Smokey Stover's Bathtub and Car: Objects of Screwball Beauty (1939)

More antics of the madcap fireman foo you! Today's BIG color scan is a beautiful example of the early Smokey Stover from late 1939, when Holman began to pack his panels as full as the suitcases of a world traveler.

I 'm not bothering to count the gags in this comic, mainly because I am struck by the superior quality of the background gags more than the quantity (which is high). I love the many screwball embellishments on Smokey's bathtub, including oars, a life preserver, a cat, an anchor, and a door! I love how Smokey's wife's hat has a dangling "Foo" sign. In panel three we get one of Holman's classic twisted drainpipes, one of the many visual obsessions in Smokey, similar to Walter Hoban's goofy trees. The last panel features the fabulous two-wheeled "fire buggy" car, which seems to defy the laws of nature.  The comic ends with a small panel feature, "Foo-losophy." This week's fool-osophy, thematically related to the Smokey comic,  is pretty wise, I think.

September 17, 1939

Ipswitch on the Amscray,
Aulpay Metumay

Smokey Stover Goes Bowling in a Striking Way (1943)

Presenting a paper scan from my collection of a striking 1943 Smokey Stover by Bill Holman. This typically compressed episode leaves nothing to spare, with 16 background jokes, by my count. Holman often scored his background jokes around the theme of the strip. In this case, the theme is bowling, and Holman has a ball with making at least six of his 16 gags relate to his set-up.

As usual, all the gags in this Smokey Stover are G-rated and wholly accessible. It must have been tempting at times, but Holman never put his popular comic, read by adults and kids alike, in the gutter (cough cough).

While Holman has plenty of verbal puns in this strip, he's in fine form as he rolls out several surreal visual puns, such as the "sox-o-phone," or the "fountain pin," which relates to bowling.

In addition to the rich background humor, there's a smashing weird last frame, with the right-angled bowling alley. As if that weren't enough, Holman also throws in a small panel, Foomous Flames, which offers some pretty good curveballs in itself. It's clear that, by 1943, Holman had a grip on the screwball comics form like few others!

February 14, 1943

OK -- who lost the beer frame?

That is all,
Screwball Paul Foomey

Bill Holman's Gilded Cage: The Pre-Smokey Strip, Junior (1923-31)

Here's a look at Bill Holman's pre-Smokey Stover kid humor comic strip, Junior. The daily strip (there were no Sundays) ran from May 28, 1923 to 1931 and was distributed by the New York Tribune syndicate*. Junior was also called Gee Whiz, Junior, Junior Wise Quacks and just Wise Quacks. Smokey came along about 4 years after Junior folded.

Holman wrote and drew Junior for about eight years. Today, the strip is largely forgotten, probably because it is nowhere near as funny or screwball as Smokey Stover. It's a well-crafted comic strip, but for anyone familiar with the madcap Smokey Stover, it's a huge let down to read the dull Junior comics. Basically, Junior was an average kids strip, with only the occasional indication of the flood-tide of wackiness to come in Holman's later comics.

Here's three examples, in poor microfilm quality, from 1924, when the strip was not even a year old. You'd be hard-pressed to identify it as the work of Bill Holman at first glance, because it's a surprisingly straight pitch, and not screwball at all.

January 30, 1924

February 1, 1924

February 2, 1924

Holman appears to have based his character on the successful comic Smitty by Walter Berndt, which started about six months prior to Junior, in November, 1922*. Here's a Smitty from the 1920s that shows the marked similarity in character design, although Smitty had some continuity and was a much better read.




Junior appears to have been kind of gilded cage for Holman. It's entirely likely that the New York Tribune syndicate asked Holman to create a strip like Smitty, which was owned by their rival, the Chicago Tribune - New York News syndicate. Holman had a big time syndicated strip, and he probably made decent money... but he was as suited for drawing a charming daily kid's gag comic as Salvador Dali was for painting Saturday Evening Post covers.

At least, as time went on, Holman developed his characteristic pen technique, with expert hatching,  and perfectly spotted blacks.

