Mark Kausler’s CatBlog

 Here’s  the only other example of Herb Gardner’s “The Nebbishes” I could find for now. It’s the episode of March 1st, 1959, which could be titled “Irving’s identity crisis”. Irving takes off his glasses and Gladys (who knows both Irving and Seymour) mistakes him for Seymour. The gag builds upon Irving’s declaration in the third panel that he must “distinguish myself from the masses in some way”. If I find any more of these pages I’ll run them here. I would love to see these available in book form, but “The Nebbishes” are a forgotten chapter in comics history and a collection probably wouldn’t sell. So back on the dusty shelf they go.

 Krazy from 11-3 to 11-8-1941, uses the first four strips to do a little continuity about Krazy’s ambition to be a sculptor. He does a bust of himself and a bust of Offissa Pupp, but the bust of Ignatz proves to be just…a bust. The balance of the week’s strips involve shadows and silhouettes. My favorite drawing of the week is the last panel of the 11-5 as Offissa Pupp react’s to Ignatz’s sneeze. The scratchy pen line really has movement to it; Pupp’s cigar is just a few lines hanging in the air.

 Felix is from 12-23 to 12-29-1935 this time. Felix is caught between the guns of Fooy Tu Yu and Punk Chow as he hides in the “junk” ashcan with his precious diamond. Felix gets away before the Chinese bad guys spot him. In the Sunday, we have part one of a fanciful story of Felix’s descent into the substrata of the Earth by “Gravity-Rocket”. Felix’s old friend (?) the chemical scientist, puts him into his new rocket as a reluctant experimental animal. If you want to see what Felix found underground, go into the blog archives and find “Time Trifles With Felix”, August 8th, 2010 for the 1-6-1936 Sunday. We’ll fill in the last dailies of 1935 next time.

 Myrtle is here, from 7-28 to 8-2-1947. A new boy joins the cast named “Snoggons”, his name reads the same way backwards or forwards. He snips off one of Myrtle’s braids and makes a wall hanging and a bike tassel out of it. When Sampson tries to avenge the theft of the braid, Snoggons takes off Sampson’s top-knot! I like the 7-28 gag, which continues Bingo’s facility with opening doors. Bingo is supposed to fetch Aunt Susie’s pillow from the back yard, but a sweet little pekingese is asleep on it. Bingo just wordlessly refuses to move the little dog and the idea is expressed by just cutting back to the inside of the house with Bingo closing the door.

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT!!

We took second prize in the ASIFA East Competition for Independent Shorts! That’s in New York City, folks! If you can make it there you can make it anywhere! We are now the Avis Rent-A-Car of cartoon shorts, we’re number two, so we’ll try harder! Congrats and love to all our stalwarts who made the cartoon possible, Greg Ford, Kim Miskoe, Igor, Ronnie Scheib, Cathy Hill and many more! I think we can safely say that this cartoon is the very LAST cel-animated analog production in the USA!! We’ve thrown down the cat-gut, no other cartoon producer can make that statement!

 Here are the next two weeks of “The Nebbishes” by Herb Gardner (called “Hy” or “H” by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch). Herb tends to go for big emotional displays followed by a sarcastic understatement that renders those displays moot. I love the Devil’s big show of confidence as he tries to barter for Seymour and Irving’s souls in the 1-18-59 strip and how Irving goes on a binge of artistic blather in the 1-25-59 as Seymour paints his house (”..creating truth, beauty and other nice things.”) There is a bit of parallel with Max Shulman’s writing on “Dobie Gillis” (just starting on TV in 1959), as Dobie often waxes poetic and seeks truth and beauty. Maybe Gardner and Shulman knew each other or drew from the same wellspring of comedy. I’ll look around for more of these old “Nebbishes”. When I was a kid I didn’t know from Jewish comedians or Yiddish expressions or anything of the kind, but somehow I really dug the comedy of Herb Gardner. The 1-18 page had to be pieced together for this blog, it’s pretty fragile, but well loved.

 There are two “echo” gags and two gags using the word “solo” in the Krazy Kat week of 10-27 to 11-1-1941. I especially favor the 10-31 strip as Offissa Pupp and Ignatz Mice shake hands as they realize that their animosity is a main driver of the strip in which they live. This idea takes a little of the sting out of all the Jail time that the Mice has had to put up with “for a number of years”.

