Deluxe New Screwball Comics Retrospective Coming Soon!

Screwball! The Cartoonists Who Made the Funnies Funny is in the works! It will be a large, full-color hardcover art book offering around 275 pages resplendent with rare comics, art, photos and original research. I've got the fantods, since this is my first book and I really hope folks like it!

The story of screwball comics in America is a large topic, more sprawling than one book can reasonably encompass if one wishes to present satisfying chunks of reprints. Foo this reason, I decided, after much deliberation, to narrow the focus of this book on American newspaper comics up to about 1950.

The publisher will be The Library of American Comics/IDW. Eisner-Award winner Dean Mullany will design and edit the book, with Bruce Canwell and Lorraine Turner providing their expertise, as well. 

We are creating a retrospective that will be broad and deep. There will be 15 chapters, each one focusing on a particular cartoonist or comic strip with an in-depth text essay and an assortment of carefully curated strips, art, and photos. 

As of this writing, and subject to change, here is the list of chapters, in the order they will appear:

Frederick Opper
Eugene "Zim" Zimmerman
Walter R. Bradford
Clare Victor "Dwig" Dwiggins
Gus Mager
George Herriman's Stumble Inn
Rube Goldberg
Walter Hoban
E.C. Segar
Milt Gross
Gene Ahern
George Swanson
Ving Fuller
Bill Holman
Boody Rogers' Sparky Watts

A Toothful Espisode of W.R. Bradford's John Dubbalong (1911)

Yesterday, I had a tooth pulled. I confess, I was quite brave. I went in with nary a protest, and uttered only two groans at the procedure's most intense moments. Yes, friends, my bravery was eclipsed only by the year of avoidance I invested before so courageously arranging myself into the dentist's chair. To celebrate both my hour of bravery and my year of cowardice, I share in this post with you an episode of the daily comic strip John Dubbalong, by screwball master W.R. Bradford.

Walter Bradford worked in newspaper comics for roughly the first quarter of the twentieth century, passing away in June of 1925 at age 53. His thousands of forgotten comics display a remarkable flair for screwball comedy, embracing anarchy, obsession, and insanity. In many ways, his stuff is as "out there" as Milt Gross, and in some ways a great deal screwier. His drawing style is, at first look, rather crude, but it is actually part of a now-forgotten school of comics that George Beckenbaugh (who worked under the name "Percy Winterbottom") in which the crudeness of the drawing is part of the joke.

W.R. Bradford in a 1918 "selfie" - a staged scene called "The Fire,"
which he posed in and took with an automatic timer.

Even though Allan Holtz's excellent resource, American Newspaper Comics: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide lists 33 comic strips by W.R. Bradford, John Dubbalong is not one of them. As near as I can tell, the strip ran 1-2 times a week from 1911 to 1914. The episodes were very dense, with lots happening in them. At another post, I'll share more of this rich comic strip.

JINGLING JOHNSON by W.R. Bradford (August 29, 1909)

For now, here's a small bite of John Dubbalong. Note the unusually dense story composition, with five scenes in 10 panels (eleven if you count the panel-within-a-panel). The last scene shows dental instruments madly dancing and singing an original song. Bradford was fond of writing silly verse, and built one of his most popular strips, Jingling Johnson around it (Johnson was a self-caricature of Bradford). Mysteriously, we are told the song is sung by a "quartette" of dental tools, but only three are shown -- either a sign of the haste with which the strip was composed, or another joke.

JOHN DUBBALONG by W.R. Bradford (November 11, 1911)

How about that 8th panel, with the Winsor McCay style distortion?

Given Bradford's status as an early master of screwball comics, and the subject matter of this particular example, it would not be inaccurate to say that this posting may qualify as a true "roots" of screwball comics entry -- although it might coax further groans to do so.

- Paul Tumey

P.S.: If you haven't already, be sure to find the accompanying Facebook group to the blog, The Masters of Screwball Comics, and send me a request to join. Lots of cool screwball comics and other neat stuff posted there every day that never makes it to this blog!

