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

A Daily Dose of Ving Fuller's Crazy Doc Syke

Mixed Nuts Wednesday

An obscure screwball classic every Wednesday!

Sure to cure what ails you - here's a double dose of Ving Fuller Doc Syke dailies from 1945, the strip's first year. Doc Syke ran as both a daily and Sunday from 1945 to 1960. It was a terrific concept -- to pour Ving's offbeat sense of humor into the character of a psychiatrist. One of the things that makes the strip exquisitely screwball is that BOTH the Doc and his patients are wacky. Doc, with his wild hair, oversize bow-tie, and long cigarette filter is just as much an eccentric, if not more so, than his patients.

Over the course of its 15 year run, Doc Syke had three different syndicates:

McClure Syndicate: 1945-46
Bell Syndicate: 1946-49
Ving Fuller Syndicate: 1949-60 (also known as Ving Features Syndidate - get it?)

You read that last one right, Ving created his own syndicate. I'm not sure if he distributed just his own work, or carried other comics as well. I'm still still digging!

In the early 50's the strip's name changed to Little Doc, and became a kid's comic strip in the style of Peanuts. More on that in a future post.

In the strip's early years, Ving managed to adroitly make fun of neuroses and complexes without being cruel or unkind. It was Bob Newhart, thirty years earlier. Ving seemed be saying that we all suffer from one form or another of mental illness, including the healers among us. Starting with James Swinnerton and Rube Goldberg, the best screwball comics often seem to have, at their core, a wisdom and perspective on humanity.

Ving Fuller's humorist insight was shaped into a daily and Sunday gag comic that was almost as well-crafted as Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy. In fact, Doc Syke appears to have been modeled visually on Fritzi Ritz and Nancy. The iconic and simple school of cartooning suited Fuller well. Reading a Doc Syke daily, like Nancy, happens in the time it takes to decide whether to read it or not.

By the time he created Doc Syke, Ving had been drawing comics professionally for over twenty years for newspapers and magazines. Laffs in Today's News Dispatches was an early Ving Fuller comic strip that supposedly drew from nutty stories Ving found in the news. Ving's humor, for all its later wisdom and screwball weirdness, was also very topical. Doc Syke was created just as pop psychology was emerging as a fad in America. In the three examples of Laffs below, we see Ving distilling humor from the popularity of aviation as  impractical summer wear (Lindbergh's 1927 flight across the Atlantic ocean had affected fashion) and from Prohibition, which started in 1919 and was still going strong in 1929 (it was repealed in 1933).

Laffs In Today's News Dispatches by Ving Fuller - June 29, 1929
The sidebar panel, B'way and 42nd St., was often racy and featured sexy women,
something Ving also enjoyed putting into his comics.

Laffs In Today's News Dispatches by Ving Fuller - July 1, 1929

Laffs In Today's News Dispatches by Ving Fuller - July 2, 1929

Over the years, Ving developed his craft as a screwball cartoonist. Here's a six-panel cartoon that appeared in Collier's Weekly, circa the mid-40s (exact date unknown). It's a well-done, zany-zazzy cartoon that is very similar to Doc Syke.

Here's the full(er) cartoon as it originally appeared:

Ving's opening premise, that there could be a Dehydrated Foods, Inc. store, is wacky enough, but the strip gets even nuttier when an entire cow is hydrated in a rainstorm -- all in a six-panel magazine gag -- primo screwballism!

At some point in the early 1950's Doc Syke mophed into a another comic entirely, a kid strip called Little Doc. I'll share some of these in a future post.

For now, enjoy these fine, forgotten examples of comic strip screwballism from 1945, the strip's very first year!

Doc Syke by Ving Fuller 1945 dailies Feb 26 to March 3

Doc Syke by Ving Fuller - 1945 dailies March 4 to 11

Screwballistically Yours,
Paul "Doc" Tumey

Why Don't He Twitt? An Insane 1928 Milt Gross Nize Baby

Here's another close-up appreciation/dissection of a gorgeously wacky Nize Baby Sunday page (a paper scan by me from my own collection) by that master of screwball masters: Milt Gross! Every image on this page is a funny drawing in itself -- beautifully composed and perfectly rendered. As if that weren't enuff, the writing is devastatingly funny - why don't he twitt? Indeed -- the tribulations of making the twitt toy twitt, getting the gimcrack do the thing it's supposed to do, but which it mysteriously won't. It's an existential dilemma to which we can all relate.