Junior's only merit comes in the occasional surreal gag and in the extra pun-filled panel comic, Wise Quacks, that Holman added, in Rube Goldberg fashion, at some point. In 1930, Holman's puns are in prose form. The genius of Smokey Stover is that, five years later, Holman shifted to delivering a tsunami of puns in visual form. Junior and Wise Quacks are basically Smokey Stover with the wacky dial on 1 instead of 11.Here's a series of Junior dailies from 1930, late in the strip's run. These are paper scans from my own collection.

You'll note that the Friday, June 6 strip is given over to all Wise Quacks. At least in 1930, if not earlier, Holman did this every Friday. The Friday Wise Quacks foreshadows the jam-packed screwballism of Smokey Stover, and we see Holman playing with little visual puns in the panels.

Here's a couple more Juniors that have a touch of surreal madness in them, anticipating the fun to come!

After Junior took his toys and went home, Holman embarked on a very successful career as a free-lance magazine cartoonist for about four years. Then, he heard that a syndicate (Smitty's syndicate, actually - the Chicago Tribune - New York News syndicate) was looking for a new strip about a fireman, and he had an idea that finally let the screwball dogs out! But that's another story, one which is told in my article The Birth of Smokey Stover - First Puffs 1935.

Quackin Up and Duckin',
Paul Tumey
_______________________________________________________________________
*American Newspaper Comics- An Encyclopedic Reference Guide by Allan Holtz, 2012, University of Michigan Press

Reading Smokey Stover: Unpacking the Storage Locker

Smokey Stover Fireday

A New Smokey Stover or Bill Holman comic every Friday - visit us often!

Here's another beautiful Bill Holman 1941 full page with a Smokey on top and a Spooky on bottom. Scanned minutes ago from my own archives. Great cartooning and loads of gags! 

Most sequential comics acrete, accumulate, and build meaning from one panel to the next, until finally you have a coherent structure built in your mind. Reading one of Bill Holman's densely compressed Smokey Stover comics is the inversion of the typical sequential comics experience -- as you read, you unpack and pull apart. It's like dismantling a storage locker bought at auction -- you never know what you'll find inside, but it will be a vast array of objects, some junk and some treasure.

By the time you've finished reading just one Smokey Stover strip, you've had to unpack each box (panel) and sift and sort -- the floor is littered with visual and verbal puns, gags, surreal plays, goofy inventions, weird characters, cartoon animals, and cornball jokes. 

Reading Smokey requires an investment of energy and presence beyond the typical 1940s newspaper comics reading experience-- and often, when I am done unpacking the storage locker that is a Smokey Stover comic, I'm a little tuckered out. But then -- all these funny gags and weird little drawings are now unpacked, and my mind can play with them all day. 

 Spooky, on the other hand, generally follows the more traditional structure.

Smokey Stover is the ultimate de-construction comic -- in order to read the strip, you have to pull it apart.

A packed storage locker of screwballism - a full page Bill Holman comic from August 17, 1941
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

Getting Off the Party Lion, 

Paul Foomey

Smokey Stover's Pipe Dream (1939)

Smokey Stover Fireday

Bill Holman's Smokey Stover is packed with crazy inventions. Aside from the ways Holman plays with the form itself, which are a kind of invention, Holman also engineered some pretty nutty stuff. Take the two-wheeled car, for example. I'm not sure where you'll take it, but you won't get far... because it only has two wheels. The curious "hand" chairs the characters sometimes sit in would be another classic Bill Holman screwball design. One of many such devices.

The idea of making nutty inventions the subject of humor cartoons comes, of course, from the great Rube Goldberg, whose very name is synonymous with "wacky invention." A Goldberg invention is usually thought of as a complicated chain reaction that produces a trivial effect, such as lighting a cigar, or hammering a nail. But Rube also populated his panels with a host of nutty inventions that were often used as props to add layers of screwballism to the the comic strip. Sometimes, his characters themselves were inventors, such as BoBo Baxter.

Bill Holman obviously learned a lot from Rube Goldberg. One of the things he learned was that the public adores wacky inventions in cartoon strips.

