byron, James O'Neil, Mark Twain, John Drew, Joseph Jefferson, Stuart Robson, Sol Smith Russell, Frank Mayo, Nat Goodwin, Henry E. Dixey, Maurice Barrymore, Wilton Mackay, Peter Daily—in sooth, these are only a few of dozens who frequented the place for years.

I heard there one afternoon what I have always considered the best bit of extemporaneous punning—if it were actually extempore, as claimed by the originators—that is on record. Mark Twain, Maurice Barrymore and Wilton Lackaye, the portrayer of Svengali in "Trilby," were seated at table, when Nat Goodwin strolled jauntily in and casually announced:

"I've just come from my publisher's. I have contracted to write my autobiography—"

"Damned interesting and very appropriate," interjected Barrymore, "with the accent on the buy!"

"No! No!" exclaimed Lackaye quickly; "with the accent on the oughto!"

It was on the way to Nick's, on the day when the news came out that Edna Goodrich had divorced Nat Goodwin, that Nat joined me and we walked down Sixth Avenue. After a few words he asked: "Seen the papers?" I nodded in silence, not being able to think of any proper comment under the circumstances.

"Good Heavens!" he exclaimed, pointing in mock excitement upward. "It's on the billboards already! Look!"

I gazed across the street, to read on a huge sign, in large red letters, the legend, "GOODRICH TIRES!"

At Engel's I heard of remarkable "spirit manifestations" in the home of one Caffrey, from an actor named Benson, who assured me that Mrs. Caffrey had summoned long-dead friends of his from the Beyond, which communications had convinced him that the lady could control spirits. I persuaded him to take me to Caffrey's that very night. There were about fifteen believers in spirit manifestation present, and among them I must have seemed to Mr. Caffrey the simplest yet introduced. He was a stocky man with a bald head, uneasy eyes and a large mustache. We sat in a ring, holding hands, while various and sundry slightly luminous forms appeared to float within the circle, introduced and welcomed with greetings as "Indian John" (whom I couldn't recognize), "Little Sunshine," "Doctor Edwards" and "Captain Barry," an alleged seaman with a rocked-in-the-cradle-of-the-deep voice.

During an intermission in the performance, my neighbor, an aged man and simple, told me that he and his wife were constant attendants and that they always conversed with the spirit of their dead daughter at each session. I eagerly conveyed to him my fervent desire to commune with my own dead sister Louise (still alive, aged eighty, at this date), and, as I fully expected, he managed to convey my desire to Caffrey, for, during the next series of manifestations, a filmy figure moved near me in the gloom and a faint voice breathed out "Louise" and vanished.

I expressed my gratification to my neighbor, and a little later was rewarded by the reappearance of the spirit form. I stood visibly trembling and held out my arms. Into them slipped a substantial warm form attired in a wisp of cheesecloth. My emotion was expressed by several fervent and unbrotherly kisses of the "Olga Nethersole" type, but they did not arouse the least suspicion in the alleged spook. Three times that evening did this hundred-and-forty-pound wraith return to my warm embrace. Very likely, it was an agreeable change from the senile goats who, in the main, comprised Mr. Caffrey's clientele. On leaving, I asked him for permission to bring an English friend on the following evening, and it was granted at once.

I took with me a reporter named Charles Hamilton, who was for years Hagenback's publicity man, a Briton of noble blood, who was unable to assume my look of absolute asininity and vacuity, not being a poker-player. He was greatly impressed by the cheerful and sociable manners of the dupes of the bald-headed Caffrey. He said that of these nuts I seemed the softest specimen. He had, he assured me, never seen quite such a bally ass. A few nights later I introduced another aid named Raisbeck, a paper-drummer. By this time my dear sister's spirit and I were on very agreeable terms indeed. I think it would have taken little to induce her to remain on earth permanently, provided I guaranteed the rent.

An old Newark picture-dealer named Campbell was one of the "regulars," and I induced Charles Meeker, a dentist friend, to accompany him on the night set for the exposé of Caffrey's fraudulent manifestations. Also, I informed Sheriff Hugh J. Grant, an old friend, one of whose deputies I was, all about my project. There were perhaps twenty-odd persons present on the night selected, my four assistants being scattered around the handholding circle, each with his duty assigned to him, but all alike quite dubious of the success of my plan, based as it was on human nature only, in other words, the amorous yearnings of my all-too-fleshly "spirit."

