Mark Kausler’s CatBlog

Your Comics Page 4-16-2013

 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.