Chicken Fat Cats in $alesman $am (1924)

Here today a quartet of Swan $alesman $am comics festooned with cats and fishes.

Sometimes, screwball comics contain lots more stuff than the average comic. I first discovered the joys of comics that are stuffed to the gills with Kurtzman and Elder's Mad comics. Elder called the myriad multiple gags he packed into his comics "chicken fat," referring to the little globules of melted fat floating at the top of a bowl of chicken soup -- in other words, the little bits that add a lot of flavor and savor. With my screwball comics project, it's been a continual joy and revelation to discover that other cartoonists added "chicken fat" details. It seems to start with Walter Hoban (although I am starting to think that maybe it goes back to Outcault's Yellow Kid) , develops with George Swanson, and reaches an apex with Bill Holman's Smokey Stover -- and then Kurtzman and Elder (and Wood) made chicken fat an essential ingredient in their humor comics recipe that led to Mad, one of the most suksessful humor magazines ever.

Enuff of de history lesson, Tumey -- get to da comics! Swanson drew $alesman $am as if he were packing to go on a long journey, stuffing every nook and cranny with potentially useful stuff. He seemed to particularly enjoy drawing cats and goldfish in the corners. Often there's no gags in these animals... the drawings are funny enuff.

Swanson called attention to his "chicken fat cat" practice in June, 1924 by reprinting a request from a Mrs. Ethel Smith to "draw a picture with a lot of cats in it."

George Swanson gets catty - $alesman $am June 2, 1924
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

 Whether there was actually a letter from Mrs. Smith, or Swan made it all up, the result is a wonderful daily comic with a terrifically funny picture of a lot of cats. In the daze that followed, Swan shoehorned in more cats and goldfish. See if you can spot 'em...

$alesman $am by George Swanson - June 3, 1924 - a nod to Jerry on the Job?
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

Dig also a great Rube Goldberg style ash tray in panel one of the next comic

$alesman $am by George Swanson - June 4, 1924
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

$alesman $am by George Swanson - June 6, 1924
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

There's more continuity in these "chicken fat cat" details than there is in the main story line -- I think it's safe to say that Swan has significant creative motivation in drawing these little cats and fishes.

Screwball comics seem to exist in the tension between the need to create a recognizably and comfortably familiar daily experience for the reader and the artist's chaotic impulse to render the images that bubble up from his unconscious at the moment pen touches paper. Nature abhors a vacuum and so did the masters of screwball comics.

Elder said he added something like 120 background gags to a six-page Mad story in part because Kurtzman's scripts, layout, and editorial hand were so well developed he began to fixate on the background as place where he could put in his own stuff. Elder's chicken fat was his way of satisfying his need to be the constant clown that he was in the rest of his life -- and he had a great precedent in the screwball comics he and Harvey grew up reading and appreciating. Just as I delighted in the background details in their Mad stories (which were reprinted as delicious color inserts in early 80's Mad giants), Kurtzman and Elder grew up savoring the chicken fat of George Swan, Bill Holman, and others.

But aside from all that high-falutin'comic theory, these are just some great kat kartoons -- thanks, Swan!

Just in case anyone is interested in reading my own cartoons and comics, I just posted a new webcomic on my Tumeland blog:

Yowling at the moon,
Paul Tumey

For Pete's Sake! A New Swan Dive!

Salesman Sam Saturday

Here's some paper scans of some very rare George Swanson High Pressure Pete comics. In 1927, Swanson left his hit comic, $alesman $am. It's not clear to me yet exactly what happened, but after a couple of quick stops, Swanson landed at King Features Syndicate, where he created a new version of $am, called High Pressure Pete. In many ways, High Pressure Pete is a more streamlined version of $alesman $am.

High Pressure Pete started June 20, 1927 and ended ten-plus years later, on February 7, 1938. Today, we present some of the very last High Pressure Pete comics, scanned from my own paper collection.

