The Roots of Screwball: The Lost 1904-1906 Sundays of Gus Mager (Part 3)

Directly on the heels of his sublime five Sundays of What Little Johnny Wanted, Gus Mager created another fascinating, short-lived Sunday comic strip, The Troubles of Pete the Pedlar, which only lasted for six weeks. After his brief foray into the violent fantasies of young Johnny, Mager shifted his focus onto western culture itself, presenting the disastrous adventures of a full grown, fussy American salesman attempting to peddle the wondrous goods of his civilized world to the African inhabitants of a less technological society.

When I read Mager's Pete the Pedlar, I see a comic strip version of Randy Newman's 1972 song, Sail Away. Each Pete Sunday begins with him arriving on an African shore, selling to the natives. In Newman's song, regarded among many as his best and a landmark of American culture, a slave trader arrives on an African shore and woos the natives:

In America you'll get food to eat  

Won't have to run through the jungle  

And scuff up your feet  

You'll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day 

It's great to be an American  

Ain't no lions or tigers-ain't no mamba snake 

Just the sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake 

Ev'rybody is as happy as a man can be 

Climb aboard, little wog-sail away with me                   

                                     - Randy Newman (Sail Away)

Of course, everything the slave trader is saying to the natives is a lie. These lyrics are bathed in a beautiful, soaring score that belies the savage truth. Similarly, Mager's Pete appears to be a funny little screwball comic. Could Mager have been wryly commenting on the lies of consumerism in The Troubles of Pete the Pedlar? Note the name of Pete's company: Joblot and Bunkum (for those not in the know, "bunk" is slang for false information.) Even though the machinery and machine-made goods Pete sells are functional, the ritual of the sales pitch always devolves into chaos for him and his potential customers. A hippo eats a record player and chases Pete, with a song streaming from his open mouth -- this, to me, seems to inhabit a more poetic and beautifully surreal space than the pranks of the smirking Katzenjammer Kids, or the mischief of the eternally repentant Buster Brown.

The Troubles of Pete the Pedlar ran from November 11 to December 16 in 1906. In the first episode, Pete has rowed ashore from his big, two-masted ship, visible on the horizon. He is greeted by a grinning giraffe, a leering hippo, a curious ostrich, and jungle natives who are oblivious to both the process of a proper sales transaction and the intended use of the products Pete peddles. By the end of the first adventure, the drooling hippo (the spirit animal of the Consumer?) attempts to consume not Pete's wares, but the "pedlar" himself! Here's a paper scan from my collection:

The Troubles of Pete the Pedlar by Gus Mager, November 11, 1906
(Collection of Paul Tumey)

Mager has given us here a comic strip that appears to be like the usual half-page Sunday comedies of the period, but one which is actually more sophisticated in both content and execution. Here's the same page in color, from the archives of Ohio State University's Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum:

(Collection Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum)

I love the native in the background of panel 3, who has helped himself to Pete's boatload of paintings -- he appears to be quite the art lover!

It's also worth noting that, with Pete the Pedlar, Mager had designed yet another strip that allowed him to draw his beloved jungle animals, particularly hippos and monkeys. In an issue of Cartoons, William P. Langreich wrote of Mager: "Gus Mayer (sic), the author of the famous "Monk" series, always did like to draw animals. Hippos and monkeys were his favorites..." Given this, it's no surprise that the second Pete adventure features a howling hippo, with an operatic ostrich thrown in, for good measure.

The Troubles of Pete the Pedlar by Gus Mager, November 18, 1906
(Collection of Paul Tumey)

I love the look of surprise on the hippo's face when the music from the swallowed record player erupts from his mouth. By the last panel, he has begun to embrace the new development and lifts his head in song.

It goes without saying that the depiction of the tribal king in the strip above is less than flattering -- but then so is the caricature of the wimpy peddler. I don't actually see anything particularly racist in Mager's natives other than the use of the formulaic big-lipped, bug-eyed way of cartooning a black man that was popular for decades in American newspaper comics.  In fact, the so-called civilized white-skinned Pete appears to be pretty idiotic in comparison to the natives of these comics. In the strip above, the King, startled by a jack-in-the-box toy exercises his royal power on Pete with a lordly comment: "You WILL play tricks on me!"

That same week, Mager drew the topper vignette for Buster Brown, and indulged his love of hippos and monkeys. These Mager toppers have nothing to do with the content of Richard F. Outcault's Buster Brown comic which ran below them.

Gus Mager topper for Richard Outcault's Buster Brown - Nov. 18, 1906

In the third episode, Pete attempts to sell the natives a pre-fabricated house and discovers that selling involves very little lion around.

