H.M. Bateman and The Speed of Life: Four Cartoons from 1923

Here are four pages of the brilliant English cartoonist H.M. Bateman's cartoons from 1923, scanned from a scrapbook I recently acquired. I believe these are all from the pages of Life, a black and white humor magazine that preceded the more famous photo-based Life Magazine.

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ANNOUNCEMENT! We're changing direction at the Masters of Screwball Comics blog. Instead of a daily posting, we'll shift to a weekly Sunday posting for the fall of 2012, to be called "Screwball Sunday." This will mimic a Sunday newspaper comics section, but will be assembled by me and be composed entirely of noteworthy screwball comics from all eras, with notes by me (of course). I will occasionally write and post illustrated essays on screwball comics as well. Tune in this Sunday for our first SCREWBALL SUNDAY! 

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As I wrote in an earlier posting on H. M. Bateman (1882-1970), it may be too much of a stretch to classify him as purely screwball, but there's no doubt his work influenced screwball cartoonists. Consider how the the panel I've excerpted above compares to this scene from Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder's classic "Restaurant!" story from Mad #16 (1954)

While Elder has created a dense tapestry of sight gags, the basic energy is the same as Bateman's panel. Both cartoonists are saying something about the acceleration of modern life.

There is so much to savor in Bateman's work. Like Milt Gross, each drawing is funny on it's own, but also contributes to a glorious escalation of comedic chaos. Bateman himself said that his cartooning was "going mad on paper."

The four pages in this article are chosen because they all depict people struggling madly to get somewhere, something that was relatively new in 1923. Bateman, who was born in 1882, saw the rise of the automobile. In this cartoon, he chronicles the plight of the pedestrian plagued by motorized vehicles at every turn.

From Life, circa 1923 (from the collection of Paul Tumey)

The gag is that our nimble pedestrian is run over by an "out of date vehicle." This cartoon says there's no avoiding change, and if you try, you will suffer. Here's another Bateman, beautifully composed and rendered,  that depicts another battle between a pedestrian and a car-clogged street:

From Life, circa 1923 (from the collection of Paul Tumey)

I love the manic, focused -- one might say mad -- look in the pedestrian's face. It requires madness to triumph in a world that turns a man out for a walk into a pedestrian.

Finally, here's an entire group of individuals who have completely adapted to the increased velocity of life. We begin with a group of seven people, all interacting civilly and having a pleasant time. As with William Golding's Lord of the Flies, the trappings of civility are shed when the group must combat each other to survive -- but in the case of the cartoon, they are only competing for a ride on the crowded subway.

They emerge from the underworld, disheveled but willing to embrace civilization once again. The astonishing  third tier of the subway battle mirrors the energy of a subway train itself, screeching, jolting, careening, speeding through the darkness.

This was the world of London, New York, Boston, or any other major city in 1923. 

Today, it seems the speed of life continues to accelerate -- but instead of fighting for our survival like fleeing or fighting animals, we seem to be in a narcotic haze of Internet, TV, sugar, caffeine, alcohol, drugs, memes, constantly looming disaster -- in short, many of us in the big city are subdued, bored, and possibly even depressed. Here's a photo I took while waiting for a subway train in New York City a few weeks ago.

And here's a shot I sneaked on the train -- looked how bored and tuned out the people are:

Maybe it was like this for people in 1923. Or 1823. Our time certainly has no claim to being the only era of numbing stress in humanity's history.

Today's last H.M. Bateman cartoon once again revolves around transportation. It depicts the ever increasing happiness of a traveler with some priceless drawings and a beautiful opera of escalation. As our Englishman gets further and further away Canada, he becomes happier and happier.

Our traveler has died from happiness! It seems in 1923, Bateman was acutely aware of how technology seemed to aid the human ego in its need to constantly be somewhere else, distracted, and gratified. 

H. M. Bateman in 1931

In The Man Who Was H. M. Bateman (Webb and Bower, Great Britain, 1982), Anthony Anderson observes: 

"Bateman by no means rejected all progress: he thought scientific advance exciting, and, for example, considered the first Moon landing the most wonderful feat of his lifetime - he never stopped talking about it. It was the ugly, leveling, concrete and tarmac side of progress that he hated, and it upset him so much that it was without doubt one of the major factors in his decision to quite England." (p. 202)

Bateman moved to the island of Malta in his later years, where he enjoyed a quite life as a painter. His work was a major influence on Harvey Kurtzman, who in turn influenced scores of important cartoonists and humorists.