 Felix, this time from 12-16 to 12-22-1935, has the Cat in hot pursuit of Fooy Tu Yu. Felix obviously disposed of all that water he swallowed in the previous week’s strips. Fooy Tu Yu is blackjacked by another Chinese who takes the diamond away and gives it to Okey Joe who hides it on a “junk”. See the next post for the conclusion of the 1935 dailies. The Sunday page continues the science fiction aspect of Felix as he experiments with a pair of glasses that enable him to see into the future.

 In Myrtle this time from 7-21 to 7-26-1947, Fisher shows a mastery of comic strip timing. The strip for 7-22 has a terrific “all you can drink” lemonade gag that dispenses with Pop’s reaction to tasting Myrtle and Sampson’s citrus quencher and just skips to the last panel. Fisher also uses timing to advantage as Sampson goes to his mother’s house to wash his neck and just leaves Myrtle hanging on a tree. In the last panel we find that Sampson used a guest towel to wipe his neck and is banished to a corner. The 7-26 continues the idea that Bingo the dog is good at opening doors; this time he gets a lump on the head for opening the wrong one. We are now into the spate of Myrtle strips culled from Newspaper Archive.com so the quality is only fair.

     The cartoon short that Greg Ford and I made called “There Must Be Some Other Cat” has been selected by a film festival to screen in September. I can’t say which one, but we are thrilled to be accepted.

     I recently read “Al Capp, A Life the the Contrary” by Denis Kitchen and Michael Schumacher” a new biography of one of the USA’s greatest comic strip creators. Elsewhere in this blog, you can find a few “L’il Abner” strip continuities reprinted, including the infamous “Joanie Phonie” story. I’ve been a fan of Al Capp’s strip all my life, I loved reading the strip each night in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and when my father didn’t bring home the evening paper, it was hard to hide my disappointment. I always liked the little fantastic characters in the strip, the Schmoos, natcherly, and the Kigmys, the little flying hot-dog shaped creatures of the planet Pincus #7, the Adorable Snowman, the Bald Iggle, and many others. I got a kick out of Big Barnsmell, the head man at the Skonk Works, and of course, Moonbeam McSwine and the gorgeous Daisy Mae. It’s said that Al Capp really didn’t like any of his characters very much. It’s lucky for him that somehow they were sympathetic to his readers. I always felt sorry for the dumb but lovable L’il Abner, and worried about his cliffhanger predicaments enough to want to keep reading about him. In reading about Capp’s sexual misadventures in the 1960s on college campuses, including his mistreatment of Goldie Hawn, Mark Evanier (world’s champeen blogger) feels uncomfortable even reading old L’il Abner stories knowing that Al Capp could be a pervert. I can’t defend Capp, but I look at his creation as a satirical fantasy unlike any other comic strip and will always enjoy it. Al Capp’s depression era background and his loss of a leg as a boy certainly colored his world view and his strip. He lived life as if he always had something to prove, and he’d do it by hook or crook. (Wait until you read how he got through art school!) “Li’l Abner” was an unapologetic bold slash of a comic strip, blending fantasy with satire. The drawing was both serenely slapstick and delicately sensuous, drawn with beautiful pen lines. Mark Evanier even got to MEET Al Capp, something I would have loved to have done. This book is a very thorough biography, I learned a great deal from it. Some of the most interesting stuff is in the notes at the back of the book. I’ve always wondered from where Capp’s comic book company, “Toby Press” got it’s name. The notes informed me that “Toby” was the name of one of Elliot Caplin’s daughters. Elliot Caplin was one of Al Capp’s brothers and wrote many comic strips, including “The Heart of Juliet Jones” and “Long Sam”, both strips about beautiful women. Toby eventually took over the writing on “The Heart of Juliet Jones” after Elliot retired. Too bad they didn’t put the story of how Felix the Cat and Otto Messmer got picked up by Toby Press after their Dell Comics run. Again, this book is highly recommended, even though it may sour some fans on Al Capp, like it did for Mark Evanier. Now, won’t some brave soul step up and reprint the rest of “L’il Abner” through the final strip? I would love to read all the “conservative” strips that caused so many newspapers to drop Abner. Let’s get Roger Ailes to do something meaningful with his life and foot the bill for reprinting these strips!