What Is Art? - A Milt Gross Count Screwloose From 1931 Frames The Question

When you ask yourself questions like "what is art," you are probably setting out on the path that leads to the fruitcake factory. Enuff books and articles have been published on this subject to fill several buildings -- and it would appear that we humans are no closer to an answer we can all agree on than we are to finding a use for screen doors on submarines.

Are comics art? I think so -- some comics, at least. The funny thing is that many comics creators (and I'm talking sequential narratives, here) appear to have been aware that their fellow humans regarded their hard work as innately inferior to the stuff that wound up on the walls in galleries. For many -- even today -- reading comics isn't actually reading -- and comics are associated with illiteracy and simple-mindedness. When someone wants to say something is shallow, they say it's "a comic book treatment." These commentators are only betraying their own ignorance -- for comics are an art form that combines words and image into a highly effective language that may be easy to grasp, but is anything but simple to create.

Many comics creators over the decades have used society's disapproval as grist for their mill. Here's a Rube Goldberg cartoon, circa 1915, in which he suggests the best way to view the new abstract and surreal art appearing in galleries and museums.

Rube Goldberg on modern art - circa 1915
(Photograph of original art)

Milt Gross -- who in many ways is the direct artistic and screwball descendant of Goldberg -- also made sport of the idea of art many times. In a 1931 Count Screwloose Sunday page, Milt Gross dissects for us the mechanics behind the social value of art. In this case, a bum who attempts to get a drink in a bar by reciting a poem receives the comic blow of a pool table on the head. When the same bearded bohemian beggar appears at a society ball clad in his hospital sheet, the wealthy party-goers celebrate his "art." The entire absurd -- but all too true -- situation is witnessed by Count Screwloose:

Count Screwloose by Milt Gross - February 22, 1931

The poem the beggar-poet recites is a very popular poem written in the 1830s entitled Abou Ben Adhem. The author, (James Henry) Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) was an English poet, essayist, and critic -- and a contemporary of Shelly's. His poem -- a depiction of a Muslim written by a Christian that expresses, in the opinions of some, basic Jewish values was a popular hit. Here's the entire text:

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)

Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,

And saw, within the moonlight in his room,

Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,

An angel writing in a book of gold:—

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,

And to the presence in the room he said,

"What writest thou?"—The vision raised its head,

And with a look made of all sweet accord,

Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."

"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"

Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,

But cheerly still; and said, "I pray thee, then,

Write me as one that loves his fellow men."

The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night

It came again with a great wakening light,

And showed the names whom love of God had blest,

And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.

Gross' inclusion of Hunt's poem, a chestnut by the 1930s, carries an ironic comment on the actions of his characters in the strip -- neither the pool hall ruffians not the society folks actually show any love at all for the beggar himself. Of course, as Sigmund Freud observed, nothing is less funny than analyses of jokes -- so I'll stop here and encourage my readers to simply dig those great, loose drawings in the strip above.

As to the issue of cartoons, art, and such -- I offer this from the great cartoonist Art Young (1866-1943):

"Some day painting will be glorified cartooning... The painter-cartoonist of the future will be an apostle of big ideas... That he will be an artist of pigment and form is, of course, important; but to be a thinking man of vision, helpfulness and courage, will be more important." (from On My Way by Art Young, 1928)

Artfully Yours,

Screwball Paul

"I Seen Yo' Ad In Dep Paper" - SAM and His Laugh (1905-06): Joyously Subversive

One of my favorite screwball artists is James "Jimmy" Swinnerton (1875-1974). 

Born in Eureka, California. In 1892, Swinnerton began his career as a staff cartoonist for Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, where he produced a popular weekly cartoon, The Little Bears (1893-1897). He moved to New York in 1896 to work for Hearst’s Journal-American, where he created Mount Ararat (1901-1904), Mister Jack (1903-1906), and his longest-running strip, Little Jimmy (1904-1958). In 1906,

James Swinnerton contemplates
his self-portrait in 1930

Swinnerton was diagnosed with a fatal case of tuberculosis. His friend and publisher, William Randolph Hearst, sent him to Colton, California, where he recovered and fell in love with the American desert. He became a noted landscape painter and died in Palm Springs, at the age of 98.