The Troubles of Pete the Pedlar by Gus Mager, November 25, 1906
(Collection of Paul Tumey)

In this period of American newspaper comics, the fifth panel of a six panel Sunday was almost always the climax of whatever comic chaos ensued, usually filled with explosions, falling objects, food and paint splatters, and all manner of disaster. In Mager's strip, he underplays the comic moment and the result is far funnier than the over-reaching slapstick of the day. The image of  Pete fleeing the lion inside the house is genuinely funny.

That same week, Mager drew a delightful Thanksgiving-themed vignette for Outcault's Buster Brown, featuring his jungle animals.

Gus Mager topper for Richard Outcault's Buster Brown - Nov. 25, 1906

It's not clar if Mager simply didn't create a Pete episode for the following week, or if the newspapers I've been using to fill the missing gaps in my collection didn't run Pete for the week of December 2. In any case, here is the extra large Buster Brown topper vignette Gus Mager drew that week, this time with a Christmas theme.

Gus Mager topper for Richard Outcault's Buster Brown - Dec.2, 1906

In the Pete episode of the following week, December 9, Pete attempts to sell stilts to diminutive pygmies. This seems like a good idea, but we know better...

The Troubles of Pete the Pedlar by Gus Mager, December 9, 1906
(Collection of Paul Tumey)

Graphically, the above strip is a perfect sequential deconstruction of cultural logic. We move from verticals of Pete's world in panel one to the skewed slants of the pygmies. The last two panels are exponentially funnier without sound effects or speech balloons. Mager's 1906 Sundays show, perhaps for the first time, what Minimalism looks like in screwball comic strip form.

On December 9, someone besides Mager drew the Buster Brown vignette, and so we move on to the last episode of Pete, in which he attempts to sell a folding bed to jungle natives and draws the interest of a famished feline:

The Troubles of Pete the Pedlar by Gus Mager, December 16, 1906

The last panel, with the flattened, two-dimensional tiger pre-figures the sort of visual gags around plastic forms that would become a staple of 1930s and 1940s animated cartoons -- Mager, in his 1906 Sundays, was thinking like an animated film director would, twenty years after Pete the Pedlar!

Even though his short run of Sunday funnies experiments ended on December 16, 1906, Mager continued to draw topper vignettes for Buster Brown. In these last examples, Mager begins to draw two sequential vignettes, offering a rudimentary comic strip, boiled down to it's most basic elements.  Here are the rest of Mager's Buster Brown topper (again, these have nothing to do with the content of the Buster Brown comics that ran below them):

Gus Mager topper for Richard Outcault's Buster Brown - Dec.23, 1906

Gus Mager topper for Richard Outcault's Buster Brown - Dec.30, 1906

Gus Mager topper for Richard Outcault's Buster Brown - January 6, 1907

Gus Mager topper for Richard Outcault's Buster Brown - January 13, 1907

Gus Mager topper for Richard Outcault's Buster Brown - January 20, 1907

Mager returned to Sunday comics, with Hawkshaw the Detective, about seven years after What Little Johnny Wanted and The Troubles of Pete the Pedlar. His new Sunday was a spin-off of his popular daily, Sherlocko the Monk. Since the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, vigorously defended the Sherlock Holmes copyright around 1913, Mager retreated from such a direct name and instead lifted from an obscure play in which a detective character is named "Hawkshaw." naturally, after some time, the word "hawkshaw" entered into popular American slang as a substitute word for "detective." Oddly, Mager's Sunday series offered a continuing story, while his dailies were one-shot gags. Here's an example of a Mager Sunday Hawkshaw, from the first year of the strip:

Hawkshaw the Detective by Gus Mager - August 24, 1913

Mager's Hawkshaw is good stuff, but it lacks the minimalist sensibility and sheer brilliance of his 1906 Sunday comics.

This concludes my 3-part monograph on Gus Mager's lost 1904-1906 Sundays. Despite the persistent comics archeology and the careful analysis offered in this monograph, two big questions related to this material remain: where did this stuff -- so unusual for the time -- come from, and why isn't the rest of Mager's subsequent output filled with similar sophistication?

In addition to having a long successful run with his Hawkshaw Sunday (1913-1947, with some short breaks), Mager carved out a career for himself as a noted painter and member of the New York art world. He was friends with Paul Bransom (who took over Gus Dirks' bug comic strip after he killed himself) and Walt Kuhn, who was also a cartoonist who enjoyed working with animal characters. In 1913, Kuhn organized the seminal art exhibit at the Armory in New York City. Today, this show is legendary for being a snapshot of American art at the time and for influencing a new generation of artists. Kuhn included in this exhibit paintings by a few of his cartoonist colleagues who also wielded a brush: Rudolph Dirks (The Katzemjammer Kids), T.E. Powers, and... Gus Mager. Mager had two paintings in the show, as shown in this scan from Kuhn's own copy of the program, now a part of the Archives of American Art.