Hi There! We lead off with the first two Sunday pages of Herb Gardner’s “The Nebbishes” from 1-4 and 1-11-1959. This comic strip was an early venture of Mr. Gardner. He is best known today for his play/movie “A Thousand Clowns” featuring Jason Robards. Some web pages say that his strip “The Nebbishes” (Yiddish for “Nobodies”), started in 1954 and was distributed by the Chicago Tribune/New York News syndicate. Allan Holtz’s book says that 1-4-59 was the first one. The Nebbishes only lasted until 1961, and was only carried for the first few months of that run by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. My copies are from those dates, and were pasted on highly acid old scrapbook pages, so I had to gently piece them together for the scanner. I love the adventures of Irving and Seymour. I always thought they were cousins of “Flebus” and “Mr. Moo”, essentially walking heads with white, squared-off bodies. The first two strips break the fourth wall to smithereens. Irving is very aware that he and Seymour are trapped in a comic strip. I love how Seymour reacts like the early Daffy Duck in the 1-11, when he realizes he’s being watched (woo woo woo). I found these strips to be quite funny when they first were printed, still do. The Nebbish statues were very popular in greeting card shops of the day (you find them on Ebay now) and the famous Nebbish sign (”One of these days we’ve just GOT to get organized”) was also a best-seller. According to the websites, Herb Gardner opted out of all this lucrative cartooning and decided to become a playwright instead, producing his classic “A Thousand Clowns” in 1961. The dialog in “The Nebbishes” became so dominant that the balloons nearly crowded out Irving and Seymour. If speech was so important, reasoned Herb Gardner, then why not write dialog all the time? His biggest commercial hit play was “I’m Not Rappaport” in 1985 (movie in 1996). Herb also wrote and produced the movie “Who is Harry Kellerman, and why is he saying those terrible things about me?” in 1971, starring Dustin Hoffman.  In 1987, Gardner appeared in the historic big budget flop movie “Ishtar” as Rabbi Pierce. He passed on in 2003. I have very few examples of “The Nebbishes” put I’m happy to scan the ones that are still with me and put them up here.

 There is a mystery in the Krazy Kat dailies of 10-20 to 10-26-1941. In the 10-21, why does Offissa Pupp lie in wait for Ignatz under a date palm with a sign tacked to the tree reading, ”June 30 1941″ backwards? I consulted the Krazy strip from that date, but it just features Krazy getting a bleach job at a beauty parlor, with no reference to any date palms. So Garge has once again baffled and amused us. In the 10-22, there is a hallmark of Herriman’s writing in Krazy’s annoyed reaction to the Sun, “Y-you..”. He used this stuttered experession many times in Krazy Kat and many of his other comic concoctions.

 Felix continues to attempt to reclaim his diamond in the dailies from 12-9 to 12-14-1935. Fooy tu Yu pours water on Felix as he hides in the basement of Fooy’s hide-out. Felix just drinks all the water to keep from drowning! A very fat, water-logged cat continues to pursue Fooy in the 12-14. In the Sunday page, you’ll have to print it out and color it according to the dialog, to get all the humor out of the Professor’s chameleon serum introduced last time, not to mention the X-Ray camera!

 Myrtle, from 7-14 to 7-19-1947 has two gags revolving around Bingo’s ability to open doors, but for me the funniest one this time is Freddie’s devilish reaction in the third panel of the 7-15 as he hits upon a way to stop Sampson from annoying him with his bad harmonica playing.

 In anticipation of Yowp’s blog, we have the May, 1963 Yogi Bear Sunday pages, all thirds this time. I think the funniest gag is the 5-12, in which all the restaurants in town that feature “All you can eat” specials close down after Yogi and Boo-Boo patronize them. Yogi, Boo-Boo and Ranger Smith all seem to be drawn by Harvey Eisenberg, but the teenagers in the 5-5 and the little Boy Scouts in the 5-19 look like Gene Hazelton. Only Jerry Eisenberg would know for sure, and he doesn’t read this blog! Remember to CLICK ON THE THUMBNAILS if you want to display any of the comics full screen. Keep visiting https://www.facebook.com/someothercat to see the complete storyboard from “There Must Be Some Other Cat” one page at a time, courtesy of our webmaster, Charles Brubaker.

 In Krazy this time from 10-13 to 10-18-1941, Garge is just doing separate gags for each day. The 10-17 may or not be related to the 10-16, as Krazy tries to call a “chimp”, a “chump”. The 10-17 has Krazy, Ignatz and Offissa Pupp trotting along singing “Chup, Chup, Chup, etc.”, may have been an extension of the “chimp, chump” idea, or it could be a salute to the Andrews Sisters’ #5 hit of 1939, “Well Alright!” in which the sisters sing “Well Alright, well chop, chop, chop, well alright..”. They repeat the “chop, chop” refrain throughout the record. Perhaps Garge heard the tune on the radio and worked it into the strip, just a theory. The 10-18 strip shows just into how few panels the “Krazy, Ignatz, Brick, Jail” formula could be distilled. All we have to see is Offissa Pupp looking out to the Coconino horizon through field glasses, then cut to Ignatz in the cell.