The nuttiest of Swinnerton’s early comics is Sam and His Laugh (1905-1906) an infectious series featuring a job-seeking black man who gleefully laughs at the hypocrisy and pomp of society.  While Sam is drawn in the typical black man stereotype common in early 20^th century pop culture, it’s clear that Swinnerton sides with him as an instinctive hero of disruption who tears down the walls of social order with a bellylaugh – exactly what humor comics are all about.  

What follows are a few examples of this remarkable strip which art spiegelman has observed works like a laughing record-- 78s  popular in the early 20th century that contained nothing but the sound of someone laughing. It was impossible not to listen to these records without succumbing to laughter. Similarly, it is well nigh impossible to read Swinnerton's SAM comics without smiling.

In this strip, Sam starts out with his customary statement: "I seen yo' ad in dep paper." He finds much joy and amusement in the unintentional truism embedded in a stuffy church hymn.

SAM by Jimmy Swinnerton - 1905
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

Sam tries his hand as a waiter. Maybe if he was in a diner, he could keep a straight face, but the pretension of the fancy French menu does him in...

The above comic came from the one and only book collection of Sam strips, a hardcover, 48-page color book published in 1906 by the Hearst outfit (one of several collections they published of their popular comics):

Here is the waiter SAM strip from above, as it was published in the newspaper on March 12, 1905:

Sam  by James Swinnerton - March 12, 1905

In this next strip, Sam loses it over a mis-matched couple's adoration, overheard on a subway train. The man in this strip looks a lot like a Milt Gross character:

SAM by Swinnerton - May 21, 1905

In another train strip, Swinnerton pulls out all the stops and shows us Sam's wife and children -- all of whom share his keen sense of absurdity:

SAM by Swinnerton - November 19, 1905
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

Though forgotten today, Sam was popular in his time. He gloriously adorned the cover of a 1905 sheet music folio:

You can listen to a 1905 recording of this remarkable song, "There's A Dark man Coming With A Bundle" here:



I'll leave you with one last SAM, which features a portrait of Swinnerton's colleague, cartoonist Rudolph Dirks, who created the hit comic "The Katzenjammer Kids." Note in the last panel that Dirks signed the strip with Swinnerton -- indicating this strip was a "jam."

I am pleased to note that the astounding new book, Society Is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip 1895-1915 includes a SAM strip (the very first one!), as well as several other incredible color comics pages by Swinnerton (including more jam pages!). These are all printed in their HUGE original size. You can learn more about this book, which includes over 150 stunning comics, great essays (I wrote one), and lots more here.

Wow!,
Paul Tumey

New Sunday Press Extravaganza Unveiled at Comic-Con 2013

Sunday Press publisher, editor, and comics historian Peter Maresca has unveiled his wondrous new creation, SOCIETY IS NIX - GLEEFUL ANARCHY AT THE DAWN OF THE AMERICAN COMIC STRIP 1895-1915, at the 2013 San Diego Comics Convention.

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Now available to buy from Sunday Press! Click here to learn more!
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Visitors to the convention can peruse this massive new collection of forgotten masterpieces. Maresca's book collects over 150 color Sunday comics in their original large and impressive dimensions. The comics are from over 50 artists, many of whom you have likely never heard of, but whose work and artistry is as good as the names you are likely to know from this era. This volume is nothing less than a bolt of polychromatic lightning from the past -- a revelation.

In the first 20 years of American newspaper comics, something quite remarkable happened -- cartoonists had extraordinary freedom to create. They could have a new idea in the morning, and see it in print within 24 hours. The anarchy Maresca refers to in his title is apparent in both the rapidly changing forms of comics, and in the thinly veiled attacks on social order that many cartoonists led during this time. The thing to realize is that comics weren't expected to have long runs. Today, it's the norm for a comic strip to run for years, sometimes decades. In the 1900s, cartoonists did something different every day.