Here's a self-portrait by Mager:



Gus Mager's life and work bears further scrutiny. In 1906, he was onto something and created a handful of comics that were artistic successes, generations ahead of their time. These comics embraced minimalism and other formal art elements to offer a simple but profound graphic style, anticipating the 1940s and 50s comics of Otto Soglow and the cartoons of the UPA Studio. The content of Mager's What Little Johnny Wanted exposed the true power fantasies of every young boy, anticipating Maurice Sendak's classic 1963 book Where the Wild Things Are and Bill Waterson's hit comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes (1985-1995). But Mager, like most American cartoonists of the early 20th century, was first and foremost a popular artist who reshaped his vision and style until he hit upon something that pleased the general public. In doing so, he left behind his bold 1904-1906 experiments in comics, which have since been consigned to the dustbins of history. Even so, much of his work before, during, and after the period of the "lost Sundays" bears the stamp of a quirky, gifted artist and is worth study. Perhaps, someday, we'll have enough information and examples of Gus Mager's work to be able to answer all the questions I've raised about this fascinating American artist.

That is all,
Screwball Paul
paultumey@gmail.com

Gus Mager and canine friend - undated photo (circa 1910)

- All text copyright 2013 Paul Tumey. No portion of this text may be used without written permission from paultumey@gmail.com

Roots of Screwball: The Lost 1904-06 Gus Mager Sundays (Part 2)

In 1906, Gus Mager was on the verge of something great.

Working mostly in weekday comic strips, Mager created two knockout Sunday comics: What Little Johnny Wanted, and The Troubles of Pete the Pedlar. These are unknown early high points of the form -- with sharp wit, superb cartooning, and a modernist use of artistic elements such as repetition, flattened planes, minimalism, and negative space. Their appearances were so brief, it's questionable that these comics had any influence at all, but nonetheless they are worth our study and appreciation today.

I'm proud to present in these articles 10 of these 11 wonderful rare comics, some from paper scans in my own collection and some excavated from microfilm archives of old newspapers.

It's hard to believe, but each of these great Sunday funnies lasted only a few weeks, and then Mager's modernist experiements, allowed to bloom in the larger space of his 1906 Sunday half pages, abruptly ended, as he continued to work in the more cramped confines of the weekday comics, producing his famous Monks series, among others.

In early 1907, Mager was at a crossroads. His Monks series, begun in April 1904 with the ever-changing titles (Knocko, Coldfeeto, Rhymo, Henpecko, Nervo,Braggo, etc.) was catching on in a big way. Here's a strip from later in the run (January 2, 1910) that showcases several of the monks.

Gus Mager's Monks strip from January 2, 1910
features several of his ever-rotating cast.

In his autobiography, Harpo Speaks! Harpo Marx talks about the popularity of the strip and it's notable influence on entertainment culture of the time:



Harpo Marx got his
famous stage name from
Gus Mager's comic strips.

In Rockford, the four of us and a monologist named Art Fisher started up a game of five-card stud, between shows. At that time there was a very popular comic strip called "Knocko the Monk," and as a result there was a rash of stage names that ended in "o." On every bill there would be at least one Bingo, Socko, Jumpo, or Bumpo.
   There must have been a couple of them on the bill with us in Rockford and we must have been making cracks about them. because when Art Fisher started dealing a poker hand, he said "A hole card for -- 'Harpo.' A card for 'Chicko.' One for --" Now that he'd committed himself, he had to pass "o-names" all around the table.
   The first two had been simple. I played the harp and my older brother chased the chicks. For a moment Art was stuck. Then he continued the deal. A card for 'Grouch" (he carried his dough in a grouch bag), and finally a card for "Gummo" (he had a gumshoe way of prowling around backstage and sneaking up on people).
   We stuck with the gag handles for the rest of the game and that, we thought, was that. It wasn't. We couldn't get rid of them. We were Chicko, Harpo, Groucho and Gummo for the rest of the week, the rest of the season, and the rest of our lives. (Harpo Speaks! by Harpo Marx.1961)

Knocko the Monk -- September 17, 1904 - poetic justice, no ifs, ands or butts...

As stated in part one of this Mager article, there can be no clearer screwball lineage than that between Gus Mager's comics and the Marx Brothers.

With a weekday strip that was such a hit, it's a mystery as to why Mager didn't extend it into a Sunday series, as well. Perhaps Mager's editors didn't want to monkey around with a winning formula. In 1913, when Mager left Hearst to work for Pulitzer, he finally did migrate his weekday series, now completely given over to an entertaining and sharp satire of Sherlock Holmes (and consistently titled Sherlocko the Monk) , into a weekday and Sunday series called Hawkshaw the Detective. His Sunday was a continuing story, where the weekday version was episodic -- the reverse of the usual treatment. It's also worth noting that Mager's Hawkshaw Sunday was an early example of continuity in comics, which didn't catch on in a big way for another ten years or so. Mager's career had some interesting creative choices.