When she was folded tightly in my loving arms for the second time that evening, I hissed loudly. At this, the signal, Hamilton turned up the gas, revealing the scantily clad form of Caffrey's maid-of-all-work struggling desperately to escape. Caffrey leaped for a revolver hidden behind a picture on the mantel, but Raisbeck tapped him one and he took the count. Hamilton and others, seeing that the medium, Mrs. Caffrey, was not in the cabinet bound hand and foot, as specified in the bond, ran into the rear room to find her, completely nude, crawling under a bed.

I handed my now relaxed captive over to the old man and woman whose dead daughter she had been impersonating all winter, with a short sarcastic sentence, and joined the others in the rear room. I heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs from a restaurant which Caffrey conducted in the basement, and, opening the door, confronted five or six men, waiters whom he relied upon for just such emergencies. I drew my gun, and the foremost man recoiled upon the rest and they all fell downstairs as one man and made a swift get-away. All of the believers were leaving in great excitement, some feebly protesting, others indignant and disgusted with Spiritualism. One of them took my overcoat, but returned it next day. Hugh Grant told me that he was sitting on the front stoop when they began to hurry out, but, not wishing to be connected with the proceeding, left abruptly.

Caffrey, his wife and the maid, thoroughly scared, all confessed to the imposture, which confession was heard by several of their dupes, and they actually signed the document. We took away a few luminous gimcracks used in producing spiritual effects as illustrative matter for the story which was published, a page of it, in the World on the following Sunday.

This high-handed exposure of a cheap crook aroused among all the spook-believers everywhere many divergent expressions of opinion, and for some time made me the target of attacks by various Spiritualist bodies in meeting assembled. It also produced a new dogma that was found to be very convenient ever afterward, to the effect that when a spirit is seized during its "manifestation" it instantly resolves itself into the form of the medium or some other person! Needless to say, Caffrey resumed business before long under this novel interpretation of spookish methods, and continued to successfully summon Indian John, Little Sunshine and the rest for a long time to the complete satisfaction of a group among whom were several who were present at his exposure and heard his confession.

One of the Spiritualist "seekers" who loudly applauded my action was an aged man named Stillman, who never tired of condemning all so-called manifestations. He was a learned, competent, well-balanced attorney. He bequeathed me a number of books on magic, phallic worship, psychology and archaeology upon his decease. One day, after deploring the credulity and fatuity of these believers in manifestation, he concluded by saying:

"It is all due to the fact that men demand actual visible evidence of the unknown, and these tricksters supply them and always will as long as the demand endures. Now, spirit-rapping is another thing entirely. That I believe in, explicitly, but that cannot be faked!"

It came to me with a sort of shock that Belief is something that has no relation whatever to Reality, and from that day I have never concerned myself with spirits of any sort.

[ END OF CHAPTER 6 PART 2 ]

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Thursday, December 31, 2015

 

Obscurity of the Day: Mrs. Trubble



T.E. Powers was one of the mainstays in the Hearst bullpen in the first quarter of the 20th century. His weekday cartoons, which graced the New York Evening Journal from 1903 until at least 1924, was one of those untitled affairs that had about a bajillion different running subtitles during its long life.

One of Powers' continuing series concerned a beautiful and sophisticated widow named Mrs. Trubble. Powers couldn't really draw attractive women all that convincingly, so you'll have to take my word for it that Mrs. Trubble was supposed to be quite the bit of eye candy.

In the weekday cartoons her role was generally to show how men react very differently to the gorgeous Mrs. Trubble compared to their wives. The typical cartoon has a wife begging her husband to take her out to dinner, say, and him spurning her. Then Mrs. Trubble arrives and suggests they all go out to dinner, and hubby all of a sudden thinks its the grandest idea in the world. This sort of scenario was played out in dozens, maybe hundreds, of different ways over the years.

In 1922 when the New York Journal's Sunday section expanded, Powers was put on the hook to fill up a page. From among his many characters and series, Powers chose Mrs. Trubble to get the color treatment. In the Sunday version, Mrs. Trubble was given a couple of steady suitors, as you can see above, but the plot pretty much remained the same -- men will consistently make asses out of themselves around a curvaceous belle like Mrs. Trubble. The series lasted from March 18 to December 2 1922.