Sunday Press publisher extraordinaire Peter Maresca
at an earlier San Diego Comic-Con. His other books include
impressive collections of Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay,
and Krazy Kat by George Herriman.

The roots of screwball humor stretch to this work. There's an intoxicating immediacy and power to comics from this time. As modern readers, we miss it, mostly. Our eyes are not trained, our minds not in synch with this earlier, weirder time. The pacing of the comics is too dense, too slow, and moves to visual melodies that are awkwardly new to us. Consider this Raymond Crawford Ewer page from 1912 -- not in the book (I don't want to spoil any surprises for you), but chosen from my own collection:

The sort of comics you'll find in Society Is Nix:
Slim Jim by Raymond Crawford Ewer - January 27, 1912
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

As with any art of depth, time is required, and you must strive to meet the work. When you can accomplish this, the results are extremely rewarding. Society Is Nix reveals to us what comics once were, and could be -- something that modern students of this work such as art spiegelman, Chris Ware, Robert Crumb, David Lasky, Frank Young, and Seth know. And yet, there is so much more to discover and learn -- as Maresca's book shows us.

As with Nix's sister Sunday Press book, Forgotten Fantasy, this book also presents a wealth of fascinating original essays about early American comic strips by such noted historians as Peter Maresca, Thierry Smolderen, Richard Samuel West, R.C. Harvey, Brian Walker, Bill Kartalopoulos, David Gerstein, Alfredo Castelli, and Paul Tumey (blush). I was also honored to be invited to be a contributing editor, researching and writing mini-biographies of the 50 or so artists represented in the book.

You can see some of the art in the book, and read samples from the various essays at the Sunday Press site here.

And here's the opening paragraph from my essay, "Mule Kicks: American Screwball Comics Commenced in the Earliest Sunday Funnies" -

A nutty mule named Maud kicks the bejeezus out of everything with democratic chaos, offering both slapstick laughs and a sly attack on conventional society. Frederick Burr Opper’s 1904-1907 Sunday comic And Her Name Was Maud is just one of the dozens of notable early anarchic comic strips that kick-started a type of comedy called screwball—a form of condensed, surreal, escalating verbal-visual exaggeration that picked up steam in the 1920s and peaked mid-century with the Marx Brothers, Rube Goldberg, W. C. Fields, Milt Gross, Bill Holman, Tex Avery, Jack Cole, Spike Jones, Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad and Ernie Kovacs.

The book, a national treasure, will be on sale in late August or early November.  Until then, I hope you enjoy this sneak peek .

This is the sort of book that the preservers and celebrators of our culture should be doing, but aren't. Thank God, then, for Peter Maresca. Please give Sunday Press your attention and support.

++++



On another note, I'd like to send out a celebratory CONGRATULATIONS!!! to my friends Frank M. Young and David Lasky for winning a 2013 Eisner Award for their graphic novel, The Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song. The book won an award for "Best Reality-Based Work." The winners of the 2013 Eisner Awards were announced July 19, 2013. Frank was also up for an Eisner for Best Writer. That award went to Brian K. Vaughn. Be sure to check out Frank's blogs:

Stanley Stories (An exploration of the work of John Stanley)
Supervised By Fred Avery: Tex Avery's Warner Brothers Cartoons
Comic Book Attic (co-authored with me)

And check out David Lasky's blog:
http://dlasky.livejournal.com/

And you can read many fascinating behind the scenes postings about the making of this Eisner Award winner at Carter Family Comics: Don't Forget This Blog!

I'm very happy for Frank and David. I was around when they started the project. In fact, they worked on the book for several months in my office. It was fascinating to see them sifting through piles of books, papers, recordings and other source material (the book is meticulously researched). I was honored to see the first pages penciled and to read early versions of the book. What was supposed to be a project that would a year of work for the two men wound up taking four years from each. Many sacrifices and hardships were endured to get through the process of creating the book.

Currently, Amazon has this book available for $10 -- a huge bargain.

