A Hot Smokey Stover Fireman Sunday Page From 1939

Hey Girlies, I'm swamped today, so no time for pithy analysis -- here's a Bill Holman extravaganz, scanned from my own paper collection,  foo you to henjoy!

February 20, 1939

Remember to foo regularly,
Paul Foomey

Smokey Stover Original Art Reveals the Slow Fanning of Bill Holman's Masterpiece

Smokey Stover Fireday!

A New Bill Holman Smokey Stover every Friday!

Continuing our Original Art Week, here's some various originals of Smokey Stover comics by Bill Holman. In studying Holman's originals, we can see that his style develops over a period of several years. We can also see, in his mature work, that his form follows his intended function. His art is as jam-packed with inking technique as his content is overstuffed with gags, wordplay, and visual puns. Holman had a steady, sure hand with a brush and pen. We forget that Holman wrote and drew a syndicated daily strip (Junior) for seven years before he started Smokey. As if that weren't enough, Holman also accomplished a successful career as a magazine gag cartoonist for another seven years between Junior and Smokey. He had plenty of time and motivation to refine his art for commercial reproduction purposes. By the time he started Smokey in 1935, Holman had a great deal of technique and expertise under his firehat. Check out this original from the 3rd month of the strip:

Smokey Stover by Bill Holman - June 2, 1935 (original art)

About eight months later, Holman has refined his style a little more. The panels are more visually dense. His lettering is exactly the same style he used in his 1924-31 daily strip, Junior.

Smokey Stover by Bill Holman - Feb. 9, 1936 (original art)

And now, here's a Smokey in full flame, from about 12 years later, from Independence Day, 1948. This is the most famous and appreciated style of the strip, a patchwork quilt of humor and surrealism. When you study the original art, you can truly appreciate the craft that Holman developed over many years to be able to create these compressed bouillon cubes of screwballism every week, and make it look easy. The "high style" of Smokey Stover represents a conscious accumulation of techniques.

Note that this 1948 comic's topper (on the bottom - the Spooky strip) has the same "BAM!" panel as the 1936 strip -- a July 4 comic would, of course, need a BAM. Also note the paste-over in the second panel of Spooky.

Smokey Stover by Bill Holman - July 4, 1948

Thanks foo reading!

Ask not what your foo can do for foo, but what foo can foo foo foo,
Paul Foomey

The Compression of Smokey Stover Comics

Smokey Stover Fireday

A new Smokey Stover or Bill Holman comic every Friday!

Here's a Smokey Stover gem from 1937, during the second year of the strip. It's no secret that Bill Holman was a great cartoonist. What we don't realize when we read a comic like the one below that has about 25 gags in it, is that Holman was also an organizational genius.

Each Smokey Stover is a unique, magical matrix of jokes, gags, one-liners, and surrealism. Holman must have had a huge collection of such material in order to be able to generate a weekly matrix that condensed and collected so much into such a small space. It requires a certain kind of genius to be able to collect, archive, and retrieve vast amounts of scattered bits and pieces of humor. Each weekly Smokey was like a patchwork quilt, made of these scraps. Sometimes, the result was quite beautiful.

Smokey Stover by Bill Holman - November 14, 1937

Well, you know what they say: "Foos rush in where angels fear to tread."

Screwily Yours,
Paul Foomey

Skat Holman Puts on the Dog: Three Spookys from the 40s

Smokey Stover Fireday

In addition to Smokey Stover, Bill Holman's second great screwball comic is Spooky (1935-1973). The strip was mainly a topper for Smokey. However, in the 1940s, Spooky had as much as half a page in which to frolic screwballisticaly. In fact, in some papers Smokey Stover was the topper and Spooky was the main attraction.

In some ways, Spooky is a more pure expression of Holman's visual humor than Smokey Stover, which is jam-packed with puns and verbal humor. Spooky is uncluttered, allowing one to savor Holman's magical ability to conjure up wacky cartoons with his scratchy pen line. One of the best things about Bill Holman's cartoons is his great strength at drawing images that are just plain funny. His cat, Spooky, is a fat-faced feline with a perpetually-bandaged tail. Holman draws Spooky with a wonderful controlled chaos of pen strokes -- somehow perfect for a cat. Holman's dogs are quite funny, too. In fact, he drew a dog strip, Zipper, for a short while in the late 1930s, which he took over from cartoonist Garr Williams. (see my Bill Holman Page for an example of Zipper and more information).

The strips presented below are just a few of the numerous examples of Holman depicting the war between 1940s cartoon cats and dogs. When Holman could get his daffy dogs in the same strip as the sublimely silly Spooky, he had a winner, no matter what the gag might have been.

Spooky by Bill Holman - April 11, 1943 (from the collection of Paul Tumey)

Just beautiful cartooning! Holman's dogs had abnormally large heads and comically tiny bodies -- they were all mouth and teeth and bark. His cats have a smug, self-satisfied look to them. They are street cats, endlessly prowling and yowling. They are distinct from his dogs, while being stylistically congruent.

