The Last of Joanie
Hello again, here are the final episodes of the “Joanie Phoanie” storyline in L’il Abner. This week’s episodes are from 2/6/67 to the following Monday, 2/13/67. Honest Abe really deserves his spanking this time! You will note that the Post-Dispatch censored the dialog on 2/9, and Joanie’s dialog balloon on 2/11 is completely blank! A few of Joan’s contemporaries sneak into the strip, Bob Dylan on 2/8, Abbie Hoffman on 2/11 and could the man with the dark beard in the first panel of 2/13 be Allen Ginsberg? Next week I will start reprinting an Abner story from 1973.
Also this week we have Marvelous Mike from 6/25/57 to 6/30. Cliff Crump as usual don’t get no respect! Mike bakes great biscuits and all Mr. Kimball does is yell at Cliff about them. I would call this story “The Baby Baker”. The next two pages of “A Sample Assignment” from Felix #4 by Jim Tyer brings up the post-ier. Note Tyer’s patented sweat drops on pg. 2, in the close-up of nervous Felix. It’s hotter n’ blazes in Glendale this weekend, I’m staying inside and blogging. Remember if you have any comments write to me at molasses@earthlink.net. I will assume that your letters are for publication unless you tell me the remarks are private. Bill Warren was a little upset over Mike Fontanelli’s comments on his comments. He thought that Mike got a little too personal. I erred in reprinting Bill’s letter verbatim, he thought his remarks were private. My apologies to Mr. Warren. See you next time.
Cappe Diem
Hi Folks, here are the next episodes of Joanie Phoanie, 1/30 67-2/4/67, with 2/3 missing. Either my Dad didn’t bring home the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that night, or the Post dropped Abner that day. Of the two newspapers in St. Louis, The Globe-Democrat and the Post-Dispatch, the Post was the most liberal. When Capp started satirizing the Left, the Post responded by censoring L’il Abner on some days, and dropping the strip for a day or sometimes weeks, if they didn’t like a particular story line. Look at the strip for 2/1 above, in which Joanie and her manager discuss Honest Abe, there is missing dialog in the balloons. Wait until you see what the Post did to some of the strips I will run next week!
We have a comment from Thad Komorowski, cartoon scholar and web master:
I’ve loved seeing the Joanie Phoanie Abner strips on your blog! It’s not a very good continuity though. The problems are that it’s just not funny (like the strip once was on a regular basis) and Capp draws a good-looking woman (Baez) as a hideous crone. You just know Capp was getting unhealthily bitter if he passes up the opportunity to draw a hot woman.
I pointed out earlier that Capp’s caricature of Joan Baez looked a lot like Nightmare Alice! He didn’t want to make Joanie an attractive woman, because Capp usually made the outsides of his characters reflect their insides. He had a low opinion of Joanie’s character, therefore he couldn’t make her look “hot”. Of course I loved Daisy Mae as a kid, but for some reason I thought Moonbeam McSwine was the most alluring woman in Dogpatch, even though she never bathes! I think I liked her clothes with all the missing parts and popped stitches, very stimulating to the imagination! My friend Larry Loc sent some interesting Capp anecdotes from cartoonist Tex Blaisdell to me from over at his blog: www.agni-animation.com/blog/ . Go over there and read them, and tell him I sent you!
Also this week we have MARVELOUS MIKE from 6/18 to 6/23/1956, in which he shows his prowess as a biscuit baker, and Jim Tyer’s Felix the Cat in “A Sample Assignment”, the first two pages of the story from Felix #4. I love those scrappy housewives in the last panel on the second page!
Believe it or not, my next short cartoon, “There Must Be Some Other Cat” is making progress! Greg Ford, Igor, Kim Miskoe and all the artists are doing some beautiful work. I have seen quite a few sample cels and I made a small animation correction to Sc. 24. I hope I will have a complete pencil test by the end of this month! I will keep you POST-ed! My wife and I are going to take a trip to Catalina Island next month to paint with our Thursday group once again, we are really looking forward to painting the old Casino, boats, gulls and tourists stuffing their faces! Remember, send any comments to my email address: molasses@earthlink.net. See you next week.
Soothing Postum
Howdy everyone! The Abner Phoanies continue with episodes from 1-23-67 to 1-28-67. Joanie is so lazy she lets Daisy Mae run for her in the Sadie Hawkins day race! In the interests of continued debate, here is Mike Fontanelli’s (Cartoonist, Al Capp Collector) rebuttal to Bill Warren’s (Film Critic, Author) screed about Al Capp’s politics and zeitgeist:
You recently posted a response to the Capp material from someone named Bill Warren, “Internet Film Reviewer” – who “reviews” the Joanie Phoanie continuity – even though it had barely begun – with words like “contempt-laden”, “repellent”, “smug”, and (very classy for a film critic) “crap”. (I wonder what Mr Warren’s reaction would be to National Lampoon’s notorious parody of Joan Baez: “Pull The Trigger, N—–“, from RADIO DINNER.)
With breathtaking insight, Mr Warren points out that Abner is only “stupid because he’s a hillbilly”, and General Bullmoose, although a financial tyrant, is “not stupid”. (Are we asked to believe that Capp intended Bullmoose as a positive portrayal? Then I can’t for the life of me figure out – why is Bullmoose always the villain?) There was always an “elitism” in LI’L ABNER, according to this genius, and he points out that comic strip parodies are really due to the cartoonist being “envious”. Chester Gould evidently was “jealous” of PEANUTS when he did SAWDUST, Mr Warren helpfully suggests. By Mr Warren’s reasoning, Walt Kelly was jealous of Harold Gray when he did LULU ARFIN’ NANNY, and Harvey Kurtzman was apparently jealous of SUPERMAN, ARCHIE, and – just about everything else!