Here's a photo of the title page of my copy, with inscriptions from the authors:

May you stay Forever Young,
Paul Tumey

Before Bob Clampett and Will Elder, There Was The Comic Anarchy of H.C. Greening

I love this guy. H.C. (Harry Cornell) Greening -- forgotten today -- was a screwball master of the first order. He wrote and drew numerous short-lived comic strips and Sunday features from about 1900-1920. He also did a slew of magazine cartoons and illustrations.

Greening could draw funny. He seemed to be able to get inside his character's heads and depict their screwball actions with total sincerity. They have no idea they are comic  drawings -- they think they are real, and that their endeavors are serious. And yet, when Greening draws, for example, a burglar fleeing a cop, the look of sheer focus and all-out pedal-to-the-metal hustle in the crook's face and body language is pure screwball.

Another interesting aspect to Greening's work is that his sensibility is subversive and his metier is anarchy. One of the things I admire most about his work is that it's edgy -- often pushing the boundaries of propriety and good taste. His drawing style is disarming --  he could do cute, cherub children as well as any children's book illustrator of the day. You glance at his work and you expect treacle -- you read it and you get comics that are made with the same sensibility of Plastic Man in the 1940s, Mad in the 1950s, and American Underground comics of the 1960's.

I first discovered Greening while sifting through a pile of hundreds of crumbling old comics. I had never heard of him before (and -- as yet -- know little about him or work, yet) -- but when I first encountered an example of his 1909-1910 comic, The Woo Woo Bird, I was hooked.

The premise of the Woo Woo Bird is simple: a cute talking bird (who usually announces himself: "I'm the Woo Woo Bird")suggests actions to people (usually children) that seem like a good idea, but when they do them, disaster incurs. The strips usually end with the enraged victim on their way to find and kill the Woo Woo Bird. One can only admire the truly awesome skill of the prankster bird. In this example, he teaches a young girl how to spell:

The Woo Woo Bird by H.C. Greening - April 11, 1909
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

It seems to me that there is some sort of cultural, if not direct, lineage from the Woo Woo Bird to Bob Clampett's Daffy Duck to Woody Woodpecker (who resembles the Woo Woo Bird). In any case, there's a guilty pleasure in the way The Woo Woo Bird laughs at the gullibility of not-so-smart children. Adults are also the prey of the "mischevious" Woo Woo Bird -- to the point where the man in the following strip is literally driven mad.

The Woo Woo Bird by H.C. Greening - April 25, 1909
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

According to Allan Holtz's American Newspaper Comics: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide (University of Michigan, 2012), The Woo Woo Bird ran for just 3 months in early 1909. However, the Barnacle Press folks, those devoted rescuers of great old comics, have on their website some Woo Woo Birds they date from 1910. You can find 13 of these gems here -- all wonderful, wacky reading.

Allan Holtz has more on H.C Greening at his Stripper's Guide site here. In this page, Allan Hotlz shares a rare scan of a 1904 Greening comic called Jocko and Jack that is a precursor to The Woo Woo Bird, with a malicious, non-talking monkey creating the havoc.

Greening's biggest success was a full-page Sunday comic called Percy - Brains He Has Nix that ran from October 1, 1911 to January 12, 1913. This comic revolved around the chaos created by a life-size "mechanism man" named Percy. Time Magazine, in a 1930 article, described the premise of the strip:

"Cartoonist Harry Cornel Greening equipped his creature with a row of buttons down the back which, when pushed, set Percy to his tasks. Only trouble—and chief source of comedy—was that, being brainless as well as tireless, Percy would keep on doing whatever he started until someone pushed another of his buttons. "

You can find 36 of Greening's Percy pages, extracted from black and white microfilm, at Barnacle Press' site here.

The Glen Bray studio made at least one Percy cartoon in 1916. Greening himself, in a 1937 letter to author Ida Tarbell, briefly recapped his career and singled out Percy as a highlight.