Also, as stated earlier, it's my own theory that Mager was playing off the words "hippo" and "monkey" when he hit upon his naming scheme. As stated in a Cartoon Magazine article, "hippos and monkey were his favorites." However, according to a May, 1910 Bookman article, the original inspiration for Mager's "o-clan" came from James. J. Montague, a fellow Hearst staffer who wrote humorous verse, columns, and short stories.

Gus Mager, from a 1911 paper,
now established as the
"Monk" cartoonist

It is significant that the first of this clan to be pictured was "Groucho" [as far as I can tell, the first strip was called Knocko -- but Groucho may have turned up earlier ]. The idea for it came to James J. Montague, who did not hand it over to Mager until he had first extracted enough inspiration from the cloud which hung over the artist to give him the dark plot of a light verse.  (Some Figures in the New Humor, Bookman, May 1910)

Perhaps at some later date, I can find the original Montague verse that inspired Mager and in turn numerous Vaudeville performers, including The Marx Brothers.

In any case, the Monks weekday comics were a sensation. In late 1906 and early 1907, Gus Mager was  at a crossroads. He could continue to develop the charming, artful animal Sunday comics or he could pour himself into the Monks series, which was starting to climb the tree of success. He chose the ladder -- unh, that is -- the latter. And, sadly, as far as I can tell, except for a few lovely pieces of banner art for other strips, Mager abandoned this particular cartooning style and apporoach.

What follows, then, is a look at what could have been -- and briefly was. Mager's early Sundays are among hundreds of such experiments made with comics in the freewheeling days of early American newspaper comics. From the vantage point of more than a century later, we can see that Gus Mager was on to something, creating an early version of a visual storytelling style that would emerge into the mainstream of American culture some forty or fifty years later with comics like Crockett Johnson's Barnaby and the UPA animation studio's celebrated stylized cartoons.


What Little Johnny Wanted
Foreshadowing Sendak, Watterson, and even Eisner (a bit)

Calvin and Hobbes... the 1906 model

Running for only five consecutive Sundays, from September 30 to October 28, 1906, What Little Johnny Wanted emerges fully formed in both concept and execution. Mager has made considerable strides forward from his previous Sunday, And Then Poppa Came from 1904:

The first episode of Gus Mager's first Sunday comic, from September 11, 1904

Two years later, aside from a slightly different wording in the first episode, Mager is consistent in his presentation of What Little Johnny Wanted -- just one of many ways he has injected formalism into his work. His idea is both clever and a pure distillation of the form, since he is basically presenting in each episode a simple sentence: "What little Johnny wanted -- and -- what he got." Extracted from the comic as pure prose, the sentence makes little sense. As part of a graphic narrative, it works beautifully, offering a world of depth,, detail, and a wry commentary on the nature of child fantasy versus adult reality -- the two worlds that early American comic strips straddled.

September 30 1906 (collection of Paul Tumey)

By breaking the strip's theme sentence into two parts, with the first part also serving as the strip's title, Mager has created an unusual structure. The last part of the sentence, "and what he got," occurs in the last panel, with the same type treatment as the title, integrating the title into the fabric of the strip's story in a way that wouldn't happen again in comics until Will Eisner began to do this with his Spirit stories ion the early 1940s. Mager's choice of font style is masterful, with bold serif lettering that has the feel of something carved into stone -- as though this is a rock-solid truth that cannot be changed.

On the same Sunday the first Johnny appeared, Mager contributed the first of his brief spate of banner art drawn for other Hearst comics. Functioning as a sort of proto-topper, Mager's comic is a vignette from What Little Johnny Wanted  -- not lifted from any episode, but an original scene. Interestingly, Mager's signature is different than his usual cursive scrawl. This is the first appearance of the wide-eyed little girl.

And Her Name Was Maud banner art by Gus Mager featuring Johnny - September 30, 1906

In the next week's episode of Johnny, a wild animal is a friend rather than a creature to be vanquished.

October 7, 1906

Another very successful aspect of this strip is Mager's stylized drawings of people and animals. With Johnny as well as the Sunday comic that immediately followed, The Troubles of Pete the Pedlar, Mager found a way to draw the jungle animals he loved in clever new story structures. In Johnny, the animals are always part of his fantasy world, which occupies the first five of six panels. Mager's cartoons animals, both cute and wild aren't that far off from the animal-monsters in Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are (1963). In fact, Mager's Johnny and Sendak are thematically related, in that they both present an unsentimental and honest view of a child's desire for power and dominance. The fifth panel in the above example reminds me very much of Sendak -- and also introduces the little girl who appears in the next two episodes.