“I don’t recall seeing any traces of that kind of stuff in Schulz’s work,” sniffs Bill Warren, who doesn’t understand satire or parody nearly as well as he understands science fiction. May we infer that Snoopy’s infatuation with “The Six Bunny-Wunnies” series of kiddie books was due to Schulz’s jealousy of Margaret Wise Brown? Or do different rules apply when Mr Warren is speaking of a comic strip that he actually understands?The real “elitism” at play is in Mr Warren’s camp. Unlike Gary Trudeau, Capp slammed the left AND the right – but only the left responded with thin-skinned, humorless moral outrage and offended indignation.
Lighten up, Bill – it’s only a comic strip!
That’s Mike’s reaction, maybe Bill will respond, but I don’t think he will. It’s MY opinion that the Joanie Phoanie sequence is about as far right as Capp got in the strip. I’ve been reading a lot of the 1970s Abners lately, and the political part of the strip is very subtle, Capp usually saves his harshest barbs for “welfare cheaters” and “lazy” people. The citizens of Dogpatch may be dumb, but they never shirk hard work when absolutely necessary. I think Al had more affection for the town of Dogpatch and it’s “culture”, than it’s individual citizens, like Abner, Daisy Mae, Earthquake McGoon. Mammy is the only really admirable character in Dogpatch, and she stayed that way until the end of the strip. Speaking of General Bullmoose, as Mike just did, I am hoping to reprint a very funny Abner story from 1973 with the General as a comic book collector! Remember if you have any comments, just send them to me at molasses@earthlink.net.
Also this week we have MARVELOUS MIKE from 6-11-56 to 6-16-56, Mike gets his father off the hook for the bank robbery, and tries to help Mom with her biscuits.
To round off the menu, we have Jim Tyer’s Felix in “Tale of A Fish”, the next two pages. Until next week, try a relaxing cup of Instant Postum, relax and don’t post so much!
Joanie Pt. 3
Hi readers! I know that I have more than one reader since I started posting the “Joanie Phoanie” sequence from L’IL ABNER. This week we have Jan. 16-Jan. 21 1967–Joanie runs in the Sadie Hawkin’s Day race. Mike Fontanelli, Cartoonist, Humorist and Al Capp collector, sent me a few quotations from Joan Baez’s biography about her reactions to Al’s unflattering caricature of her: (Joan Baez speaking)
“…I quit reading what the papers said about me because either they portrayed me as more self-sacrificing than I was, or they didn’t like me and said, in a variety of ways, that I was a fake. Al Capp, creator of the LI’L ABNER comic strip, launched the most imaginative of the negative attacks, introducing a character into his strip called Joanie Phoanie. She was a slovenly, two-faced show-biz slut, a thinly disguised Commie, who traveled around in a limousine singing “songs of protest against poverty and hunger for $10,000.00 a concert.” She put out albums like “If It Sounds Phoanie, It’s Joanie”, which included “Lay Those Weapons Down, McNamara,” “Throw Another Draft Card on the Fire!” and “Let’s Conga with the Viet Cong.” Looking back at both the strip and the situation, I have to laugh. At the time, I couldn’t. Mr. Capp was slandering my name, my causes, my music, and of course, my persona. I got huffy, and huff turned to rage. I never sued Al Capp. I asked for a retraction but did not get one. Al Capp publicly denied to all who asked that Joan Baez was Joanie Phoanie. Many years later, I would read: “The truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you could invent,” but at the time my righteous indignation came from feeling guilty about having money, even if I was giving most of it away. In my heart of hearts, I thought I should not have anything. And that’s where he stung me. Was Al Capp right? The puritan in me said that unless I learned to live free of possessions, like Gandhi, I was less than perfect. Gandhi’s aim was to be detached from all desire. I tried to be detached, but did not succeed. I was attached to my house, my boyfriends, my ever-changing wardrobe, and my demons. Mr. Capp confused me considerably. I’m sorry he’s not alive to read this. It would make him chuckle.”
JOAN BAEZ
“And A Voice To Sing With” – 1989
Here’s how TIME reported the dust-up between Capp and Baez:
WHICH ONE IS THE PHOANIE?
Joanie Phoanie is a sight. She has a roller coaster of a nose, unraveled hair, and sandal straps that look as if they’re devouring her legs. She douses herself with deodorant, wolfs down caviar in front of famished children. She sings of brotherhood to incite student riots. When one song triggers only three uprisings, she composes another she is sure will be a blockbuster: “A Molotov cocktail or two/ Will blow up the boys in blue.” Could it be Joan Baez? Joan Baez thinks so. In fact, she’s so sure Al Capp’s cartoon character is a take-off on her that she has demanded an apology and the immediate execution of the comic strip abomination. “Either out of ignorance or malice,” she wailed, “he has made being for peace equal to being for Communism, the Viet Cong and narcotics.” Just as captiously, the cartoonist growled that Joanie wasn’t Joan. “She should remember that protest singers don’t own protest. When she protests about others’ rights to protest, she is killing the whole racket.” She also protested all the talk in the strip about the amount of money a folk singer earns. “Capp must be jealous,” she sniffed. He may have reason. Now on a tour of Japan, Protester Joan is making $8,500 per appearance.