If you compare these comics to Swanson's 1920s $alesman $am comics I've been posting, you'll see that his style simplifies. These strips also have very little to do selling. In fact, the stage is shared, or sometimes completely hogged not by Pete, but by a gregarious lantern-jawed cop. Sometime in 1935, Swanson introduced Officer 6 and 7/8 (his first name is "Joe").  Even though the later High Pressure Pete comic are not as detailed as Swanson's earlier work, they are still lovely examples of screwball cartooning, with exaggerated takes, multiple gags, and superb simple cartooning. Here are three scans of especially nice strips I've selected, all from December, 1937.

This strip shows Swanson developing his verbal gags. You can also see he is still employing his split-tier technique, which was unusual for daily strips. I really like the simplified swear symbols in panel three:

High Pressure Pete by George Swanson - December 2, 1937
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

I chose this next strip because of the spectacular and beautifully rendered culinary waterfall-pratfall in the last panel, that both works are the driver of the gag and echoes Swan's earlier plop-takes.

High Pressure Pete by George Swanson - December 13, 1937
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

"I used to be a clerk once" -- this strip is a look back, a return to High Pressure Pete, and Salesman Sam. Perhaps Swanson knew old Pete's days were numbered.

High Pressure Pete by George Swanson - December 20, 1937
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

High Pressure Pete would end, just about a month later. Swanson would move from Cleveland to New York, and then take over Elza Poppin from Ving Fuller (see my post here). In 1943, Swanson created his last syndicated comic, the even more simplified Flop Family (as named by the syndicate -- Swanson's name for the strip was Dad's Family) which ran for nearly forty years!

In researching this post, I stumbled across a panel cartoon from late 1937 called Excuse It, Please. Even though it has no byline, and is not signed (most of the later High Pressure Pete comics aren't signed, either), the art is unmistakably that of George Swanson. I don't have the start and end dates on this panel, and I'm not sure if Swanson wrote it, although it seems likely since he wrote most everything else we know he drew. The style of humor is not screwball, but  the drawing has Swan's great looney-cartoony exaggerations. Here's a few examples I grabbed:

December 1, 1937

Jan 1, 1938

Jan 3, 1938 - the last appearance of this panel?

So there you have it, a new, previously unknown George Swanson comic, and three nice-quality rare examples of the classic High Pressure Pete that show the development of Swanson's simplified style.

Many thanks to Bob Foster, who wrote the great article on George Swanson that appears in the February 2007 issue of The Comics Journal. That article provided much of the information used in this post.

Yours,
High Pressure Paul

Don't Miss
Yesterday's collection of Bill Holman Spooky the Cat screwball classics

Salesman Sam Goes to Florida!

Salesman Sam Saturday

A new Salesman Sam screwball classic posted every Saturday!

Here's a batch of Swan-derful screwball comics, and an interesting story on George Swanson's road trips down South. George Swanson was the seminal screwballist who created $alesman $am, High Pressure Pete, and The Flop Family. Swanson (who signed his comics "Swan") is an important figure in the study of screwball comics. In his 1921-1927 stretch on $alesman $am, he took some of the wackier elements of humor comics, combined them into a new dense, pun-laden form and then pushed it all over the top. In fact, it's the work of George Swanson that opens the high period of American screwball comics. Either directly or indirectly, George Swanson's $alesman $am influenced the work of several other masters of screwball comics, including Milt Gross, Bill Holman, Boody Rogers, Jack Cole, Basil Wolverton, and Will Elder.

For example, the funny sign: although it was Walter Hoban who originated the use of funny signs, it was Swanson who made it a mainstay of screwball comics, with more frequent and focused use of the device.

Similarly, even though the flip-take (sometimes called a "plop") can be traced to James Swinnerton's turn-of-the-century comics, and seen in numerous prior examples, George Swanson exaggerated the gag reaction to previously unseen surreal heights.

Sidenote: The only other artist of the time who had such wild endings was George McManus in his elegantly rendered Bringing Up Father. However the endings where Maggie hurled a set of dishes, the cat, a rolling pin, furniture, and even sometimes a piano (or am I remembering the Kurtzman/Elder/Krigstein version?) -- these were not flip-takes, but comically exaggerated assaults on a guilty husband by an enraged wife. The device had a whiff of screwballism, but it wasn't built around a gag.