Spooky by Bill Holman - August 23, 1942 (courtesy Ger Apeldoorn)

Holman found endless material from the uncontrollable desire his dogs have to chase cats. Notice in the above strip, he signs it "Skat Holman," as in "skat cat!" This strip and the one below were kindly shared with me expressly for this blog by my pal and fellow comics scholar, Ger Apeldoorn. Be sure to check out his Fabulous Fifties blog which has a wealth of rare comics and insights.

Spooky by Bill Holman - October 11, 1942 (courtesy Ger Apeldoorn)

That's it for today!

Don't miss:

Yesterday's Squirrel Cage and Room and Board full Sunday from 1937 - a standout page!

Tomorrow's Salesman Sam Saturday - more rare George Swan comics!

Boody Rogers and Bill Holman Go Meta-Screwball

This panel was indeed drawn upside-down
as part of a parody of screwball comics
by Boody Rogers and Zack Mosely

Meta-Screwballism

A Screwball Sunday essay by Paul Tumey

Presenting a cuckoo screwball comic jam by Boody Rogers and Zack Mosely that reaches rarely scaled heights of wild lunacy. The page, never meant for publication, appears to have been created as a wedding gift for a friend who may have been named or nick-named "Rupe," or "John." Rogers assisted Zack Mosely on the Smilin' Jack comic in the late 1930's, so it's likely this jam between the two cartoonists comes from that period.

We haven't explored the comics of Boody Rogers in this blog yet, but he certainly belongs in the pantheon of screwball masters. Rogers' created Sparky Watts as a comic strip in the early 40s and then as a comic book feature for Columbia. He also did the even-nuttier Babe for Quality Comics.

We'll do a Boody-call in a later post, but for now, we're looking a page that may be one of the nuttiest screwball comics ever made. The page is laid out like a full Sunday comic with a topper, distributed by the "Ding Dong Syndicate." To start with, here's the topper:

There's a certain freedom that comes when cartoonists get together and make comics just for the fun of it. Jams became popular in the Underground comics of the late 60s and early 70s,  and then the self-published Newave comics of the 80s and 90s. Currently, jams are a popular and frequent occurrence and part of the American mainstream comic industry's flow of "product." It's something of a miracle to discover a screwball jam from a much-earlier era.

In the topper alone, we are bombarded with daft twists on cornball cliches. Both Rogers and Mosely were professional cartoonists who had absorbed the screwball style and they deftly play with it, here. What makes this topper and the rest of the jam page so remarkable is that it is a self-conscious yet free-flowing parody of a form that already is a kind of parody of itself. It's an example of screwball-screwball, or meta-screwball.

Bill Holman's Smokey Stover included numerous examples of
backgrounds gags such as this one from
July 23, 1939

Screwball comics by their very nature are meta. In order to bend and stretch and natural laws of physics, they first have to establish them. Therefore, when Bill Holman places a hanging picture on the wall behind Smoky Stover and Chief Cash U. Nutt, he is first obeying physics. The picture is connected to a string that hangs on a nail. Then, when Holman draws a figure leaning out of the picture frame, he is creating a screwball event, in which something wacky is happening.

Similarly, when Smokey drives a car, Holman first establishes the base reality of a gas-driven, round-wheeled vehicle with a steering wheel, headlights, etc. Then, he adds a layer of UN-reality, with various parts flying off as the car zooms like a loony rocket.

Bill Holman drew this explanation of how to do screwball comics
for a magazine, but it also functions as a
meta-screwball comic.

Bill Holman's Smokey Stover is already a parody of screwball comics. He went one step further, breaking a kind of sound barrier of wackiness, when he drew this unpublished, unhinged parody of Little Orphan Annie.

Bill Holman was at his meta-screwball best in this stream-of-conscious parody of Little Orphan Annie.
It is undated, but the drawing style resembles his late 50s and early 60s style used on Smokey Stover.
(courtesy of Craig Yoe's blog, where you can find many other rare Bill Holman items)

"And last month they filtched all of my finial, and dinkheimered 77 of my dynamic dinkies..." There's a Dr. Seuss quality to Holman's writing here, as he parodies his both himself and Harold Gray. The result is sublime nonsense.

Similarly, the Rogers-Mosely jam page reaches new heights of zaniness. Below is the entire Boody Rogers- Zack Mosely jam page circa late 30s. The final panel has, of course, screwball comics' "plop" take (here, called "ploop").

Since Rogers worked in Mosely's style, it's difficult to tell who did what, but it's clear the two played off each other and inspired several off-color ethnic and sexual jokes that could never be used in their mainstream work. In effect, this is an an underground comic thirty years too soon. The same sensibilities that drove the irreverent, taboo-breaking Underground comics  are at work in this jam page. It's perhaps a missing link between screwball comics and Undergrounds.

A rare, unpublished maniacal screwball comic by Boody Rogers
and Zack Mosely, circa late 1930s.

Many thanks to the kind reader who shared the Rogers-Mosely jam. Be sure to tune in tomorrow for Milt Gross Monday!

Ploopily Yours,
Screwball Paul