– TIME Magazine Jan. 20, 1967
In point of fact, Joan Baez DID attempt to sue Capp but was unsuccessful – as several different sources confirm, including Denis Kitchen: “The Joanie Phoanie character as written by Capp, sang protest songs and incited riots for huge profits. Joan Baez demanded a public apology which never came. In fact, Capp never acknowledged that the Joanie Phoanie character was a reference to Baez at all. Baez was so convinced the reference was about her that she filed a court case. The judge ruled that free speech works both ways and refused to tell Al Capp to stop.”
Here’s Mike Fontanelli on L’IL ABNER and how the strip influenced his work as a cartoonist:
I admit I am an unabashed fan, so maybe I’m not so impartial a judge.  The guy’s ideas just kill me, especially the classic forties and fifties stuff.  I remember reading him in the sixties and seventies (I was born in ‘61, so the strip was well past its prime by the time I’d gotten to it) and laughing until tears rolled down my cheeks.  Decline or not, it was still the funniest, ballzy-est strip on the comics page.  He and Walt Kelly were my heroes – they still are, actually.  (I’m a cartoonist because of POGO and ABNER, basically – I’d probably be working in a bookstore if it weren’t for that stuff.  And MAD, and Looney Tunes.)
Thank you for reproducing the famous (some would say infamous) Joanie Phoanie strips, which I’ve always heard about but never had the opportunity to read before. Â (I’ve gotta laugh at “Molotov Cocktails For Two” and “Let’s Conga With The Viet Cong”! Â Sure it’s mean – and over the top, I guess. Â But it’s also, after all, just Capp being Capp.)
I’m sorry that ASIFA is stuck with scanning ABNER continuities that are already available elsewhere, but we don’t currently have the resources or the access to anything better. Â (Coming up, however, is a hilarious continuity called CHICKENSOUPERMAN!, a spoof of TV superheroes and their sponsors that, as far as I know, has never been republished since it originally ran in 1966.)
Our real intent was to introduce Capp to a new generation, one that’s grown up with the likes of FOXTROT and DRABBLE, and so has no idea that newspaper comics were once intelligent, dynamic, beautifully drawn and well worth reading. Â (After Capp, we hope to do comprehensive tributes to Willard Mullin and Walt Kelly.) Â
It’s very gratifying to receive letters from teenagers and twenty-somethings who were bowled over by the Loverboynik strips.  (Wait’ll they see Fearless Fosdick, I keep telling them…) Â
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The Capp retrospective will stretch out to around a dozen posts, because the material is so great, and because, frankly, his reputation could use some rescuing. Â
(I’d like to Google search Al Capp someday and find references to his work for a change, instead of his cantankerous cameo in IMAGINE and his sexcapades with coeds.  I’d also like to see Denis Kitchen resume his pet project one day: the republication of the complete LI’L ABNER.)
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After all, we can’t let the kids go on believing that CATHY and SALLY FORTH are all there is, can we?Â
(Mark here:) Make sure that all you Al Capp fans check out ASIFA’s Animation History website at www.animationarchive.org for more classic Capp strips. Here is another person’s reation to the “Joanie Phoanie” reprints, Bill Warren, Internet Film Reviewer and author of the book, “Keep Watching The Skies!”:  “Al Capp, like Charlton Heston, was one of those implacable guys who planted a flag right HERE and defended that position as the best possible place to be–while unaware they’re sliding steadily to the right. That Joanie Phoanie stuff is really repellent; not only does it falsify the hell out of Baez, but it’s mean, contempt-laded writing. Capp was always very smug as a writer, but he had flexibility early on. He utterly ossified by the time of the Joanie Phoanie crap. Al Capp jumps the shark, big time.    Did you ever see that video of him smirking at John Lennon and Yoko Ono when they were doing their protest from a bed? (Recently posted on Cartoon Brew-MK) Capp obviously thinks he’s winning everything, but he’s just a mean old bastard who doesn’t know he sounds like a preening bully.    I always liked Li’l Abner, but I also was wary of it. Even though Abner is always a decent guy, he’s also always a stupid guy, and stupid because he’s a hillbilly. General Bullmoose is a financial tyrant, but he’s not stupid. There was a certain elitism in the strip, all the time.    Interesting that he became so envious of Charles Schulz, since in the past, Ham Fisher had become so envious of Capp. I was puzzled that Chester Gould also evidently became jealous of Schulz, with his “Sawdust” strip-within-the-strip. I don’t recall seeing any traces of that kind of stuff in Schulz’s work.(Mark again:)
Please excuse all the type face size variance, I don’t know how to make all the fonts uniform. I’m very happy that the Joanie strips attracted such good comments! Thank you, Mike and Bill for taking the time to make this post one of my better ones. I think it’s a good contrast between the opinions of a cartoonist who appreciates Capp for his art, and a film reviewer and scholar who sees Capp predominately as a satirist who fell apart by the late 1960s. Remember, you may comment on anything you see here by writing to molasses@earthlink.net.
The other strips this week are MARVELOUS MIKE from 6-2-56 to 6-9-56, sorry that 6-7 is among the missing. Little Mike is going to make his adopted father look like a hero very soon. I also have the first two pages of the Felix story, “Tale of a Fish” from Felix the Cat #4, by the madcap cartoonist, Jim Tyer. I know he drew these stories, but I’m not sure about the writing. Maybe Gaylord Dubois was doing the scripting, does anyone know?