In the New Year's Day misadventure below, from Jan 1, 1939, we can see some of the odd objects and devices that Holman invented and then used repeatedly in his comic. In the first panel, there's both the hand-chair and the double-barreled pipe -- both common props Holman recycled in Smokey Stover for years. In panel six, we get a version of his improbably two-wheeled car.

The double-barreled pipe may be the first wacky invention in Smokey Stover, making it's first appearance in the second published comic, protruding from underneath the dust-broom mustache of Chief Cash U. Nutt. It's funny enough that a fireman smokes a pipe, but Holman took the gag one notch higher. Or should we say two bowls deeper?

The double-barreled pipe's first appearance, in the second Smokey comic
(March 17, 1935)

Sometimes, real-life inventors and engineers made actual versions of the wacky inventions found in screwball comics. Here's an item from a 1939 issue of Popular Science about someone who, um, matched, Bill Holman's double-barreled pipe (cough cough):

from Popular Science, October 1939

The pipe was developed by a tobacco shop in New York City. This might be the pipe that Uncle Bill posed with in this great photo, also from 1939:

As that screwball painter, Rene Margritte might say, "ceci n'est pas une dang pipe."

Okay, time foo me to pipe down and end this puff piece.

Bowled Over,

Paul Tumey

Don't Miss

Tomorrow's Salesman Sam Saturday

And...

Yesterday's great Herriman-like Squirrel Cage comic for Gene Ahern Thursday

Smokey Stover Rows to the Occasion

Smokey Stover Fireday

Bill Holman mines some rich oar in this screwball Smokey Stover and Spooky page from 1941, scanned from my paper collection.

As usual, a gang of wild verbal and visual puns stow away in the page below. I count over 30 gags, but there's probably more I didn't eyespy. Smokey Stover started in 1935 (see here for the first Smokey comic). By 1941, Holman had unleashed a flood of crazy, pun-oriented gags on the adoring public. Even though his pages seem at first glance to be chaotic, Holman -- the Spike Jones of comics -- was actually a highly organized and structured cartoonist.

His pages are visual and verbal jigsaw puzzles, with each oddly-shaped piece customized to fit perfectly. Often, Holman's pages would play with a particular theme. If Smokey was gardening, Holman would plant 25 or 30 garden-related jokes in every nook and cranny of the page. Today's jigsaw features water and boating puns, starting with Holman's signature: "Bill Port Holman, Tom Buoy." Underneath, we get a joke with a parrot, which relates to pirates (and cartoon parrots, as Rube Goldberg and Gene Ahern also knew, are intrinsically funny). Next to the parrot, one of Holman's living portraits is named "Gil," as in fish gill. And Holman is just getting started...

Smokey Stover and Spooky by Bill Holman - July 20, 1941
(from the foollection of Paul Tumey)

That "pig pen" in the second Smokey panel is the primary reason I chose this page to share -- it's a notch more surreal and bizarre than Holman's usual work, which is already over the top. His rowing machine is a crazy, over-complicated machine, a common element in screwball comics that goes back to Rube Goldberg.

The Spooky strip involves the use of a hose, which is water-related. This strip is pure visual fun. You can "read" this Spooky without having to read the words. Holman's cartooning in Spooky was more sequential and visually flowing than in Smokey Stover, which was disruptive in nature. His wildly configured drainpipes echo the twisted trees in Walter Hoban's Jerry On The Job.

The book in panel four of Spooky is the infamous Joe Miller Joke Book -- no doubt the source of many a corny cartoon joke. Jack Cole included the book in a 1945 cartoon self-portrait:

Jack Cole's 1945 cartoon self-portrait

DON'T MISS
Tomorrow's Salesman Sam Saturday post - some paper scans of George Swanson's screwball madness!

AND...
Yesterday's Gene Ahern Squirrel Cage

Lastly...

If you are reading this and happen to have a blog, might I prevail upon your generosity to plug The Masters of Screwball Comics? Let's spread the word and give our sober reality a much-needed dose of nutty, just-for-the-fun-of-it humor!