While the episodes of Johnny are structurally repetitive, each strip actually explores a different angle of a child's fantasy. In the next week's episode, Johnny is the uber-hero, effortlessly defeating buffalo, Indians, and a lion. In the end, we learn he was inspired by a dime novel adventure.

October 14, 1906

By presenting his figures in relative perspective with no background details, Mager creates in the above example a perfect cartoon. He's even removed the chair the angry man (Johnny's dad?) sits on in panel six. Mager has stripped out every extraneous detail, allowing us to see the world through a young boy's mind, where buffalo, Indians, and lions co-exist and things like chairs are unimportant and unseen.

Also on October 14, Mager's tigers-and-trees march across the banner for Richard Outcault's Buster Brown Sunday page.:

Buster Brown banner art by Gus Mager - Oct 14, 1906

Continuing the adventure theme the following week, Mager turns on the most visually detailed episode of the series, with a battle at sea. Johnny is the pirate raider, and the little girl from last week returns, charmingly hanging around the fantasy as an astonished observer of Johnny's prowess.

October 21, 1906 (collection of Paul Tumey)

Also that week, Mager drew the Buster Brown banner art. This time, it's not from Johnny's world, but instead a classroom with a stern hippo teacher -- one has to admire Mager's playfulness.

Buster Brown banner art by Gus Mager - October 21, 1904

In the last episode of the series, Mager brings one of the sanguine tigers from episode 1 back. This time, instead of an enemy to defeat, the tiger is an ally -- prefiguring Calvin and Hobbes, if only for an eyeblink in comics history. Still, perhaps the greatest aspect of What Little Johnny Wanted is the celebration of the richness and sheer, delightfully snarky kid-ness of a boy's fantasy world.

October 28, 1906

Also this week, Mager contributed the banner art for another Buster Brown Sunday page, with another cameo by Johnny, serving almost as a mini-version of the strip, this time. It's interesting that Mager's banner art has nothing whatsoever to do with Buster Brown. This is the last appearance of Little Johnny, and I'm grateful that the pie-eyed little girl is here, too. I love that she has a be-ribboned pet pig. Ah, if only Mager had continued Johnny!

Buster Brown banner art by Gus Mager - October 28, 1906

Sadly, What Little Johnny Wanted ended with the above examples. With this comic, Gus Mager was decades ahead of his time. Perhaps audiences of the 1900s weren't as ready to celebrate the psychotic fantasies of the common boy as they were in the 1960s with the sucess of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are and in the 1980s, when Calvin and Hobbes became a hit.

 After a short vacation of a week, Mager returned to the Sunday supplement with a new comic, equally formal in structure and eccentric in nature - The Troubles of Pete the Pedlar. In the third and last part of this series on Mager's lost Sundays, I'll share the Pete Sundays with some notes, as well as more of Mager's charming banner art comics for Buster Brown. In the meantime, here's a sneak preview:

The Troubles of Pete the Pedlar by Gus Mager - Novemeber 18, 1906

That is all,
Screwball Paul Tumey

Roots of Screwball: The Lost 1904-06 Gus Mager Sundays (Part One)

I have some screwy news!

I just completed an essay on the birth of American newspaper screwball comics that will be included in the forthcoming Sunday Press book, Society Is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip 1896-1915. While no release date has been set, it seems a safe bet that the book will come out before the end of 2013. This is a book that I'm sure every fan of screwball comics and the comics on this blog will cherish!

For those of you unfamiliar with Sunday Press books, be sure to check them out here -- they present amazing old newspaper comics in their original size in beautifully designed volumes. Seeing Little Nemo and Krazy Kat Sundays in the original colors and size offers the invaluable opportunity to re-discover these works of art anew and to more fully understand and appreciate them -- in this case, size matters!

Having covered the standout comics of the early days, Sunday Press publisher Peter Maresca has laudably decided to move into devising anthologies that collect lesser-known comics that are worthy of our attention. His Forgotten Fantasy volume is a wonder and highly recommended. The price tags for these books, while high by everyday standards, are well worth it -- since buying the original Sunday pages in these books would cost far more - -probably at least a hundred times as much. And, you can read with impunity, not having to worry about the paper crumbling in your fingers. Plus... you get some cool essays and bonus ephemera. So, my four-color friends, I encourage you to save up and spring for one these deeply satisfying books. I am honored to have the chance to contribute an essay to the upcoming book.

(Here and above) Gus Mager's contributions to the
1909 and 1910 programs for the Kit Kat Club,
a small organization of  avant-garde
New York artists that included
many cartoonists.