Yours in Screwballism,
P.C. Tumey

The Sexy Screwballism of Cecil Jensen's Elmo Comic: An Appreciation

Today we look at a selection of Elmo Sunday from 1947-48, scanned from my own paper collection.

Screwball comics peaked in the late 1930s - early 1940s. While a classic screwball comic like Bill Holman's Smokey Stover ran in the 1940s and 1950s, it was actually created in the 1930s. It's rare to find a bold new screwball concept introduced in American newspaper comics in the late 1940s. Ving Fuller's Doc Syke, started in 1945, is one of the few. Cecil Jensen's Elmo (1946-61)  is another rare instance -- at least for the first 15 months of the strip, until it radically morphed into a dull kid's strip that eventually came to be called Debbie.

Cecil Jensen (January 7, 1902 - May, 1976) is known primarily as an editorial cartoonist.  Early in his career he had a daily strip with the Chicago Daily News called Syncopating Sue (1929-32).

Syncopating Sue by Cecil Jensen August 20, 1931

Starting in October, 1946, the Chicago-based cartoonist rolled out Elmo, his new daily/Sunday comic. By 1946, flip-takes and silly signs were decades old, and most cartoonists, sadly, eschewed their use. The first 15 months of the comic are something special. Jensen dances gracefully with the challenge of making a screwball comic that fit into the breezy template that Sunday newspaper comics had become. These forgotten comics are filled with inspired moments, zany ideas, sexy gals, and screwballs galore -- all delivered in an appealing visual style.

The basic set-up of Elmo in the beginning is pretty simple: Elmo works as a marketer and later VP for a breakfast cereal company called Popnuts Scrummies (perhaps the first time screwball and advertising collide?). A young, not-so-bright pretty boy filled with energy and ambition, Elmo is single and lives in a crowded boarding house that appears to be filled with near-naked beautiful women walking around in loosely-tied bathrobes.

Elmo's father is deceased - but still hangs around the strip as a ghost. Here's his first appearance, in an episode adorned with a lovely bathrobe-clad beauty.

The contemporary world of Elmo is filled with nutty inventions (one of the hallmarks of 20th century screwball humor) and wacky characters.

Jensen gets a lot of mileage from situations involving the advertising and promotion of the breakfast cereal. Here, he works in jungle natives and culturally-clashing ideas of beauty, with yet another sultry sexpot (how did he get away with these provocative poses in a mainstream paper?).  "Then came civilization with Popnut Skrummies!"

Elmo's visual solidity fascinates me. The forms in the comic are both cartoony and invested with weight and mass. Like Bushmiller, Jensen has stripped out all extraneous detail. His brush line is both simple and filled with expression (unlike Bushmiller). But what makes Elmo mildly screwball is Jensen's slanted take -- or, in the case of my next selection, updown side view of the world:

As you can see from these examples, Jensen invented a distinctive version of screwball comics for post-war America. His props and tropes are about working hard, being clean cut, and the strategic packaging of everything in America, including sex. His comic is fun because it happens at a time when all this stuff was new and fun. It's too bad that this earlier version of Elmo didn't continue. My guess is that both Jensen and his syndicate realized a more bland, less daring comic about a cute, trouble-making little girl would sell to more papers. In 1948, he introduced Debbie, Elmo's niece into the strip and she quickly took over. You can see an in-between example of this morphing at Jeff Overtuff's blog here.

Eventually, Elmo and his screwball Popnut Scrummies/boarding house world vanished. Like Elmo, Jensen had to please the public -- and he sank into the mire of the general public's mediocre taste. Here's an example of Debbie, what Elmo became:

In my last example of the "good" Elmo, Jensen makes a meta-reference to "screwball inventions," and delivers a parody of screwball comics that is literally over the top:

Hope you enjoyed this appreciation of a fine, forgotten comic! You can find more about Cecil Jensen and Elmo in Dan Nadel's landmark book (which I recommend to all readers of this blog), Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries 1900-1969.

A big box o' Popnut Skrummies to my pal, Frank Young, for turning me onto the antics of Elmo! Thanks, Frank! And while I'm at it, I'll just put in a plug for the brand new, amazing graphic novel by Frank Young and David Lasky, The Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song, which became available in stores yesterday!

