Getting Tyer-ed
Hi Reader(s)! I have had some quality responses to the old blog from Dan Variano and Bob Jaques. Dan likes the Rock and Rollo story from Felix #8, the concluding page is north of this text. He points out that the wallpapering gag is very similar to the Heckle and Jeckle story that Tyer did called “The Misdirected Scarecrow”. If you want to compare the stories, head over to www.animationarchive.org/2006/06/media-jim-tyer-comic-books.html. There you can see several Tyer stories, including the Heckle and Jeckle. The wallpaper idea is much funnier and more fleshed-out in the H and J, but it seems to confirm that Jim wrote a lot of his own stories. I can’t tell if he wrote “Tippy Takes A Trip” from Coo-Coo Comics #16 above, but it is certainly one of his earlier epics. If any of you readers would like to see them, I can reprint his Felix Four-Color stories which he drew together with Joe Oriolo and Otto Messmer. I believe they are Tyer’s first comic book work. I would speculate that he did some newspaper cartooning in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but I’ve never seen any of it. Bob Jaques would like to see a Tyer index of all his comic book work, I don’t have it all, but for a real hard core collector like Milton Knight, or Marc Schirmeister that would be a slam. Thanks to you guys for reading this here tattered blog!
    The dailies this week are Marvelous Mike from November THIRD through Nov. 10, 1956. I screwed up last week and left a strip out, please excuse the poor repro, I couldn’t get to the scanner and had to paste a copy together from the camera. Relaxo tonic has some amazing properties, as Mike is about to discover in this week’s strips. Now you can actually SEE Mr. Fencemetal packing up to leave “bag and baggage”. What a great era when all a crook had to do was LOOK at a letter from the Better Business Bureau to be scared out of town. Nobody cares about the BBB in our Super Robber Barons age. They aren’t scared of the League of Women Voters, either, more’s the pity.
Krazy Kat this week is from 3/27/1939 to 4/1. Offissa Pupp actually arrests Ignatz’s brick, and the brick is represented by Lawyer Foxx Potts. Ignatz “springs’ the brick at the end of the sequence. Does anyone know what the reference to “Spaniola” means in the 3/28 strip? Write in and tell me, either post below or write to blogmolasses@att.net. Enjoy the strips!
Milton Knight says:
Hi, Mark;
Thanks for mentioning me! The TIPPY strip reads like it was written (like most of his 40s ACG/Pines stories) by editor Richard Hughes, creator of SUPERMOUSE and, later and somewhat more famously in the 60s, HERBIE THE FAT FURY. Fred Iger (also on the publishing staff) told me that Hughes and cartoonist/animator Dan Gordon actually planned the SUPERKATT and COOKIE scripts as a creative team; Hughes is caricatured by Gordon as ‘Ye Editor’ on an inside cover of COOKIE #1 (which I do not own).
I know there must be a lot of Tyer comic work that I am unaware of; it’s been only recently that I learned of his contributions to FAWCETT’S FUNNY ANIMALS. It’s entirely possible that he did his comic pages for ‘studios’ that did book packaging for publishers rather than for the publishers themselves. (Edward Jason’s Jason Comic Art was one of these; former Fleischer staffer Bernard Bailey owned another, doing every kind of feature, not just humorous ones.)
When I spoke to Iger, he was unfamiliar with the term ‘funny animal’. In those days, these types of comics were always referred to as ‘animated’ or ‘animation-style’.
And yes, that TIPPY story was a very great influence on my work starting from my early teens, just as Tyer’s SNUFFY SMITH and STUFFY DURMA TV animation impressed me from about age four!!
Best,
Milt
Mark Kausler says:
Thanks for writing, Milton! You know more than most about Tyer’s comic book history. Now I know what “JCA” stands for in some of the Tyer comics, it’s sometimes the only “signature” on the work. Thanks for clarifying who the writer of the “Tippy” story might be. I’ve got to see some of the FAWCETT’S FUNNY ANIMALS work, I didn’t know he did that book. Any thoughts about who wrote the early 1960s Felix comics? I just finished re-printing Tyer’s pages from all 8 issues, thanks to your suggestion.
Milton Knight says:
The recurring wallpaper bit suggests that Tyer wrote at least some of his own Dell material. Mike Kazaleh says that other stories you’ve posted (thanks) read like John Stanley, and that one of them actually reused a plot from one of the MUGGY-DOO TV cartoons.
Note: Years ago, as a group, Kazaleh, Kent Butterworth, Marc Schirmeister and I bought the originals for an eight page MIGHTY MOUSE story, and drew numbers for first choice. I won, and took the fight scene page. On the back of the original were pencilled panel borders; no drawings, but lots of Tyer lettering for an alternate ending. It looked very off-the-cuff, suggesting that he had changed the story as he went along!