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Joanie Pt. Two
Hello again dear reader(s)! Here are the next six strips in the “Joanie Phoanie” sequence from “L’il Abner”, Jan. 9-1967 to Jan. 14th. Here Capp implies that Joan Baez is not only a protest singer who cares only for money, but she throws herself at any appetizing man who crosses her path, in this case, Abner. I like the sly way that Al uses Little Orphan Annie as a supporting player in some of these dailies. I’ve been reading a bunch of “L’il Abner”s I saved from the early 1970s, and a lot of the Sunday pages feature the Dogpatch kids: Honest Abe, “Rotton Ralphie” and the bunch. Capp was openly jealous of Charles Schulz’s success, and it seems he toyed with the idea of turning “L’il Abner” into a kid strip for awhile, Dogpatch style. If you go over to ASIFA’s animation history website at www.animationarchive.org , they are doing their own tribute to Al Capp this week. Very nice scans of earlier Abner material from the collection of Mike Fontanelli, but Dennis Kitchen has already reprinted the strips from 1956 that they are running. As far as I know, these “Joanie Phoanie” strips have NEVER been reprinted, so let me know what you think.
“Marvelous Mike” this week continues the bank robbery story. I think some aspects of this story ring true to this day, when sometimes to be ACCUSED of a crime is the same thing as being a CRIMINAL. We’ll see how poor Cliff gets out of the line-up next week.
To round out the reprints this week, we have the last two pages of Jim Tyer’s “The Vicious Cycle” from FELIX THE CAT #4. We will present the start of the next story from that issue, “Tale Of A Fish”, in a week. Remember, to comment on anything you see here, write to me at molasses@earthlink.net. I will reprint any comments that my readers would enjoy seeing.
Joanie Phoanie
Somebody’s relentlessly hacking me, so I better post this quickly before I get shut down again. Here are the first 5 episodes of the infamous “Joanie Phoanie” storyline of Al Capp’s “L’il Abner” from 12-31-67 to 1-7-67. There may be a day or two missing, these are clipped from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch which printed some of their daily strips in color back then. I will point out some editing that the Post did to these strips as I re-print them. The recent Al Capp videos posted on Cartoon Brew led me to re-print this sequence, since it seems it is the exact point where Al Capp parted company with the political liberals who had read “L’il Abner” up to 1967. His caricature of Joan Baez makes her look like Nightmare Alice! Baez was a very beautiful woman who had a lovely voice. Capp saw her as an adjunct to student unrest, however, and he couldn’t forgive her for that in his mind. The artwork and inking in these strips are very well done, Joanie’s appearance comes right in the middle of a storyline that prys Honest Abe from his parents and puts him up for adoption. The sequence ran barely two months.
“Marvelous Mike” this week reprints 5-21-56-5-26. 5-25-56 is out of sequence, I can’t figure out how to get it in the correct spot. Â The Goliath story winds up (you can see him a little better in these scans), and the next story begins. Mike overhears a bank robbery plot.
Felix has the next two pages of the current storyline by Jim Tyer, “The Vicious Cycle” from Felix the Cat #4. I had better save this before I get shut down again, somebody sure doesn’t like this blog. If you have any comments, mail them to me at molasses@earthlink.net. See you again, I hope.
Down on Mike’s Farm
Hi Reader (s) ! The last two weeks Cathy and I went to Rubel Farms on March 27th and a Pasadena Plant Nursery near Sierra Madre on April 3rd with our Thursday Morning Painting Group. The paintings this week are watercolors that I did at Rubel Farms and some Borrego Springs studies leftover from last week. The late (sadly) Mike Rubel’s farm in Glendora, Ca. is now being taken care of by the city since his untimely passing. It is a sprawling collection of giant boulders stacked up and hewn into castle turrets, a clockworks from England that chimes out the hours, at least a dozen old model T Fords and Ford trucks used as farm machinery in the early 20th Century, an old red caboose filled with train memorabilia, tin “palaces” full of model train layouts, twenty ancient wheelbarrows and a coop full of feisty roosters and hens; the subject of my painting. The roosters were so curious about what Cathy and I were doing that they walked right up to us, stared us in the face and walked through Cathy’s pallette and pecked at her turpentine rags! Inside Rubel’s Farm in one of the “tin palaces” is a display case that is a tribute to Mike’s dad, Heinz Rubel, who under the name of Hal Raynor, wrote a lot of Joe Penner’s radio material, including the line “Wanna Buy A Duck?”. It is fitting that the son of the man who wrote such crazy songs for Joe Penner as “When The Pussy Willow Whispers to the Catnip” and “When The Berry Blossoms Bloom” should have built this crazy edifice, this farm of fancy, this edifice of eccentricity. Get in touch with the city of Glendora and see this one of a kind farm, say hello to the roosters for us!
The little study in phthalo blue and orange is called “Borrego Springs at Night”. I went outside our trailer in the moonlight and tried to paint and draw in near darkness, this is the result. All I could see was the silhouette of the trailer, the faint light seeping through the Venetian blind, and the light of the desert moon. I also did a larger watercolor of the Resors’s Airstream trailer, with a puddle of water reflecting it’s image. The puddle wasn’t really there, it is the desert after all, but I felt that the foreground needed something. These paintings help me to remember the Borrego desert, and take me to that peaceful space whenever I look at them. If any of you readers would like to own an original painting of Cathy’s or mine, just write to us at molasses@earthlink.net and let us know. My watercolors are a bargain, larger ones like the Airstream are $50.00, small studies like the night painting are only $30.00. If you want to own any of Cathy’s beautiful oil paintings, just click on her website on the right side of this page. She has Gallery representation at www.tirageart.com, just click to the artists pages and go to her alphabetical space. By the way, did anyone notice the hands drawing Bugs Bunny with the bunny Oscar from “What’s Cooking, Doc?” on the cartoon Oscar DVDs, Disc three documentary? That’s my hands modeling (and drawing) at my old animation desk.