When you consider the hex-quizz-it visual screwballism of Milt Gross' Sunday comic, Nize Baby (9/12/26 - 2/10/29), it's surprising to learn that it developed from a written column. There's an organic flow to Milt's work. One creative output naturally leads to another, and they are all part of an entire dingbat universe.

In the mid 20's Milt Gross wrote a syndicated column called Gross Exaggerations, sprinkled with his cartoon illustrations. These were included as part of a Sunday supplement magazine that had humor pieces by Ring Lardner, celebrity gossip, and so on.

The columns were filled with the conversations of New Yawk City Jewish mothers leaning out of their tenement windows to chat in hilarious American-Jewish dialect. Often, Gross divided his columns into what was being said on the various floors.

Milt Gross was as accomplished a writer as he was a cartoonist.
His first book, Nize Baby, evolved from this newspaper column.  (Nov. 15, 1925)

In short order, the mother with the "nize baby" on the fourth floor began to dominate the columns with her Yidd-English versions of classic children's stories. It's a little hard to read the muddy microfilm scan above, so here's a transcription of the first few sentences:

"Fourth Floor: Oohoo, nize baby it opp all de Pust Tustizz, so momma'll gonna tell you a Ferry Tale from Bloobidd. Wance oppon a time was leeving a nobbleman in a cestle wot is was by heem blue de wheeskers. So all the keeds from de neighborhoot dey gave heem a neekname, "Bloobidd." (Nize baby, take anodder spoon Pust Tustizz)" (From Gross Exaggerations, November 15, 1925 by Milt Gross)

It works best to read Milt's prose out loud, and I imagine many folks cracked each odder up at the the time, doing that just that. The above tale of Bluebeard the pirate makes mention of "Pust Tustizz," the breakfast cereal called Post Toasties.

So that was Sundays. Then, during the week, Gross Exaggerations was a daily comic strip, mostly visual humor! Here's an example from around the same time as the column above:

Gross Exaggerations by Milt Gross -  November 23, 1925

Milt said he got the idea for Nize Baby from his wife: "I went home... and found that one of my children was misbehaving and wouldn't eat his supper. My wife was striving to comfort him with a recitation of 'Sing a song of sixpence,' but he wasn't to be comforted that way. So, suddenly on the wings of inspiration... I broke into a recitation of the same verse in Jewish dialect, 'Seenk a sunk from seex pants,' with the result that Mrs. gross burst into a pal of laughter and the child was diverted, too. Afterwards, at my wife's suggestion, I worked the thing up into the form of a mother telling a fairy tale to her infant and called it Gross Exaggerations." (Success Magazine interview, 1926)

The popular column was collected into Nize Baby, a book published by George Doran in 1926 -- Milt's first book. Here's what the first edition looks like. (You can buy this copy for a mere $550 from here).

This book (in a later edition, minus dustjacket) was my very first introduction to Milt Gross. Kevin Lacke, my college chum and fellow "bookie" at Bill's Bookstore in Tallahassee, Florida produced this book one drunken evening at his apartment. Kevin, a talented actor, adored the book and proceeded to perform a few of the pages for me in a perfect recitation of Gross' anglicized Russian-Jewish dialect, to my great delight. Somehow, in time, I managed to persuade Kevin to sell his copy of Nize Baby to me. I still have it!

Starting in 1926, on September 12, Nize Baby became a full color Sunday comic, topped by the single tier Banana Oil comic. So there's your hee story lesson. Now, for the fun!

Here's a delightful Nize Baby Sunday from August 26, 1928 that shows off both the visual and the verbal joys of Milt's screwball talent. If the page looks familiar, it's because it was included on page 289 of Bill Blackbeard's and Martin Williams' The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics (1977).  Printing technology being what is was 34 years ago, the reproduction of the page is pretty muddy. Even so, this page was, for me, a standout in an amazing collection, and made me a lifelong Milt Gross fan. I recently was fortunate enough to acquire the actual page myself, and can now provide a creesp scan for you!