This 190-page hardcover fill color graphic novel was years in the making. It tells the story of the first family of country music, the Carter Family, who gave us such standards as "The Wildwood Flower," and "Can the Circle be Unbroken." Johnny Cash's loving wife and partner, June Carter Cash was a member of this family (Johnny and June appear very briefly in the book).  Young and Lasky tell a compelling story of American life in the early 20th century that is as mysterious and hauntingly elegant as morning mist shot through with sunshine. Plus, the book comes with a CD of rare Carter Family radio broadcasts! A beautiful book, a solid read, and some tunes. Highly recommended. You can order it on amazon here.


Till Next Time,
Tall Pumey

The Weirdness of Kids, Family, and The Physical World Explored in the Nutty Comics of Frank Owen

Here's a look at the comics of yet another forgotten screwball master - Frank Owen. I have been accumulating and studying Owen's comics for some time, now. Spending some time in the wacky world of Ossie Tittle, Jasper, Philbert, and Bumpy Bear is weird, but rewarding.

Owen's cartoons appeared in both newspapers and magazines from the 1930s through the 1960s, with his prime screwball work starting in 1935 and continuing to 1943. You can find more biographical information on Owen, as well as additional examples of Owen's comics, at comics historian Allan Holtz's blog, here. (Allan Holtz -- who is in Florida while I am in Seattle --  has also been posting about Owen this week, so I thought we'd make this week coast-to-coast Frank Owen Week). Here is a newspaper article on Owen that appeared in 1936, promoting the start of his first syndicated comic strip, Ossie Tittle.

March 14, 1936

As the above article mentions, Owen's first success with in the "5 cent magazines," with a panel called, in the best screwball comics tradition, Philbert (code for "nutty"). Here's a couple of nutty Philberts:

Frank Owen's regular nickel magazine panel, Philbert  (Colliers, Feb 23, 1936)

Philbert  (Colliers, March 30, 1936

Like other screwball masters, Owen has his own modus operandi. We'd expect nothing less from a true practitioner of the screwball school. In the tear sheet below, we learn that Owen believes that "nine out of ten people enjoy a joke which evokes explosive laughter rather than one which requires figuring out." This may well be yet another definition of screwball comics.

Frank Owen was in a class with other popular magazine cartoonists, such as  Richard Taylor, a New Yorker  alumni

Owen's concerns are less about technological and social trends (as we find in the works of many other screwball cartoonists), and more about the strangeness of the physical laws we accept so completely. Why do little kids always have to weak and vulnerable -- what if a kid was actually much stronger than an adult? What if an otherwise average man had the ability to sleep almost constantly, or eat anything, or was strong enough to carry a horse on his back -- what would that look like? Start turning these questions over in your mind, and you have sauntered down the twilight path that leads into the wacky world of Frank Owen.

Here's a rare Sunday page of Ossie Tittle and the topper Bumpy Bear, scanned from my collection. The Bumpy Bear is totally charming, and seems to be loosely built around the idea that an old gent has a bear cub for a pet. The Ossie Tittle offers a truly screwy, perfectly Owen style cartoon hypothesis: what if nightmare creatures had a real physical appearance?

Ossie Tittle and Bumpy Bear by Frank Owen - July 26, 1936
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

Owen's cartooning style employs a spontaneous, loose scrawl line in the school of  Rube Goldberg and Milt Gross. His character designs are uniquely his, with comically wide eyes, open mouths, mussed hair, and large, beefy bodies -- sort of like using a team of friendly, perpetually stunned football players to deliver comic gags.

Here's a daily Ossie Tittle that offers a variation on the above nightmare-creatures-are-real gag:

Seussian screwball nightmare jokes in Ossie Tittle by Frank Owen, 1936
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

The visual formula Owen worked out for his characters is as bizarre and non-representational as the empty eyes of  Little Orphan Annie, the inflated forearms of Popeye, the hook nose of Dick Tracy, or the Brillo pad hair of Nancy. However, Owen had a very unique sense of humor that makes his comics less accessible than they deserve. I have sometimes wondered if perhaps, on a subconscious level, his characters hit too close to him visually, as many Americans are now overweight and overwhelmed. If humor is a way of coping with difficult changes, then perhaps Owen's cartoons are a gentle satire of American excess.