The comics this week are MARVELOUS MIKE, 5/14 through 5-19-1956. Mike tames Goliath the dog by getting a cat! Also we have the next two pages of “The Vicious Cycle” from FELIX #4 by the great Jim Tyer!
Easter Jackrabbits
 Hi everyone! Cathy and I are back from the Anza-Borrego desert, where we spent Easter week as part of the Borrego Art Institute’s 
Plein Air Painting Competition. Cathy completed 5 oil paintings during the week. The Airstream trailer painting is called “Silver Baby”, and the painting of the Coyote mountains is called “Fireworks At Sunset”. We stayed in a “Terry” trailer, on the same property as the Airstream. Cathy fulfilled a dream by painting the Airstream; she is in love with their streamlined design and silvery, shiny skins. Our hosts were Stuart and Bonnie Resor, just great folks; Stuart is not only an architect (dynamite at lettering and drawing), but is an expert in astronomy. He showed me the planet Saturn through his telescope one night, and it looked like the Saturns in an Al Capp swear word! Perfect circle and perfect little ring around it. The sunsets were magnificent! We painted the last day we were there at an old resort, called the Hoberg in the 1950s, The Palms, now. We saw our first live jackrabbits, they were very large animals and their ears were longer than their bodies! You couldn’t have wanted better Easter Bunnies than these wily desert jacks! They hop very slowly compared with their neighbors, the Cottontail rabbits, which are a lot smaller. It was hot in the sun all week (85 degrees), but cool in the shade, it got downright cold at night. The Terry trailer we rented for the week was small, but beautifully decorated by Bonnie Resor inside. I had to learn a lot of new skills to keep all the pilot lights running, had to make an LP gas run one morning to the hardware store, shades of Hank Hill. The desert culture is so peaceful, the birds sing different songs out there. The wildflowers were in bloom (yellow and violet) and people came from miles around to see them. It was the wettest winter they’ve had in Borrego Springs for years (over 4 inches). If you want to read more about the event and see the prize-winning paintings, go to www.borregoartinstitute.comand find the link to the Plein Air Competition for 2008.
    It’s almost the end of the temperate season in Borrego Springs, April is the last month you can visit with 80 degree temps, but the little town and the State Park are worth while seeing. We last visited ten years ago, and the only major changes to the town are the costs of an evening’s lodging in the local motels and resorts! The locals who live through the 120 degree summers are hardy souls indeed. One guy I talked to said he never has to wait in line for anything in July or August, he practically has the town to himself! Only 3000 people live in Borrego Springs year round, so if you like it hot, git out thar!
    This week’s comics are Marvelous Mike, May 7th through May 12th, 1956. Mike continues to baby-sit the lummox dog, Goliath. Too bad Goliath’s so hard to see! I have also put up the first two pages from Jim Tyer’s Felix the Cat #4, 1963. “Chairman of the Bored” features Pussyfoot in a one page b/w gag, he’s looking pixillated and more Tyer extreme! “The Vicious Cycle” also begins this week, an eight page story, page two next week. I will also tell you the story of our latest visit to the late Mike Rubel’s castle in Glendora next week as well. Remember, if you would like to leave a comment, send it to molasses@earthlink.net. If it is an interesting comment, it will be posted.
Happy Easter!
Hi folks, that old b/w photo at the top is of Tex Avery and me in 1969. This was taken at his office at the old Cascade Pictures studio on Seward St and Romaine. Seward is where an animation museum should be located, what an historic spot!  Walter Lantz, Walt Disney, Hugh Harman, Rudy Ising, Bob Clampett , Tex Avery and Gabor Csupo all made pictures on this street. I used to visit Tex at Cascade every once in awhile hoping to pick up free-lance work, but he never used me. I was a pretty gawky stringy kid in those days, but Tex put up with me. I think he could tell that I was a really devoted fan. Sometimes Tex let me hang around the studio until the early evening watching him shoot a Pillsbury doughboy commercial. Tex actually manipulated the puppet frame by frame! He could do almost anything in animation. Tex was developing a pilot for Playboy at the time I met him, animating gag cartoons from the magazine in short film vignettes. They were very limited animation, and unfortunately, didn’t really plus the humor in the original magazine cartoons they were based on by very much. Tex had already done most of the Raid and Bugs Bunny Kool-Aid spots that were so popular by that time, so now he was just trying things to bring in business to Cascade. I think that’s a picture of Ronald Reagan on Tex’s office wall at the extreme right hand side of the photo. I remember Irv Spector visiting Tex one day at Cascade. Tex seemed to have a lot of respect for this Easterner and gave him a big welcome. I don’t know if Irv was anymore successful than I was at picking up work from Tex, however.
This post’s comics are MARVELOUS MIKE from 5-1-56 to 5-5-56. I am missing April 29th, the Saturday episode, and May 6th, another Saturday. This is a new storyline introducing a pesty dog, “Goliath”. Unfortunately, the Post-Dispatch assigned a color to Goliath that renders him almost invisible in most of the strips, but bear with me. If anyone can supply missing Mikes, please write me at : molasses@earthlink.net. I also have finished reprinting the Jim Tyer Felix story: “You Auto Be In Pictures” from Felix #3. Jim’s style has been a bit subdued up until now, but he really busts loose in Felix #4, coming soon. Hope the bunny brings you all some nice healthy DARK chocolate, full of antioxidents, for Easter. Gotta Hop-a-long now, Cassidy!