Screwbalistically Yours,
Paul Foomey

The Birth of Smokey Stover - First Puffs (1935)

Smokey Stover Fireday

New Bill Holman comics posted every Friday!

Just foo you, girlies --  rare early Holman comics, including the very first Smokey Stover and Spooky in color paper scans!

Holman came to Smokey as a foo-ly developed cartoonist. By the time he created his classic screwball comic at the age of 31, Bill Holman had written and drawn his own syndicated comics for eight years from 1922-30 and then sold hundreds of gag cartoons to magazines during the next five years from 1929-34.

When he heard the Chicago Tribune - New York Daily News Syndicate was looking for a new Sunday page in late 1933, Holman (who was living in New York) took some of the firemen-themed magazine gags he had been selling (and also his jowly kitty) and fashioned them into a Sunday comic about screwball firemen, which took off, blazing.

Holman's first stint as a daily newspaper cartoonist, however, did not distinguish him as a notable cartoonist. I think this was in part because he was suppressing himself to be commercial. His first strip was an idiosyncratic funny animal strip first called J. Rabbit Esquire and then Billville Birds. Here's a couple of examples that show the characteristic Holman love for puns and background details, but very underplayed:

Billville Birds by Bill Holman August 9, 1922

Billville Birds by Bill Holman August 10, 1922

Then Holman tried a kid strip, Gee Whiz Junior. Again, it had touches of the Holman screwball approach, but in a subdued way. Here's a couple of examples:

Gee Whiz Junior by Bill Holman - Feb 1, 1924

Gee Whiz Junior by Bill Holman - Feb 2, 1924 - a slight $alesman $am flavor

We'll take a closer look at Holman's early comics in a future article. After several years on Junior, Holman moved into magazine cartooning where he began to find himself as a screwball cartoonist. As Holman said in an  interview with John Canemaker (available for reading at the official Smokey Stover/Bill Holman website):

"I was just being myself in my cartoons  -- that was the whole thing. I'd had quite a bit of experience at various papers and syndicates, and when you find that your stuff's appearing before the public in a big national publication, you get confidence." (John Canemaker, Millimeter - date unknown, circa 1970s)

Bill Holman's gag cartoons reached a far wider audience
than his earlier newspaper comic strips - Collier's Weekly Jan 28, 1933

We'll also take a look at Holman's magazine cartoons in a future post. Having finally developed his cartooning style and screwball sensibility, Holman seized an opportunity to take another dance on the stripper's stage. It seems that the fireman idea may have been suggested by News publisher Joseph "Captain" Patterson, who took as keen an interest in his syndicate's comics as William Hearst did in his line-up.

Here is an early, if not the first announcement/solicitation the Tribune-News syndicate circulated to newspapers for the comic. Note that the cat is already named Spooky. Note also the name of Arthur Crawford. Holman credited Crawford in some interviews as being the first to contact him about the opportunity to develop a new comic for the syndicate.

Here is the first Smokey Stover (here called simply "Smokey"), published March 10, 1935 in a nice paper scan, furnished by fellow screwball historian, Carl Linich (see his blog on Ahern's Squirrel Cage)

The first published Smokey Stover comic by Bill Holman.
A landmark in screwball comics. (March 10, 1935)
Scan supplied by Carl Linich from his collection

This example of strip is in the "tab" (tabloid) format, which was a smaller, full page format. I wonder if this was the first page that Holman drew on that chilly Indiana Christmas Eve, or if they perhaps selected from his built-up inventory a year or so later, to select an early, but solid first strip. In any case, as with most newspaper comic series, this first appearance is noticeably different from the high-octane insanity that most of us associate with Smokey Stover.

Another point to note in the comic above is that Holman draws his signature jowl-cheeked, tape-tailed cat in seven of the 12 panels. Holman was also inserting this kitty in his gag cartoons. Although the early Smokey comics lack the density of the later strips, Holman is already working to create multi-tracks of gags. In the strip above, we have the main gag about the chair legs, and then there's the funny business of the goofy cat, who is not an essential part of the joke at all, but still adds a lot to the comic.