Samples above courtesy of Cole Johnson.

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Wednesday, December 30, 2015

 

Magazine Cover Comics: Guests We Never Invite Again



We've covered a lot of Fish's great American Weekly cover series, and here's yet another. Guests We Never Invite Again ran from May 21 1937 to at least July 4 of that year (I have a long gap in my American Weekly records, so it could have run until as late as September).

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Tuesday, December 29, 2015

 

Ink-Slinger Profiles by Alex Jay: C.D. Vormelker


1925

Clifford David Vormelker was born in Cleveland, Ohio on July, 22, 1906, according to the Ohio, Births and Christenings Index at Ancestry.com. His parents were Julius Vormelker and Amy Hippler.

In the 1910 U.S. Federal Census, Vormelker was the youngest of four children whose parents were German emigrants. The father was a machine operator. The family lived at 1449 East 92nd Street NE in Cleveland.

The 1920 census recorded Vormelker at 1517 80 Place in Cleveland. He attended East High School. The 1922 school yearbook, Mnemonic, said he was a member of the Wistgoma Club. In September 1924, he was the secretary-treasurer of the YMCA Hi-Y Club. Vormelker was in the cast of the school’s musical comedy, College Days, which was presented January 1925. Vormelker graduated February 1925.




1925 Mnemonic

A 1926 city directory said Vormelker lived with his parents and worked as a clerk. According to Who's Who in Library Service (1943), Vormelker won the First Rupert Hughes Poetry Prize in 1929.

In 1930 the Vormelker family remained at the same address. Vormelker's sister, Rosa, was a librarian at the public library. The household included a lodger, Milfred Moor, also a librarian at the public library. Vormelker, who was unemployed at the time, would become a librarian, too.

According to Who’s Who in Library Service, Vormelker received his BA at Western Reserve University (WRU) in Cleveland. In 1933, he obtained his BS in Library Science WRU. He found work as a script man at the United Electrical Recording Company in Hollywood, California, from June to October 1933. He returned to Cleveland and found work as a sales manager at Arco Shuffleboard through 1934. In 1935 Vormelker was the librarian and a staff writer at Central Press Association. The same year he was assistant at Hatch Library, WRU. Along the way he married Helen Elinor Brown. The couple made their home at 1385 West 84th Street in Cleveland.


American Newspaper Comics (2012) said Vormelker wrote Dickens’ Christmas Carol which was drawn by Alfred J. Buescher, the Central Press Association art director. Their strip ran from November 29 to December 25, 1937. The following year for King Features, Vormelker wrote Dickens The Chimes—A New Year’s Fantasy, which was illustrated by fellow Clevelander, William Sherb. The strip appeared from December 19 to 31, 1938. 
A Christmas Fantasy appeared in December 1939 and was drawn by Sherb. The writing was credited to David Orme who was Vormelker’s nom de plume. The Orme name appeared on many Central Press items.
 Nevada State Journal 11/10/1937


Nevada State Journal 5/30/1942

A listing for Vormelker was published in the 1940 Variety Radio Directory: Central Press Association. Clifford D. Vormelker (also librarian, staff writer). On page 250 of the book, Special Library Resources (1941), was the following listing:
Central Press Association - Reference Department Est. 1912
1435 E. 12th St., Cleveland, Ohio
Head: C. David Vormelker, Librarian
Responsible to: Managing Editor
Staff: 2
Professional: 1
Serves: Own organization
Interlibrary Loan Privileges: None
Reproducing Facilities: None
Classification System: None
On June 2, 1941 Vormelker enlisted in the Army. His civil occupation was in the category: authors, editors, and reporters.

On June 22, 1943 the Wartime Conference of Special Libraries Association, in New York City, acknowledged their members who were serving in the armed forces including Sgt. Clifford Vormelker, Army Air Corps. The convention was reported on page 195 of Special Libraries, Volume 34, Number 6, 1943.

Vormelker passed away on December 30, 1974 in East Cleveland. The Cleveland Plain Dealer (Ohio) published a death notice the following day.