Ossie Tittle has zero continuity. One day Ossie was a policeman, the next a grocer. Owen's canvas is broad, perhaps developed from his many sales to leading American magazines, and he also delivers some terrific wacky animal jokes, such as these one:

Owen was one of the few cartoonists who could draw a horse riding another horse and make it work.
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

Ossie Tittle also featured a large cast of eccentric characters, mostly relations of Ossie's. Here' we see a hobo member of the Tittle family that has ridden in the racks under trains so much that it shapes his every action:

(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

Much of the humor in Ossie Tittle centers around the super-human strength of the title character:

(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

Ossie Tittle ran for a little over a year, from January, 1936 to March, 1937, making it one of the numerous comics that a syndicate (in this case, Consolidated News Features) tried for a year and then abandoned to the dustbins of history. The unique formula Owen worked out continued, in a much longer-lived cartoon, his Jasper panel, which ran from 1937 to 1943, and was merely a renamed version of his earlier Philbert panel. Here, we see Owen recycling a 1936 joke for his 1939 comic.

The superhuman child, Jasper by Frank Owen (June 7, 1939)
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

A case could be made for Ossie Tittle and then Jasper being among the first comic strip superheroes, along with Popeye and Superman, who both came along around the same time. Like Ossie, Jasper has superhuman strength and is seemingly invulnerable. He is also kid-like, with a child's curiosity and creative resourcefulness. This leads to an infinite series of startling comic scenarios, as we see in this selection of Jasper panels from 3 consecutive days:

Owen draws Jasper as a little man naked except for a diaper, socks, and shoes. Jasper is devoid of neotony, and the result is slightly unsettling. However, I think Owen was on to something. I think Philbert and Jasper are both comedies that reach forward into time, sensing the shift in the way mid-20th century Americans raised their children. At its best, his kid panels are doorways for us adults to momentarily step back into the weird mindset of a child, when it makes total sense to line up a row of water-filled containers as a path for a pet goldfish.

With Ossie Tittle, however, Owen had a broader and richer vehicle, in which the oddness of the child mind was only one theme among many, including the weirdness of family, and the spikiness of being an adult. It's too bad the strip didn't continue, as I suspect it could have evolved into one of the great American newspaper comics, instead of a slim chapter in the history of American screwball comics.

I'll end with another rare color Sunday, which is also another incredible screwball joke derived from riding a horse (Owen's cartoons are at once anachronistic and forward-looking).

Screwball horsing around in Ossie Tittle by Frank Owen (August 9, 1936)
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

Thanks for reading,
Paul Tumey

All text copyright 2012 Paul Tumey

Virgil Partch (VIP) On the Art of Screwball Cartooning

Mixed Nuts Wednesday 
Visit this blog every Wednesday for a special NEW screwball comics discovery!

Here's a fascinating lesson in screwball cartooning by  screwball master Virgil Partch (who signed his cartoons VIP).

Virgil Partch (1916-1984) hardly needs an exhaustive introduction or background article on this blog. His work is all over the Web, and there's an excellent Wikipedia article on his life and work here. 

Working within the critical and historical framework I'm developing for the genre of Screwball Comics, I'd place Partch at the start of the Modern Screwball category. Partch's cartoons began appearing in magazines in the early 1940s. From the start, he had both a distinctive visual style, and a screwball sensibility, pushing the gags several notches further in absurdity than most cartoonists of the time. Often, the extremism of his cartoons was the gag, as we see in this 1945 Collier's Weekly cartoon:

Collier's Weekly - February 17, 1945

Partch also delighted in literally illustrating idioms and popular sayings such as "if looks could kill," or "don't count your chickens before they hatch." Here's a couple of examples:

Collier's Weekly - March 10, 1945

Collier's Weekly - May 13, 1955

Partch was one of those cartoonists who make it look easy, but as his lesson below, from the 1950s Famous Artist Course shows, he put a lot of thought and care into these refined, simple screwball cartoons. 

Partch's work continues to find an audience today. Because most of his work is not topical, and relies, in the best screwball tradition, on visual puns and a carefully cultivated silliness, a 21st century reader can connect as immediately and completely with his cartoons as readers did fifty years ago.