 In Felix, from 12-2 to 12-8-1935, Felix is at last smuggled ashore by Wong, the ship’s cook. Wong also manages to come up with Felix’s diamond, smuggled on land inside a fish! At last we meet Ah Fooy, the Tong leader who figures in much of the 1936 dailies. He’s more than happy to use the diamond to finance plans for his secret empire, Sax Rohmer would have been proud. In the Sunday, Felix inhales some Chameleon extract in the Professor’s lab and acquires the ability to change color with his mood. Now everybody, print the page out and color Felix according to the script, I’ll bet you’ll get better results than most papers of 1935 could come up with!

 In Myrtle this time, (7-7 to 7-12-1947) Bingo stars in four strips. My favorite is the 7-9, where the fierce guard dog is supposed to chase the book salesman away, but winds up buying two pawloads of books! I remember the days of the door-to-door salesmen very vividly from childhood. In St. Louis in 1949 to 1954, we still had salesmen coming to the door with encyclopedias, as well as junkmen with horse-drawn wagons trying to pick up refuse cheap! They were the original “recyclers”. Photographers sometimes came around our house with a pony and a little cowboy outfit. My Mom fell for their line, and a photograph exists of my brother and I on ponies with cowboy hat, chaps and pistols. You’ll never see the likes of those photographers coming to your door anymore, now all we seem to get is Jehovah’s Witnesses! To get back to the strip, Freddie’s smelly pipe opens and closes the week, as Bingo admires Pop’s ability to smoke the darn thing in the 7-7, and a pipe cleaner (very cartoony idea) rebels at cleaning the offending calabash in the 7-12. The image quality of the Myrtles will dip a bit in the following weeks, as my run of original clipped dailies runs out. I have to substitute the missing strips from Newspaper Archive, and the quality is mostly on the down side. We’ll see you soon with more favorites from old newspapers.

 In Krazy this time, 10-6 to 10-11-1941, Garge trots out one of his favorite vehicles, the “Door-Mice”. He got a lot of mileage out of that basic pun, “Dormouse” and “Door-Mice”, and here he spins more gold out of that straw, to mix a metaphor. There is a visit from a Herriman rattle snake, then Krazy and Ignatz trade nonsequiters about a pair of Tom-Tom drums. Ignatz’s comment on Krazy in the 10-11 is so iconic: “His craziness is practically permanent”. 

 It’s “Felix Pathetique” this time, as Felix strikes out in both the daily continuity and Sunday page, from 11-15 to 12-1-1935. Felix is very nearly reunited with the precious diamond aboard the ape’s ship in the 11-17, but loses it again and isn’t even allowed to come ashore in the 11-30, because the Captain won’t pay duty on Felix. In the Sunday page, Felix tries to rescue the professor’s mind-reading formula from a burglar, but only succeeds in attracting the metal box it was stored in with a giant magnet. We’ll see if Felix redeems himself next time.

 In Myrtle, from 6-30 to 7-5-1947, Myrtle is proud of her rear shape in the 6-30, Bingo steals her clothes while she is bathing in the 7-2, Freddie is punished for saying “Ain’t”, when he has actually used much sharper language in the 7-4, and Susie buys a rather “fem” shirt for Freddie, knowing full well that she will wind up with it in the 7-5.

 Beautiful art by Harvey Eisenberg on this month’s Yogi Sunday pages, from April, 1963. Just click the thumbnails to blow them up. The 4-14 has a funny twist, with Cupid shooting Boo-Boo instead of Yogi. Boob winds up with Cindy Bear! In the 4-21, check out what life was like before Xerox photocopiers were commonplace, as Mister Ranger dreams that Yogi falls into his duplicating machine, mimeograph no doubt! In the 4-28, Mister Ranger does a real “Tom and Jerry” take, as he pulls out the entire electrical wiring system from his cabin! Check out Yogi’s understated pose in the same panel, nice acting from the animated/comic strip bear.  Check the link to Yowp’s page in the Blogroll list, he will probably be posting the half-page versions of these strips very soon. I’m having fun posting these comic pages, I’ll do another Junior Times, one of these days. C ya.