Here's the second appearance of Smokey Stover (again, just called "Smokey"), from March 17, 1935. This example is in the half-page format, which uses fewer panels (3 tiers instead of 4).

The second published Smokey Stover comic - March 17, 1935
From the collection of Paul Tumey

Foo some reason, the image in the last panel reminds me of Don Martin's comics. Maybe it's the way the "honk" sound effects are drawn. There are a few items in the background, and Chief Cash U. Nutt is smokiing that wonderful two-bowl pipe in the title panel (the smoke from his pipe appropriately forms the title, creating a visual pun). Still, overall this comic is sparse and tame, compared to what it would become. It's not yet the "torrent of audacious gags" that the Tribune-News promised. Spooky appears in panels two and eight.

In the fifth Smokey Stover comic to be published, Spooky gets his own strip. Here, then, is the very first Spooky comic strip!

The first Spooky and the fifth Smokey. (April 7, 1935 )
Scan supplied by Carl Linich from his collection

I'd like to dedicate this post to a pal and fellow screwball, Carl Linich. 

If you are in New York this weekend (April 28 and 29), be sure to visit Carl's table at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) Festival. 

Smoked Links
You can find more excellent Smokey Stover and Spooky comics at the following links:

Smokey Stover Online (the official site by Bill Holman's nephew)

Pappy's Golden Age Blog  (reprints lots of great Holman comics! Thanks for the plug, Pappy!)

The Fireman Cometh - my first article on Holman with some more early Smokeys

No Claws For Alarm - my article reprinting and analyzing Holman's topper strip

My page on Bill Holman - just updated as of this post - many rare items not found anywhere else on this blog!

I hope you enjoyed this look at the birth of Smokey Stover and Spooky. In future posts, I'd like share with you more of Holman's early comics, and some of his magazine gag cartoons. Until then, you can find me in room...

Nix Nix 1506,
Paul Tumey

What's in that pipe, Bill? (1939)

The Fireman Cometh - A Taste of Bill Holman's UnFOOgettable Screwball Strip

The greatest screwball comedy strip of all time, SMOKEY STOVER by Bill Holman, began appearing in newspapers in 1935. The Smokey Stover dailies and sundays were jam-packed with gags. Some of the gags were visual puns, some were verbal, and some were just pulled out of the ether, such as the repeated use of the word "foo." Holman, shown below, was a true master of the form. In future posts, we'll be exploring Holman's background and his various SCREWBALL inventions. 

Bill Holman - master of all things screwy

Hey, being a screwball cartoonist isn't such a bad way to go!

Smokey Stover was a fireman, and often the strips involved the characters frantically running to put out a fire, exchanging vaudeville-style jokes as they zipped along. You got your money's worth with Smokey Stover, since Holman often stuffed his pages with jokes. I count 13 jokes in this 6-panel sunday strip, taken from Four Color #64 (Dell, no date on the issue), one of several Four Color issues devoted entirely to reprints of Holman's work.

We'll have more on Bill Holman and his strip in future postings, but for now, as we're just setting up shop and getting our stock organized on the shelves, here's a rare choice Smokey Stover Sunday from 1935, the year of the strip's debut:

Smokey Stover by Bill Holman - Sept 22, 1935

And here's a foo-bulous consecutive run from late 1938. Note how much denser the panels have become, more loaded with background jokes. This was about 15 years before Kurtzman and Elder's "chicken fat" Mad style developed. 

Smokey Stover by Bill Holman - Nov 20, 1938

Smokey Stover by Bill Holman - Nov 28, 1938

Smokey Stover by Bill Holman - Dec 4, 1938

For more of Bill Holman's brilliant work, be sure to visit http://www.smokey-stover.com/, created by his nephew, Victor Paul, and loaded with great Holman comics. 

See also Pappy's great postings on his Golden Age Blogzine:

744: There's No Foo Like An Old Foo

818: More of Bill Holman's Inspired Insanity

And there's more on Bill Holman coming!

Until then, remember friends, 'tis better to have foo than not to have foo at all!

All text copyright 2012 Paul Tumey - please link to this blog!