Harry's cartoons push the boundaries of good taste -- as in his cartoon, "From the Pupville Press," in which a sausage maker laconically, and somewhat horrifically comments on the contents of his product:

In another cartoon, a young pup sees a hot-dog shaped balloon and thinks it's a dog-angel -- the joke being that hot dogs are where stray canines wind up:

In a Thanksgiving-themed cartoon called "Hard Luck," Greening wickedly delivers a gag panel that is, in effect, a hit-and-run assault on good taste (although the turkey might taste good):

To be fair, the decade of the 1900s recycled out-of-control automobile cartoons, getting years of mileage from the general citizen's wariness of those horseless carriages. Surely this example, with its final stage direction of "(Expires.)" is one of the most off-color.

Another thing I admire about Greening's work is that he is just such a dad-blamed good artist, manipulating light and shadow, pen-stroked textures, and perfect facial and body expressions. On top of all that, his ability to render virtually anything in any scene allowed his to work with a broad visual canvas. In his cartoon "Submarine Sadness" Greening dives for a virtuoso presentation of an undersea diver. The fish have the same manic cuteness as The Woo Woo Bird.

In "Those Mountain Resort Girls," Greening builds a gag from a cliff-hanger situation.

In "Illustrated Expression," he creates a man out of straw (that is, a "straw man").

In his cartoon, "After the Thanksgiving Meal," Greening expertly renders the interior of wealthy home. Check out that snobby butler -- and the snappy writing!

In "The Elopement Cinched," Greening takes a cue from fellow cartoonist Zim, who often set his scenes in pre-Alley Oop prehistoric times. Flora, fauna, primitives, socialites... Greening's work displays an astonishing range.

Or this intriguing editorial cartoon:

More than his variety and expertise, and more than his screwball-anarchic sensibility, Greening also had a flair for innovation. Percy, his comic strip about a crazy robot was novel and innovative for 1911.  Perhaps the most interesting of Greening's work that I've seen, however, is his wordless cartoons -- what he called "moving pictures on paper." Years before this was common, Greening broke a single page into a grid of 18 small panels and played with the time signatures of the strips. In some cases a strip of panels showed incremental action, comically portraying "freeze-frame" moments of panic and chaos. The effect is similar to slow motion in a movie. In other strips, Greening jump cuts the scene with startling humorous effect. This is D.W. Griffith on paper!

The caption for "The Pie-ous Tramp's Triumph" provides the reader with directions on how to read this odd cartoon: "Rube the eyes rapidly along each row from left to right. If you do not find the pictures moving it must be because you are not easily moved." Of course, this was purely a joke, since there is much more happening here than just a novelty representation of movement.

Each "frame" of  "The Bold, Bad Burglar" is a funny picture in itself, but the overall effect is breathless -- and breath-taking:

As with H.M. Bateman's wordless, multi-panel cartoons, Greening's pages are filled with funny drawings. The work is similar in spirit to Milt Gross, who accomplished the same thing, but with a drunken, hyper scrawl. Incredibly, Greening's "Balloon Ascension" offers even greater chaos:

The jump cuts in the above comic, between panels three and four, five and six, and thirteen and fourteen are masterful.

John Adcock has shared more H.C. Greening on his website here, which I recommend to you.

Greening is in the top ten of early American cartoonists that I would love to research more thoroughly. I hope this little article has helped to reveal his place as an early master of screwball comics.

Woo Woo,
Paul Tumey

The First Dave's Delicatessen by Milt Gross - 1931

Here's the very first Dave's Delicatessen Sunday by that inimitable achiever of screwballosity, Milt Gross. 

Dave's Delicatessen ran as a Sunday from June 7, 1931 to January 13, 1935. It was accompanied by the toppers Count Screwloose (an abbreviated version of an earlier full page incarnation) and That's My Pop. The comic also ran as a daily strip from July 13, 1931 to August 5, 1933. Here's three examples of the daily:

The basic idea of the strip was that Dave ran a Jewish deli and each episode featured a different eccentric character or characters coming across Dave's path. It was a toned-down, inverted variation on Milt Gross' theme of insanity in everyday life. Where Papa Feitelbaum in Nize Baby over-reacted in crazy ways, Dave is always grounded in a world of crazy characters. In his previous Sunday pages, Nize Baby (1926-1929) and Count Screwloose of Tooloose (1929-1931), Gross created epics in miniature around the comedy of escalation. You can read some of these operas of comic destruction and frustration  in these postings:

Why Don't He Twitt: An Insane 1928 Milt Gross Nize Baby

The Escalated Hypocrisy of Milt Gross' Count Screwloose

Dave's Delicatessen moved to a different, more subdued rhythm -- but saying a Milt Gross strip is subdued  is a little like saying a half dozen bottle rockets is not as explosive as a roman candle. In his new strip, Gross -- ever the growing artist -- challenged himself with moving from episodic to narrative humor. While each episode of Dave's Delicatessen remains a single unit with very little continuity, Gross often presented entire little compressed stories with a beginning, middle, and end -- all worked into a single Sunday page.

Such is the case with the very first 18-panel episode of Dave's Delicatessen, in which Dave is completely conned by two silly swindlers. It's a brilliant debut, jam-packed with Gross' visual and verbal play, oddballs, and goofy scenes -- such as in panel 8, in which a woman shoplifts a sausage with a expanding grabber thingie protruding from the pocket of her socialite dress.

The first Dave's Delicatessen by Milt Gross
June 7, 1931
(courtesy of Carl Linich)

Look at how, in the last panel, Gross makes the mug shot book unrealistically gigantic -- allowing us, the reader, to see what it is. This sort of freedom to expertly stray from one-on-one representation reveals the true mastery of Gross. While Dave's Delicatessen doesn't provide as many visual pyrotechnics as his earlier strips, it does offer some of the most stuffed comics ever -- and belongs among the greatest of Milt Gross' achievements.

Many thanks to Carl Linich, who provided this beautiful paper scan from his own collection.

All the Best,
Paul Tumey

Harvey Kurtzman's Pigtales for Parkinson's - Sizzling Screwball Comics From 1946!

Ya gotta admit: cartoon pigs are funny. One of the undisputed masters of screwball comics is Harvey Kurtzman, who certainly seemed to appreciate the comedic possibilities of porcine antics. In today's post, I've snuffled out the rare, first Kurtzman Pigtales story that sits like a truffle in the mud of Timely's lackluster golden age humor comics.

If you like the Pigtales comic below, you can buy the entire series of six in a digitally restored ebook (in cbr format) for only $3.00 (please allow 24 hours for email delivery as I sending these out manually to keep the cost low).

Here's the Table of Contents page from the ebook:

You'll also get links to download FREE .cbr viewers for PC and Mac.

Kurtzman's work stands in direct lineage from screwball masters Rube Goldberg, Milt Gross and Bill Holman (with a little Jack Cole thrown in). Kurtzman's work has the skewed perspective, exaggerated action, and zany energy found in screwball comics. It also has the characteristic compression of information, with jokes buried within jokes. In the early 1950s, Kurtzman's MAD brought self-awareness to American pop culture and profoundly influenced generations of creative minds, including art spiegelman and Robert Crumb.

I won't attempt a recap of Kurztman's career and influence, here. There's a few books out there that do a pretty good job of that, especially The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics by Dennis Kitchen and Paul Buhle (New York: Abrams Comic Arts, 2009) - which currently (April 2013) is available from Amazon for a bargain price of $18 (regularly $45).

Most fans of Kurtzman's comics know about his wonderful early surreal Hey Look! one-pagers, and a few folks even have the excellent 1992 Kitchen Sink collection (long out of print). Here's a color paper scan from Willie Comics #7 (Timely, April 1947).

Harvey Kurtzman loved drawing pigs. From Willie Comics #7  (April 1947)

It's always been fascinating to me to consider that the editor who bought and published these experimental-type comics was none other than Marvel mogul Stan Lee. That's right, before he hooked up with William Gaines at E.C. Comics and created MAD (as well as Two-Fisted Tales, Frontline Combat, and a stream of brilliant and under-appreciated science fiction comics) Harvey Kurtzman did humor comics for Marvel/Timely under the editorship of Stan Lee. Talk about a study in contrast! Still, it's great that Lee gave Kurtzman this early outlet and encouraged his development.

