Month: January 2022


Now Listen, Mabel Strips


Here are the next six “Now Listen, Mabel” dailies from the pen and knife of George Herriman, 9-11 to 9-17-1919. 9-11 through 9-13 introduce Mabel’s dog “Tizwin” who  barks at Jimmie accidentally through Mabel’s telephone. When Jimmie tells Mabel that Tizwin sounds just like Mabel over the telephone, she gets irritated and walks out on him. Mabel tosses the insult back at Jimmie in the 9-13. In the 9-15 through 9-17 strips, Jimmie keeps trying to talk to Mabel on the office telephone much to the disgust of his boss. In the 9-17 strip, Jimmie is introduced to Mr. Gindus (where is Garge getting these character names?), who seems to be another supervisor. Gindus intercepts a call to Jimmie from Mabel, but Jimmie handily steps on Gindus’s head, saving his bacon with Mabel.

I still need advice on making these strips clickable in Word Press. I tried using Classic Editor and Block Editor to edit the pictures, and tried various sizes and uploads. None of that worked, you now have to use your mouse to make the images appear in another window, where you CAN make them bigger. If anyone can help me figure this out, I would be very appreciative. Thanks for reading!

Felix Saves Everybody but Himself


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Here’s Felix from 11-6-1933 to 11-19-1933. In the dailies, Felix shows his savvy as he completely foils the counterfeitter. After Felix forces the bad guy to re-grow his whiskers, Tony the Barber gets the $10K reward and goes out to buy new clothes, completely ignoring Felix. In the 11-18, Felix makes a key statement: “When they put on the high hat—that’s the time to leave ’em.” Felix doesn’t even get a reward, he’s on to a new assignment as a mascot. Obviously he is not a fan of the wealthy classes. In the Sundays, Felix and Danny Dooit continue their adventures lost in the woods. Felix tries to feed Danny with fish he grabs from the lake. I love panel 8 in the 11-12 as all those eyes stare at Felix, very much like the scary sequence in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”. In the 11-19, Felix and Danny take pity on two hungry baby Eagles and feed them worms that they intended for fish bait. Mother Eagle seems threatening, but instead gives Felix and Danny a soft bed in her nest. “One good turn always brings another,” Felix says. Enjoy these dear readers!

Have a Comic Weekend


 

Hi Readers, Must be some kind o’ record for the Catblog, three posts in a week! Hope you like them. Here’s the next batch of Herriman’s “Now Listen, Mabel” from 9-4-1919 to 9-10-1919. Look at that last panel in the 9-10, a real balcony crowd scene masterpiece! Have a great Comic Weekend!

Have a Cat!


Here’s FELIX, another glorious two weeks of vintage 1933 feline frolics! These are from 10-23 to 11-5-33. I had a complaint from reader Peter Vollmann about the strips in my blog looking fuzzy, so these look vastly improved to me, hope they look that way to you, dear readers. Felix and Danny fight the depression in the 10-23 to 10-28 batch. I especially like the 10-26 strip, which has some terrific Otto Messmer fighting poses as Felix punches out a dog who unfortunately gets in the way of his feline fisticuffs. In the 10-28, an unshaven character enters the barber shop where Tony, the proprietor, has adopted Felix as mascot. In the 10-30 to 11-4 dailies, the story continues as the unshaven man takes a shave and pays for it with a counterfeit twenty dollar bill. Felix disguises himself as a poodle with some shaving soap and pursues the counterfeiter. You can imagine that “making your own money” was an idea on the rise in an era when legitimate currency was scarce.

The Sunday pages are also a continued story as Felix and Danny go fishing and are rescued from wild leopards by a bear. The bear is such a glutton that Felix resorts to assuage the bear’s hunger with an entire icebox full of food from Danny’s Mother’s kitchen.

Hope you can read these better and enjoy them more! Remember to click on the images to enlarge them. If you click again after they enlarge, they will get larger still. I hope to post more often, see ya!

A New Post at Last!


Hi Readers,

We’ve been off the “air” for awhile, just for how long I don’t know. I have been neglecting the Catblog, and I’m sorry for that. The site was hacked near the Holidays. The Go Daddy Web Host people came to my rescue and restored the Catblog, including the Archives! They did a great job, but it was costly. Maybe I will put up a “Go Fund Me” page for the Catblog. You may remember a particularly creative hack the Catblog went through a few years ago when I had 5000 unwanted users from Russia! They took advantage of a security leak and I had to eliminate all of them ONE AT A TIME! Word Press is pretty good to write on, but their rules are complicated. You have to have the “latest version” of Word Press installed, or there are breeches possible. Word Press seems to put up a new version about every two weeks!  Having a blog is like maintaining a little fort in the digital wilderness, constantly vulnerable to attack by the aboriginals. And sometimes they are more “original” than “aba”s. Here’s hoping you are all well that read this blog, and bless you for doing that. A good friend of this blog, Charles Brubaker, the eminent cartoonist, wrote to me and told me the blog was down, thanks Charles! A Better New Year to y’all and now here’s another batch of “Now Listen, Mabel” by George Herriman: 8-27 to 9-3-1919. Jimmie is fired from the Moonshine Comedy Films Studio for trying to satisfy Mabel’s ambition for him to be a star. In the 9-1 through 9-3 strips, Jimmie fools his own father by wearing a tuxedo as he escorts Mabel to a fancy dress party. Remember that these strips are “clickable”, so just click on them to enlarge.

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