Management
Hi Folks, I’ve been a prodigal blogger again. It’s starting to dawn on me that writing a blog is kinda fun, but MANAGING a blog is like presiding over a remedial classroom, a classroom the size of the WORLD! In other words, the comments have been hacked. I have had to turn the access to the comments off from all un-registered people. However, I don’t know how to turn the registration process ON for those who wish to participate in a reasonable way. In the meantime, please communicate with me by my special email address: molasses@earthlink.net. I will manage comments from there. I will keep reminding readers to use this address in future posts, also, don’t forget to click on the small images you see on this page to see larger versions of them.
The MARVELOUS MIKEs this week are from 4-23-1956 to 4-28-1956, the Felix pages are from Felix #3, the next two pages of “You Auto Be In Pictures” by Jim Tyer. Cliff Crump is so astonished by Mike’s ability as a painter that he winds up in the police station! Of course, allowing for today’s inflation, “Whistler’s Father” would now command a price of fifty grand. Felix drives Mr. Mogul’s Alpha-Ravioli luxury car down to the power train in this week’s pages. You can easily feel what these pages would look like moving in Tyer’s animation style, lots of flying debris and staggered contacts as the Alpha-Ravioli falls apart, with those little black lines that break off and whirl around.
Cathy and I went to paint at Eaton Canyon in Pasadena last Thursday, March 6th. It was ideal weather down there, not much wind and plenty of light. Cathy did a great little 9″ by 12″ oil painting of a sycamore and an oak tree side by side. The sycamore was a warm white and the oak tree was in dark raw umber, topped by accents of orange leaves and a faint suggestion of violet mountains in the distance. Not so long ago, Cathy wouldn’t even TRY to paint an oak, they present too great a challenge in value and detail, but now she’s fearless. I titled her painting, “The Finish Line”, as the trees resemble a horse race, with a white and a black horse in a photo finish. I think she liked the idea. I still haven’t learned how to edit a complex environment like Eaton Canyon in watercolor and I produced a real mess. When that didn’t work, I made two MORE messes! It was one of those days when you just want to chuck all the paints in the nearest waste can and swear off! I didn’t put the garbage into the critique at the end of the session, not worthwhile.
I think I have seen just about all the Tex Avery MGM cartoons complete now, I finally saw the uncut GARDEN GOPHER. This one has a scene which is always faded off prematurely. Spike puts a big can of dynamite over the Gopher’s den and lights it. In the meantime, the Gopher pours a slippery pool of grease under Spike’s feet. When Spike turns to run, he can’t get traction in the grease and is caught in the explosion when the dynamite can blows up. This is where the action always fades out, in the middle of the explosion clouds. In the original, the clouds clear and Spike is burnt black, (with big lips and spit curls, natch) and running on the grease, VERY SLOWWWWLY. It’s a black stereotype gag, but it is also animation based, going from a fast run pre-explosion, to a slow run, after the blast. It works on two levels at the same time, the Stepin Fetchit reference, and the natural drag that being blown up has on the dog’s body. I will admit that I laughed, but I love Tex’s humor. I used to write Tex fan letters when I was a kid, sent in envelopes illustrated with my crude drawings of Screwy Squirrel, to which he never replied.  When I met Tex years later at the Cascade Pictures studio on Seward St., I reminded Tex of those letters, and asked him why I never heard back from him. He told me, “If I got letters from anybody with Screwy Squirrel on ’em, I’d pitch ’em in the wastebasket!” I have a few more little stories about Tex, but I will save them for another post.
Catchin’ Up
Girls and Boys, I have dried my eyes and now present the next two pages of Jim Tyer’s “You Auto Be In Pictures”. Mike Kazaleh, a regular reader of this bag of spaghetti, wrote this comment about Felix: The current Felix comic story you are printing seemed familiar to me somehow. Then it hit me… so far the story is just like a Muggy Doo cartoon (animated by Myron Waldman)Â that goes by the same name! Did Hal Seegar borrow the story from Tyer (who was working for him at the time)? The cartoon has no story credit.Â
If Seeger asked Jim Tyer for the story, Jim probably gave it to him to oblige, after all, why alienate your steady employer? Thanks, Mike for writing this comment. I have seen precious little MILTON THE MONSTER, MUGGY-DOO BOY FOX or STUFFY DURMA, so it’s hard to speculate about these things.
Also in this post are the MARVELOUS MIKE episodes from 4-16 to 4-21-1956. Will Cliff Crump and his wife be torn to bits by the enraged members of the P.T.A.? You will note that this is the first time that Mike speaks directly to Cliff. At this point, Cliff doubts his sanity and doesn’t believe that the infant quoted Sir Francis Bacon to him. Their relationship changes around as the strip progresses. I’ll be posting again soon, ’til then enjoy the strips!
I Can’t See Ya, Wranglers!
Whew! I accidently deleted last week’s post this morning. I was attempting to delete an unwelcome comment, and scrapped all my text! At least all the comics were saved! If any of my readers copied my post, please mail me a copy of the text and I will re-type it. The post contained “Marvelous Mike”, 4/9/1956 through 4/14, “Wee Pals”, 2-19-2008 and the next two pages of “You Auto Be In Pictures” by Jim Tyer from Felix #3, Dell 1963. That’s a very dark photo of Harry Gibbs, alias Texas Bruce, reproduced from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of 1956. Harry had a show on St. Louis television called the “Wrangler’s Cartoon Club”, that poisoned my mind with countless old cartoons, Looney Tunes, Betty Boops, Little Lulus and the Fema Noveck Flamingo package including many Soyuzmultifilm and Zagreb productions. That’s about as far as I want to go in re-creating this post for now. I will do a new one very soon; right now, I’m going to go someplace and cry a lot!