Eventually, Stan Lee imposed his editorial control over Kurtzman with the Rusty stories, a dismal Blondie knock-off that Kurtzman -- professional that he was -- dutifully created for nearly a year before he jumped ship and eventually found E.C. Comics. Here's a couple of pages from a Rusty story, written by Stan Lee and drawn by Harvey Kurtzman.

Well, you get the idea. When Kurtzman drew the Hey Look! pig- piggybank one-pager above, he may have been thinking of his Pigtales series, which in the last half of 1946. As forgotten as Rusty, the Pigtales stories are worth rooting out, because they are both written and drawn by Kurtzman and show him working out some of the self-reflexive concepts and graphic treatments that would get so crispy and tasty in his later work.

The Pigtales stories appeared in extremely obscure Timely humor titles like All Surprise and Krazy Komics. Below is the very first episode featuring Homer and Hickstaff, from Kid Movie Comics #11 (June 1946).

As you hoof thru this story, notice how Kurtzman is artfully playing with self-awareness as humor. Homer and Hickstaff know they are only lines on paper, and encourage us to see them that way. Essentially, this is a science fiction premise: what if characters drawn on paper were sentient beings? The logical conclusion is that they would be painfully aware of their own limitations as ink on paper, and yet they also posses unlimited potential to go anywhere and do anything:

Carefully considered, the spiral that winds back on itself that is a pig's tail makes a fitting visual metaphor for Kurtzman's approach to humor, which also winds back on itself.

Kurtzman's figures in the 1946 Pigtales have the form, but not the total verve they would assume in later years. Compare the above pages with this visually sophisticated 1949 Hey Look! page:

from Patsy Walker 22 (May 1949)

Here's a rare WWII 1944 Kurtzman cover from his army days that recently surfaced (and as of this writing on April 7 2013 is still available on ebay here). You can see the little heavily outlined blobby figures in this piece have the same playful presentation as Homer and Hickstaff, once again carrying the awareness that they are only lines on paper.

As an army Private, Kurtzman drew this cover for the Camp Sutton, North Carolina base paper

As another example of the embryonic early style of Kurtzman, here's what is believed to be Kurtzman's first professional job in comics, a one-pager than ran on the inside front cover of Four Favorites #8, published in May, 1945. Notice the exaggerated perspective from above and below -- the very same visual approach we see in the Pigtales stories a couple of years later.

Kurtzman's first pro comics page? From Four Favorites #8 (Ace, May, 1945)

In all, Kurtzman wrote and drew six curly Pigtales stories. In the six months he worked on these stories, his art and storytelling style grew richer and more confident. here's a page from the last published story, from December, 1946 where he hams it in fine style:

Page 5 of Kurtzman's last Pigtales story, from Krazy Komics #25 (December 1946)

If you enjoyed the Pigtales story in this post, you might like to pork over three measly bucks and get the whole run. These ain't easy to find, and they are a lotta fun to read. You also get a BONUS section of goodies:

-  Four Giggles and Grins pages which feature nine surreal, silly, color Kurtzman gag cartoons
- The complete rare 5-page Rusty story excerpted in this blog - by Stan Lee and Harvey Kurtzman
- Eight rare Hey Look! page scans from their original color comics publications

I hope you'll go for it, as these fine Pigtales deserve to be re-read. But mainly I hope you'll go for this because I could really use the three bucks -- hoo ha!

Actually, all proceeds from this ebook sale will be donated to the National Parkinson Foundation in honor of Harvey Kurtzman, who suffered from Parkinson's Disease.

Note: This is not connected with any organization -- it's just a little thing I'm doing on my own. I don't expect we'll sell many at all -- other ebooks I'm associated with sell about two or three a month, so it's a pretty small amount we're talking here -- but even so ... it's something.





Harvey Kurtzman's Pigtales for Parkinson's
55 page ebook delivered as a download link via email for only $3.00
(please allow 24 hours for delivery as this is a true rinky-dink one-man operation and I'll be manually emailing this to you to keep the costs down on the product):

Yours in all things Screwball,
Paul Tumey