Writing this essay helped me to pull together some thoughts I've been developing on how certain elements of  screwball comics developed in American newspaper comic strips. Since my essay, (currently titled Mule Kicks, Boy Bounces, Eccentrics Perpetrate Chaos: American Screwball Comics Commenced in the Earliest Sunday Funnies) is a breathless 1700 word survey of a few highlights, I've decided to delve deeper and present a NEW series on this blog: The Roots of Screwball Comics.

In order to create the Sunday Press essay, it was necessary to sift through my personal collection of fragile old funny papers and my archive of scans to pull together an ersatz, rough-hewn framework for understanding the development of  screwballism in early American comic strips. In an upcoming essay on this blog, I will share this framework with you, as imperfect as it is. But, for now, in true screwball fashion, I'll start randomly and share with you one of the many screwball delights I discovered in early American newspaper comics:

The Lost 1904-1906 Sunday Comics of Gus Mager - Part One

Known primarily for his Sunday comic Sherlock Holmes spoof, Hawkshaw the Detective, which ran off and on from 1913 through 1947, Gus Mager (1878-1956) was a fine cartoonist and accomplished painter. Mager was born in New Jersey to German immigrant parents. The self-taught cartoonist was influenced by the work of German cartoonists represented in his parent's library, including the great Wilhelm Busch. Details of his life are chronicled by comics historian Allan Holtz here.

Much of Mager's earliest comic strips of the 1900s are filled with rich humor, joi de vivre, and innovations stemming from a fine arts sensibility. His work from 1904-1913 anticipates where the form and screwball genre would go in ensuing decades. While there appears to be nothing screwball in his paintings, which hang in many galleries and museums today (including the Whitney), Mager certainly had a flair for the artful expression of exaggeration in his comic strips.

Gus Mager, circa 1905-1910

In his cartooning career, Mager created well over 30 individual series, mostly dailies (see the Illustrated Gus Mager Comicography below). Many of these creations were spawned between 1904 and 1913, sometimes only running for a few days or weeks before being discarded. In several cases, there is overlap between his various series. This speaks both to the more casual, freewheeling attitude newspaper editors and cartoonists had in the early days and to the ambitious Mager's quest to find a subject that would strike a chord with the public. As we'll see in this and the next article, Mager's early work has a satirical edge to it that reminds me of Roald Dahl's stories for kids, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. For readers of 1905, who delighted in the slapstick antics of the Katzenjammer Kids, Mager's early satirical bent may have been a bit too droll -- which could also explain his numerous short-lived series. It's difficult to really know exactly why Mager had so many brief series in his first eight years as a professional cartoonist.

More likely, however, it simply took Mager a while to settle down. His restless early career was not uncommon. The form of comics allows for a great deal of experimentation and development of ideas -- and in the 1900s, the business of comics also allowed for this.

Gus Mager was born in 1878 to German immigrant parents in New Jersey, and grew up enjoying the cartoons of Wilhelm Busch and Karl Arnold. Thus inspired, he sold cartoons to American magazines in his teenage years. At some point in his mid-20s, Mager landed a position as staff cartoonist at the Hearst-owned New York American and New York Journal. These papers provided spot cartoons, art and comics to the other Hearst papers around the country.

Members of the Hearst stable of New York cartoonists, 1904.  T.S. Sullivant is on the far left.

Mager's first comic strip work appears to start in April, 1904. From the start, he seemed inclined to draw charming hippos and monkeys, possibly influenced by the work of fellow staffer T.S. Sullivant whose humorous animal cartoons were highly regarded then and now:

T.S. Sullivant's version of hippos and monks

But where old-school renderers like Sullivant put the emphasis on detailed funny drawings, Mager seemed to understand the need for a different kind of visual approach in sequential comics. His clothes-wearing animals are simpler, but no less charming. One of his first strips was called, alternatively, Jungle Land, The Jungle Society, and In Jungle Society. It began as a series of separate panels with typeset captions and featured animals in their au natural state.

October 15, 1904

The cocky mouse character in this next example reminds me of something we'd see in 1930s and 40s animated cartoons and comic books:

October 8, 1904

At some point, Mager's Jungle comic morphed into a sequential strip. The animals began to wear clothes, Mager's drawing style became more refined, and his humor became more slapstick. In the example below, Mager cleverly plays with the central panel border as a separating wall between two rooms. Four years later, in 1910, George Herriman would build an entire strip around this concept, called The Family Upstairs. Mager's early comics are filled with this sort of playful innovation and experimentation.