As with the previous Milt Gross Sunday page I've shared, I'll provide nice large versions of each panel that you can scroll through. However, to get started, here's the entire page, in a large paper scan from my own collection:

A paper scan from my own collection - Nize Baby by Milt Gross (August 26, 1928)

We have 14 panels in four tiers. The first two tiers are composed of three panels each. This allows Milt to work in a couple of "double-wide" panels that establish the living room scene. The bottom two tiers have more panels, with quicker beats, reflecting Pop Feitelbaum's escalation from amusement to annoyance to enraged insanity.

A word about Milt Gross and escalation. Many of his Sunday pages and later comic book stories are built around escalation. If you diagrammed the level of emotional intensity in these pieces, it would almost always be a sharp curve upward. This is mirrored by an ever-increasing series of calamitous events. Gross always pushes the joke out to the borders -- into screwball territory. It's been said that, when Chaplin came up with the idea of the tramp pretending he can walk a tightrope in The Circus, Gross (working for Chaplin as a writer at the time) was the guy who came up with the additional wrinkle of a circus monkey dropping a banana peel onto the wire in the tramp's path. Escalation.

Milt Gross wrote for Charlie Chaplin on The Circus.
The monkeys on the tightrope climax were  partially his work

In panel one, the squeaky toy is introduced. Don't you just love the goofy design of the toy?

In panel two, one toy is left for the nize baby (who's name happens to be Ignatz -- perhaps a tip of the hat to Herriman). When characters move in a Milt Gross comic, they almost always produce a perfect little dust cloud.

Pop has drunk the Kool-aid. He now has the expectation the toy will give a twitt and delight baby. We know different from the first time we read the comic. 

Gross' writing is all about phonetics and timing. He could have written so much more here-- but the 'Hm!' is all that's needed. Check out the composition here, too. The way the couch arm fills the space between the stretched tail and Pop, helping us really feel that stretch of the toy.

There's something beautifully funny about pronouncing "tweet" as "twitt" when the toy is broken. Pop's question is a an archetypal moment every person in the modern world asks - when the car won't start, when the email you just typed vanishes, when the computer won't start, when the DVD won't play. Imagine what Milt Gross could have done with today's car alarms and forever ringing cell phones. Somehow, Screwball comics are inextricably tied to our struggles with technology. 

The wide panel emphaisizes the streeeeeeetttttch. Pop is a resourceful guy -- he always a has solution...

... and it usually backfires -- in this case, literally so.

Poor Isidore. Izzy is often the recipient of a spanking when things go wrong. I don't spank my kid, but I do identify with Pop. So many times, I've done something stupid, or something was knocked over or broken and I have (I blush to admit) turned to my son and blamed him! Such is human nature! (I apologize to him when I get my cool back). Maw is totally unconcerned about the spanking...

Pop to twitt toy: You realize this means war.

Even using an old fashioned hearing trumpet... no twitt. This is exactly the same sort of thing I go through when the furshlugginer computer suddenly acts weird -- you try one crazy thing after another.

Definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

But hark! A twit appears on the scene, twitting! Look at how Milt lets his line scrawl on Pop... his fury has distorted his form.

The pay-off... an incredible back-flip plop take, caused only by a little tweeting toy.

And Maggie's dishes, Ignatz's brick, Jerry's body are hurled once again.... the end.

Whew! Great stuff! These comics grossing on you? Wanna see more? Lemme know! Crickets are chirping on this blog, tumbleweeds rolling through....

MORE GROSS COMICS

For more Gross Exaggerations and hilarious rare early comics by Milt Gross, be sure to check this post at Ger Apeldoorn's Fabulous Fifties blog.

And see my earlier post for more Nize Baby:

Have a Gross Sunday -The Apex of Loose-Scrawl Cartooning

AND... A FURSHLUGGINER PLUG

Wanna see what sort of comics a guy who studies screwball comics makes? Then click here.