What Causes “Runtime Error”s?
Alright you computer scientists out there, what causes “runtime error”s? I keep getting a pop-up window supposedly from Microsoft that says there is a C++ Visual Runtime Library “runtime error”. The address seems to be: C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\IEXPLORE.EXE R6025 -pure virtual function call. Is this a virus? It doesn’t seem to be causing any slow-downs or any other problems, just an annoying pop-up window every so often. It may be connected with streaming radio, I don’t know. Any offers of help would be gratefully accepted.
Last week, Cathy and I went to Claremont and a new housing development near the Padua Hills Theatre, an old theatre building dedicated to live performance. It was a beautiful place, we painted the side entrance to the theatre, a series of white columns receding into the distance, surrounded by a dark grove of olive trees. Cathy’s painting was well-composed and well-balanced, with the columns on the left and the Padua Hills Theatre sign on the right. She got some beautiful yellows, olive greens and violets into her painting, and good dark values. I got some good darks into my painting as well, but balanced the composition so that the image was split right down the middle of the page, with the columns on the right and the dark olive trees on the left. Brenda Swenson, our crit master, pointed out that I could re-mat the painting and take the curse off the evenly spaced composition. We’re all getting a lot of valuable advice and experience painting with this great group. After we painted we were invited to the nearby home of Karl and Sandy Flores for lunch! They displayed digital photos of all of the painters at work on the biggest DLP (?) television screen I have ever seen! It was so big and dominated the room so much that it was hard to concentrate on the paintings and the critique. After lunch, Cathy and I drove up to the Mt. Baldy Lodge and village center, hoping to find a little snow. We even brought our snow boots, but only found a few dirty patches of snow, most of it had already melted off from the storms in January. That didn’t stop us from putting a little of the cold stuff down each other’s necks!
This week’s “Marvelous Mike” episodes are from 4/2 to 4/7/1956, and continue the story of Mike’s entry in the school’s first-grade painting contest. Mr. Crump, Mike’s “father”, has to get Mr. Van Goth, the company’s art director, to be the judge of the contest, which puts him in an uncomfortable position. Again, Mr. Crump is usually the victimized clown in these early Mikes. His adopted son almost always extricates Crump from his convoluted schemes. We also have the last page of “Fair Weather Enemies” and the first page of “You Auto Be In Pictures” from Felix The Cat #3. Jim Tyer, one of the world’s most creative cartoonists, is once again at the helm.
Last week, I did a little tribute to Al Scaduto, as King Features ran his last “They’ll Do It Every Time” strips. A note on the King Features website explains that the last TDIE Sunday page was 2-10-2008. The last one they ran on the website was 2-3, so what happened to 2-10? I’ll let you know when I find out. KFS also says that Scaduto has been doing TDIE since 1948, and that the strip was in 100 papers. I’ll bet that’s one of the main reasons, besides Mr. Scaduto’s unfortunate death, that King is ending the strip. Not much income from those few outlets.
Comics and Scaduto
In our comics this week, we pay tribute to the late Al Scaduto, who drew and wrote “They’ll Do It Every Time” for King Features Syndicate for many years. He continued the feature started by Jimmy Hatlo in 1929 for the sports page of the San Francisco Call. Scaduto used gag suggestions from his readers as did Hatlo and Bob Dunn before him. Hatlo’s family, the Tremblechins originated in TDIE, as did his devilish little girl: L’il Iodine. TDIE was syndicated in 1936 and continued up to Feb. 3, 2008, the last Sunday page, a run of 72 years! (That’s the last daily, Feb. 2nd, and the last Sunday page above.) Hy Eisman and Scaduto were assistants to Hatlo and Dunn originally, now Hy Eisman is the sole surviving member of the Hatlo “gang”, he still draws The Katenjammer Kids and Popeye for King Features. Milt Gross is tacitly connected to this gang, as Bob Dunn was Gross’s assistant for awhile.
Here is the text of an e-mail I wrote to Al Scaduto’s family:
Hi Scaduto family,
> Please accept my sympathies on the passing of Al Scaduto.
> I’ve been a fan of Al Scaduto, Bob Dunn and Jimmy Hatlo for a
> long time. I’ve noticed that “They’ll Do It Every Time” is
> continuing under his by-line. Are these strips that Al Scaduto
> back-logged, reprints or done by a new artist under the Scaduto
> name? I really have enjoyed the feature, and hope it can
> continue, if only My Daily Ink would display the Sunday page
> larger with more detail! Again, I think Al’s work was funny and
> I love his drawing, his attention to detail in props was
> especially impressive. He kept pretty much up-to-date with the
> feature right up to the end. He will be missed.