Keeping My Head On Straight (imagine the cartoon VIP could have done for that one!),

Paul Tumey

The Mild Screwballism of Russ Johnson's Mr. Oswald Hardware Comics

Mixed Nuts Wednesday

Russ Johnson's Mr. Oswald is one of my all-time favorite obscure comics. Continuing with our Original Art Week theme, here's a gallery of originals that are great fun to read, all from the collection of  Rob Stolzer, who conducted a great interview with Johnson that was published in Hogan's Alley, and which can be read online here.

Russ Johnson was a sort of real life $alesman $am. He actually owned and operated a hardware store in Vermont. For a jaw-dropping 62 years, Russ also wrote and drew Mr. Oswald,  a jam-packed, slightly screwball, highly intelligent comic about hardware retailing that was regularly published in a trade magazine called, appropriately enough, Hardware Retailer.

Admittedly, Mr. Oswald may be the least screwball comic to be published so far in The Masters of Screwball Comics. That being said, it does actually have a mild screwball sensibility, with patterns of escalation, dense visuals, and a wry humor that belies the stiff competency of the drawing. 

You wouldn't think that reading a regular comic about selling hardware would be much fun, but in Johnson's hands it's deeply compelling. He has a sort of Carl Barks approach, with logical story structures and rock solid drawings of a seemingly endless supply of objects. There's a Barks Halloween story in which he depicts bags of candy and treats with such absorbing detail that I studied those panels for hours when I was a kid. Similarly, Johnson's panels offer us a plethora of objects and details to study. While he rarely drops in a background gag, as George Swanson does in $alesman $am (another strip set in an overcrowded general hardware type store) Johnson's drawings add the same level of intensity and compression to his comics that we find in some other screwball comics. Russ even created inventory books in which he meticulously drew every item in his store... this was a guy who loved drawing objects!

Russ Johnson's Mr. Oswald is stuffed with background details in the best screwball tradition

Russ Johnson holding an original of his
great Mr. Oswald comic
(photo by Rob Stolzer)

Besides the Barksian detailing, Johnson also creates a rich cast of characters and invests every strip with conflict, the fuel that drives every story forward. Mr. Oswald is hard-working, but comically grumpy and driven by human weaknesses -- he's a surprisingly complex character for a trade journal comic strip. It's good reading, folks.

There's an undercurrent in Mr. Oswald that tells us life can often be pretty chaotic and nutty, filled with curve (or screw) ball picthes. Johnson flowed the eccentricities and frustrating craziness of his world into his comic -- it was probably what kept him sane. This is very similar to Rube Goldberg's comics, which revolve around the theme of inanity on everyday life.

I first discovered the arcane joys of Mr. Oswald when I read a small article in an early issue of The Comics Journal in the early 1980s. The article announced that Russ had copies available of a small press collection of his comics -- and it sounded fascinating to me. I could tell by the way the writer gushed that this could be good stuff. As luck would have it, just days after reading the article, I unearthed a copy of the book, Forty Years With Mr. Oswald (National Hardware Retailing Association, 1968) in the backroom of Jelly's, the huge legendary comic book/trading card/gaming/CD/toy/book store that I helped manage in Honolulu, Hawaii. I took the book home, read it, and feel in love with the world of selling small objects to crazy people. I could really identify with the comic, since I worked in retail, too. I'm sure that Mr. Oswald was a powerful tonic for hundreds of folks working the front lines of retail.

My much-loved copy of this great book

My copy, now tattered and read to death, has a Russ Johnson drawing on the flyleaf, unfortunately smeared, but still a treasure:

Russ Johnson's hand-drawn inscription in my copy of his book

I've only seen 3 copies of this book in my life -- and I go to a LOT of bookstores. However, currently, someone is selling a copy on Amazon for about $30, which is a bargain since this book has a ton of comics and holds up to re-reading, quite well.

But the book, as generous a collection as it is, just scratches the surface. What we have here is a treasure trove of great comics, most of which have never been reprinted and are next-to-impossible to find. I have spent years searching for back issues of  Hardware Retailer to no avail. The search goes on. Someday, someone will get a pile of these great comics together and share them with the world.

When I wrote Stolzer and asked his permission to reprint these scans in my blog, he responded: "Absolutely. Please share, share, share any of Russ's art. The more who know about him the better." That's the sort of appreciation and devotion that these comics can inspire.

With Rob Stolzer's blessing, here's a gallery of scans of Mr. Oswald comics from the originals. Enjoy!

Your Grumpy Neighborhood Screwball Retailer,
Paul Tumey