Clifford David Vormelker, dearest beloved husband of Helen (nee Brown), dear father of Joel D., brother of Rose, Howard and Philip, December 30, 1974. Services at Maher-Melbourne Funeral Home, 4274 Mayfield Rd. (at Belvoir) South Euclid. Friday at 1:30 P,M, The family will receive friends 7–9 P.M. Wednesday and 2–4 and 7–9 P.M. Thursday.
Vormelker was buried in Lake View Cemetery.

—Alex Jay

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Monday, December 28, 2015

 

Obscurity of the Day: Two Black Crows



In the heyday of vaudeville there were quite a few blackface comedy acts making the circuit. One of the most popular was Moran and Mack, also known as the Two Black Crows. The act began in the 1910s and was popular enough to make records that sold very well (at least I often see them in collections of 78s that I come across).

The Two Black Crows became even more well-known when they signed on to do a weekly radio show in 1928. It is unclear to me whether they debuted in that medium before or after Amos 'n' Andy, but the duos both got on the airwaves within months of each other. Oddly, both shows were marketed with the aid of a comic strip. The Amos 'n' Andy comic strip is quite rare, but the Two Black Crows strip really takes the crown, as it seems to have possibly appeared for most if not all of its run only in Hearst's New York Daily Mirror.

Jeffrey Lindenblatt reports that the strip debuted in the Mirror on October 29 1928, and if the samples above (provided by Cole Johnson) are representative, the strip told an ongoing story, perhaps related to the radio show's story or maybe not. Obviously the crows' faces were provided by photos, and the rest was drawn by an uncredited cartoonist. Granted these two samples don't exactly give us a lot of meat to work with, but the style does look rather familiar. Anyone care to hazard a guess at the Hearst bullpenner who might be at the controls?

In 1929 things get a little murky. According to Lindenblatt's index of the Mirror, a Bell Syndicate stamp began to appear on the strip sometime in early 1929, and then the strip changed to a text feature on March 6. Well, I can certainly vouch for Bell Syndicate selling that text feature, as it can be found in a good selection of papers. But I have that text feature showing up elsewhere well before March 6, in fact it has been found as early as October 29 1928, the exact same date the strip began:




which makes me wonder whether Bell actually had anything to do with the comic strip version, or if the terms of their contract with Two Black Crows stated that they would be the copyright holder of all newspaper material related to the radio show. Perhaps by contractual obligation the strip had to bear their copyright, even though it was produced by and ran only in the Mirror. Until we find the comic strip running somewhere besides the Mirror, that's the story that I'm going with.

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As far as I know, Moran and Mack's act was straight-up vaudeville, whereas Gosden and Correll's Amos 'n' Andy (which was based on their earlier program, SAM 'N' HENRY) was more of a comic serial (indeed, WGN originally wanted Gosden and Correll to do an audio adaption of Sidney Smith's THE GUMPS; the duo balked, feeling they didn't know enough about married life to do the show justice, so they pitched Sam 'n' Henry instead.)

I don't know who did the art on The Two Black Crows' strip, but calling it "amateurish" is giving it way too much credit...it actually makes the work on the short-lived A&A strip look polished by comparison; hell it makes them art in the Tijuana Bible version of Amos n Andy look good!!
 
Hello Allen-
If I might venture a guess as to the mystery ink spiller would be, how about Ben Batsford?
I know Mack and Moran well, or as well as I want to. Cole had a huge collection of prewar 78s, which included the works of the duo, who recorded their best known patter routines over the course of several sets of 10" Columbias, of about 1926 vintage.
Nobody now living saw their act as Broadway headliners, but most of their films still exist, many of which I have been witness to. The stage routine in their first feature film, "Why Bring That Up?"(1929) was well done and one can see why they were stars. The rest of that film and subsequent outings are really bad to worse. If you go to horror movies to make you skin crawl, take out "Hypnotized" or their "Hot Hoofs" instead.
 
Hi Mark --
Thanks for the suggestion. Yeah, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was Ben Batsford. In order for me to tell his style with any degree of certainty, I need some of those distinctive BB faces, but there's certainly nothing here that points me in a different direction.

--Allan
 
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Sunday, December 27, 2015

 

Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics


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What a cool memoir. Glad to have know Jim for the last nearly 40 years!
 
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