May 27, 1906  

In a circa 1920 issue of Cartoons magazine (in which his name is misspelled as "Gus Mayer"), Mager's early career development is discussed:

"Gus Mayer (sic), the author of the famous "Monk" series, always did like to draw animals. Hippos and monkeys were his favorites, and in order to indulge his hobby to the fullest extent he gave up a position as a jewelry designer, and went to the New York American where they allowed him to make animals by the yard. Finally somebody suggested that he take the little monkey which appeared usually in the corner of his weekly "jungle" page and develop him into a full-fledged comic character. So Mayer (sic) dressed up the little beast, clipped his tail, and introduced him to polite society as "Knocko the Monk," a gentle satire on those individuals who are always taking the joy out of life."
- From Comikers and Their Characters by William P. Langreich (Cartoons Magazine, 1915)

In addition to spelling Mager's name wrong, the article's description of how Mager's second early weekday series, the "Monks" came about is also erroneous, for Mager started both his Jungle comic and the Monks series in April, 1904. Here's an early Knocko the Monk that mentions Teddy Roosevelt:

August 13, 1904 - dropout lines indicate a second color the microfilming process did not pick up

These strips appeared three or four times a week, usually on weekdays. Sometimes Mager drew two tiers, approaching the half page Sunday format.

September 3, 1904

The Cartoons article goes on to explain:

"Knocko had his day and was succeeded by 'Grafto the Monk,' a sort of a simian panhandler. 'Rhymo' then gave Mayer (sic) a chance to inflict some of his 'made in Newark' poetry upon his readers. Finally came 'Sherlocko the Monk,' a creature endowed with the uncanny instincts of Sire Arthur Conan Doyle's world famous character."- From Comikers and Their Characters by William P. Langreich (Cartoons Magazine, 1915) 

Left to Right: George Overbury 'Pop" Hart, Walt Kuhn, Gus Mager on banjo. Kuhn was
also an early cartoonist with an original flair who became a famous
painter -- and is also known for organizing the seminal 1913 New York Armory
Art Show -- which included paintings by Mager, Kuhn, Rudolph Dirks
(The Katzenjammer Kids), and cartoonist T.E. Powers.

Once again, the author of this piece has his facts wrong, but still captures the basic gist of Mager's career. There were numerous Monks from 1904-1911 before Mager devoted the strip to the adventures of Sherlocko (all of which were reprinted in a recommended book in the Hyperion Classic Comics series by Bill Blackbeard). Mager's Sherlock Holmes satires, which are among the very first of hundreds that followed, deserve a future article on their own. Eventually, Mager humanized Sherlocko, and then created a new Sunday version, Hawkshaw the Detective ("hawkshaw" is slang for detective), which ran for four decades. It's a testament to Mager's uniqueness that his weekday strip had no continuity, where his Sunday Hawkshaws were long-running, shaggy dog continuities -- the reverse of the usual approach by comic strippers. Here's a special Monk strip that features many of the characters:

1910: Some of the Monks shown here include, left to right, Groucho, Nervo, and Knocko (on tuba).

The Monk names ending in O created an early cartoon-inspired fad, similar to Rube Goldberg's 1909 Foolish Questions series (see my article here). Some writers speculate Mager was inspired by Latinate Italian in his naming scheme, but I suspect that he was combining his two favorite, trademark animals: the hippo and the monk. It's also of interest that, in his autobiography, Harpo Marx clearly states the comedy team of The Marx Brothers derived their names from Mager's comic strip - a clear example of screwball lineage, if there ever was one! Note also that the Marx Brothers named an early vaudeville show and a movie "Cocoanuts, " a further connection with the popular comic strip.

The bulk of Mager's 30-odd cartoon series were single tier weekday strips, but he did produce three short-lived Sunday funnies 1904-1906 -- each one so filled with humor and style that they beg to be re-discovered an appreciated.

In September 11, 1904, Mager created the half-page Sunday feature called And Then Papa Came, his first run at a Sunday feature.

September 11, 1904: The first of  only sixepisodes

The basic idea of the strip is simple, but effective. A girl's suitor hides when poppa comes, and chaos ensues when poppa comically discovers the suitor, usually in a hilariously painful way, and goes bananas. The last panel in the above strip is very close to the trademark plop take (or back-flip) of the screwball comics of the 1920s and 30s.

October 9, 1904

Mager's drawings are richly comical, with a clarity of composition and line that clearly communicate the gag. In the strip above, we see Mager experimenting with repetition on the background. The six circles of the moons in squares of black are a stabilizing visual element that is both decorative and has a story function (to tell us it's a bright moonlit night). Similarly, the next week's episode -- sadly, the last in the all-too-brief series -- uses small white circles in the color field of the tree. There are fewer and fewer white circles, representing oranges, as we work through the panel -- a beautiful device in its simplicity that anticipates the comics of Otto Soglow (The Little King).