The screwball violence of George McManus' Bringing Up Father
compares visually to George Swanson's exaggerated plops.

Getting back to Swanson,  what follows is an example of $alesman $am from 1926, late in hiss run on the strip, that shows Swanson's mature development of the aforementioned screwball devices. In this example, Swanson has put a "pre-plop" take in the second panel, instead of the last -- a true master.

Salesman Sam by George Swanson - February 2, 1926

Unfortunately, it must be noted that there's also an unconscious racism in this episode, something we find in a great deal of early 20th century American pop culture.

There is much to appreciate in Swan's 1920s and 30s work. In the example below, Swan draws a comical avalanche of books, in addition to the funny figures, exaggerated take, and the funny signs in the background. Oh yes, and the gag! These strips are similar in their sheer density to the Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder "chicken fat" stories for the early Mad.

Salesman Sam by George Swanson - February 28, 1925

 Here, Swan gives us two plop takes and a crowd scene...

Salesman Sam by George Swanson - March 4, 1925

In the beautifully paced strip below, Sam gets a telegram (delivered by Eastern Onion) calling him back from a sales foray to New York City. This is a great example of  Swan's two-tier daily. I don't know if he innovated it, but it was yet another way that he increased the density of comedy in his work. If the comics of Milt Gross are about escalation, the comics of George Swan are about density (but possibly panic, and probably exaggeration).

Salesman Sam by George Swanson - March 6, 1925

George Swanson

In what little information I've found on George Swanson, it appears that at least twice, he drove from his home in Ohio to Florida and the South to escape the winters. He appears to have been a very fun-loving, high-spirited guy and one can only imagine the high-jinks of these annual road trips.

In his first recorded trip down south, in October of 1925, Swanson visited the Big Bayou Alligator Farm, and wrestled not with an alligator, but with a joke:

St. Petersburg Evening Independent, October 20, 1925

And here is the strip that the alligator farm lecturer inspired, offering us a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse of the origins of a rather bizarre gag (note the in-joke title of the strip):

Swanson returned to St. Petersburg and the South nine years later, this time going all the way to Cuba. In the following article, found in a 1934 St. Petersburg, Florida paper, Swan jokes about knowing nothing of cars and being mistaken for a book salesman when he calls on his fellow cartoonist Wally Bishop (author of Muggs and Skeeter, Bishop made his home in St. Petersburg). We learn his hobbies are "motoring and digging up and cleaning up old jokes."

St. Petersburg Times - Oct 25, 1934

The next day's paper carried this delightful cartoon by Swan, in which High-Pressure Pete says howdy to St. Pete:

St. Petersburg Times - Oct 26, 1934

In 1927, Swanson left his highly successful Salesman Sam strip (C.D. Small took over, with dazzling results), and started up a variation, called High Pressure Pete, which eventually King Features embraced. As the years went on, Swanson simplified his style and reduced the density of his comics. In the early years of High Pressure Pete, though, he continued his experiments with the form, as we see in this jam-packed, triple-tier daily from 1928:

High Pressure Pete by George Swanson - April 17. 1928

Here's one of the best flip takes ever, from 1931:

High Pressure Pete by George Swanson - March 20, 1931

Just as Swanson wrote a little of his 1925 Florida trip into his comics, he seems to have had another trip to Florida on his mind in 1931, as he sends Sam and his characters on a road trip to the sunshine state:

March 26, 1931

March 27, 1931

March 28, 1931

March 30, 1931 

The sequences seems to conclude with this great example, which plays on the same humor angle around cars breaking down that Swanson generated in his 1934 interview:

April 2, 1931

Here's some later High Pressure Pete comics from 1935, that show the streamlined style Swanson settled into. These are paper scans courtesy of Carl Linich.

After High Pressure Pete, George Swanson created The Flop Family. Here's a couple of photos of originals that show his simplified, but still solid cartooning:

These originals, and others, can be purchased at the bargain price of $49.99 each  from George Swanson's great-niece. For more information and more photos of originals on this, see my George Swanson page.

That's all for now! I hope you enjoyed this post!

Effa Doofa Daffa,
Paul "Duck" Tumey