October 18, 1904

The character designs of the monkeys are compellingly ugly and funny. Mager has developed his craft in both  funny animals and in comic strips. As with Frederick Opper and James Swinnerton, Mager has created a six panel sequence where the chaos explodes in the fifth panel, followed by a denouement in the sixth panel. From week-to-week, the series grows funnier as we learn to expect the final scene of the suitor scampering towards the horizon. Mager's staging in the final panel, where we see the characters from the back and from a distance, encourages us to step back and laugh, similar to the way Carl Barks sometimes ended his 10-page Donald Duck stories in the 1940s and 50s. Sadly, the series ended after just six episodes, and Mager's work was not seen in the Sunday pages for two years.

On September 30, 1906, What Little Johnny Wanted, a true forgotten gem of comics first appeared, and lasted for only five episodes. The comic was a sharp, satirical reversal of warm and fuzzy kids fantasy adventures, and represented a far more refined and sophisticated accomplishment.

September 30, 1906 - Note the title, which was refined in later episodes
(From the collection of Paul Tumey)

NEXT TIME, in Part Two of this article, we'll look at more examples of What Little Johnny Wanted, and Mager's other lost Sunday, The Troubles of Pete the Pedlar, with a plethora of large paper scans from my collection!

All the Best,
Screwballo

An Illustrated Gus Mager Comicography
Most of this information comes from American Newspaper Comics: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide by Allan Holtz 

Sunday Halves and Full Pages
And Then Papa Came (9/11/04 to 10/18/04)
What Little Johnny Wanted (9/30/06 to 10/28/06)
Troubles of Pete the Pedlar (11/11/06 to 12/16/06)
Hawkshaw the Detective (1913 to 1947, with some breaks)
Main Street (10/15/22 to 10/7/23)

Weekday Panels and Strips

Jungle Land/ The Jungle Society/ In Jungle Society (4/14/04 to 2/27/06)

Oct 15, 1904: In the first strips, Mager drew
a series of panels with typset captions and
no speech balloons. Each panel was a separate gag.
This strip may be a jam with his friend and colleague at
The Evening Journal, Paul Bransom,
who possibly drew the snail, man, and grasshopper.
(from microfilm)

May 27 1906: At some point Mager shifted into drawing a sequential
version of this strip, with speech balloons. In this one, we are treated to a Mager alligator.
(from microfilm)

[Various names such as Knocko, Braggo, Coldfeeto, etc.] the Monk (4/22/04-3/613)

July 2, 1904: Mager's first Monk was Knocko, who knocked everything down a peg.
Satisfyingly, Knocko always got knocked himself in the last panel.
(from microfilm)

January 9, 1911: Original art to a very funny episode of  Sherlocko the Monk daily.
Mager's parody was so popular that it's speculated Arthur Conan Doyle
threatened lawsuit and William Randolph Hearst hired him away
to create a carbon copy strip, called Hawkshaw the Detective.

Foxy Reynard (12/6/04 to 12/9/04)
Trouble Bruin (12/16/04 to 12/19/04)

If Swinnerton's bears were a big hit, why not give a new bear strip a go?
Mager did --  for exactly three days! Good title, though.
(from microfilm)

It's Too Bad that Willie Stammers (1/20/05 - 1/28/05)

February 4, 1905 - this strip barely lasted long enough for Willie
to get a complete sentence out. (from microfilm)

Everyday Dreams (3/2/05 to 5/29/05)
Cecil in Search of a Job (7/29/05 to 9/27/05)
Oily John the Detective (9/20/05 to 10/10/05)
Louis and Franz (12/23/05 to 1/23/06)

January 21, 1906: Let's mix Swinnerton's bears with Opper's mule!
(from microfilm)

Maybe You Don't Believe It (6/24/07 to 8/14/07)
The Nerve of Some People (1/15/08 to 1/18/08)
What Little Sammy Knows (1/28/08 to 2/4/08)
The Merry Widower (4/20/08 to 5/29/08)

May 31, 1908 (from microfilm)

Dogs is Dogs (1/23/09 to 3/3/09)
A Misfit Fable (2/24/09 to 3/19/09)
Ain't It? (3/2/09 to 3/1/09)
And Not Only That (3/16/09 to 5/3/10)
O. Heeza Boob (9/21/12 to 1/3/13)
Millionbucks (1/18/13 to 6/3/13)

Millionbucks (Sometimes called Millionbucks and  Kandykiddo)

Obliging Otto (6/21/13 to 8/2/13)
Time-Table Tompkins (12/17/13 to 1/6/14)
Trewtulyfe Family (1923-24)

The Trewtulyfe Family by Gus Mager  - October 2, 1923

The Trewtulyfe Family by Gus Mager  - October 3, 1923

Radio the Monk (1/2/24 to 3/29/24)
Sherlocko (1925)
Fifty-Fifty Family (1925, dates unknown)
Oliver's Adventures (1926-34)