> In Sympathy, Mark Kausler, a fan
And here is Al Scaduto’s daughter Pat’s reply:
Mr. Kausler: Thank you for writing. My father worked approximately two months ahead of schedule so the strip will continue until February 2nd which is the last piece of artwork that he submitted. From what King Features says, they will not have another artist continue with the strip. I can’t imagine anyone else doing it. My dad was one of a kind. I wish you could have met him. He was one terrific guy. Thanks again for your sympathy. Pat Violette
    It was very nice of Pat to write me back, I really didn’t expect a response. I think this is an important milestone; the conclusion of a strip that ran a total of 82 years going back to the local run! Scaduto’s drawing remained pretty strong all the way up to the end, I liked how the characters always looked a little like the 1940s, even though they were using cell phones and Hi-Def TVs. I noticed that the hospital jokes were more numerous in the last few months, maybe Mr. Scaduto did some of those strips from his sick bed. I wish I could have met him, as Pat said. It’s very unusual that King Features elected to discontinue the strip, look how long they’ve continued The Katenjammer Kids, for instance. King Features must have recognized how personal Scaduto’s version of the strip was. So long, Al and goodbye to “They’ll Do It Every Time”.Â
Also this week, I have reprinted the next two pages of “Fair Weather Enemies” from Felix #3, by Jim Tyer. Jerry Beck thinks that maybe Joe Oriolo did clean-up on Felix, because he seems to be drawn “on-model”. That may be so. “Marvelous Mike” continues with the strips from 3/26 to 3/31/1956; the next episodes of the “Kimball Ad Agency” storyline. That Mike was a genius, he could write and he could draw. I have started to do real scans of the strips, but they are from inadequate microfilm copies. They are murky, but you should be able to make most of them out. This is probably the only reprint you will ever see, so enjoy.
Cathy and I went out to Encanto Park in Duarte, Ca. last Thusday to paint with our group. We did studies of Mount Baldy all covered with snow. Snow is rare around here, so we all thought it was worth turning out to paint. That brilliant white mountain with dark hills and Eucalyptus trees in the foreground was quite a challenge. I did two watercolors, and was criticized for leaving too many white outlines around my trees. It was a good call, I do tend to carefully brush around my tree branches and left gaps. Cathy did a very nice oil of the scene, using a lot of purples for her foreground hills. Afterwards we were all invited to a nearby artist’s house for the critique led by Walter McNall and Brenda Swenson. Hot tea was provided, very welcome on a cold morning. An old friend of ours, Dick Tarkington, visited our group from Arkansas, where he lives in a house that’s buried in the side of a hill, on 30 acres. Dick does some of the best figure indication I’ve ever seen in watercolor, he can really give a great impression of humans and animals in action with only a few strokes of a brush. He looked a little thinner and has developed a cough, but still had his old sense of humor. It’s so inspiring to paint with all these great artists! You should come to Encanto park and paint for awhile, now’s the time. While you’re there, visit the Duarte Museum, a beautiful little building on the park grounds. See you soon!
General Bullmoose, Comic Book Fan?
May 27, 2008
Al Capp, Comic Strips
Comments Off on General Bullmoose, Comic Book Fan?
Mark
Happy Decoration Day readers! This week, as promised, are the first two chapters of the L’IL ABNER story, “Corporal Crock” which started March 30, 1973. I have scanned the first two strips from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch full page comic section, so I couldn’t close the lid all the way down on top of it, and the scan is a bit light because of that. Next week, we’ll find out more about General Bullmoose’s “ideel”, Corporal Crock.
I have received a few more comments on the “Joanie Phoanie” strips that ran over the past several weeks. Here’s one from Mike Fontanelli, cartoonist and Al Capp Collector:
Thanks again for printing the Joanie Phoanie strips. Â Â I never knew what all the fuss was about, and now that I’ve finally seen them – I still don’t know what all the fuss was about! Â
It seems to me the most offensive aspect was the fact that some of the dialog – and at least one whole daily strip – was censored!  As a free speech advocate, that’s a lot more troubling than anything actually in the strips.It’s my professional opinion that Capp’s vivid portrayal of student protesters and “hippies†were really no more of a caricature than the hillbillies that regularly populated Dogpatch, anyway.  (I also think it’s ironic that Capp called them “wildly indignant†– and they’ve been reacting with wild indignation ever since!)
Speaking of censored strips, Mike, here are some enlightening words from eminent cartoon authority, Cole Johnson:
The missing dialogue in the 2-1-67 strip, as it appeared in the Washington Post : Joannie’s assistant says: “Why not keep the kid, Joannie baby? You’re supposed to love little people!” Joannie’s word balloon, much larger in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is shrunk down around “Oh, well, I’ll send him to school!!” in the WP. The missing 2-3-67 episode has fly-encircled Joannie with Honest Abe in her mansion, declaring what a wonderful, warm-hearted mother she’ll be to…what’s your name again, kid? Then she tells Abe how you can tell the servants to do anything you want, and a delighted Abe joyously jumps in the air at the prospect.In addition, the 2-9-67 strip ran in the Washington Post with the same “remaining” words as in the chiseled-up first balloon, only this time, they have been rearranged into a smaller and tighter balloon you’d never imagine to have been tampered with. The 2-11-67 strip also had no balloon at all from Joannie Phoanie. Since the WP ran their strips in the conventional B/W, there is nothing to imagine there would be a comment by her, but the Post-Dispatch had a color background which clearly shows the “ghost” of a balloon. I’ll try to get some copies of these for you! The Washington Post could certainly match the Post-Dispatch for left-wing aspects, and raise it. I wonder if this delightful sequence ran differently in a conservative paper, like the fondly remembered Philadelphia Bulletin?
(Mark here) It seems the Washington Post and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch were sister papers in their attitude towards editing (censoring) L’IL ABNER. They even re-lettered and re-arranged the balloons to suit their individual editors’s tastes. Cole may send the missing strip, 2-3-67, along soon. When he does, I will post it here. Maybe Cole has some of the missing MARVELOUS MIKE strips as well; MIKE also ran in the Washington Post.Also this week, MARVELOUS MIKE winds up the “Baby Baker” storyline (from 7/2/56 to 7/7/56 with July 4th missing) and starts the Crumps off on a cruise with the money they’ve won. The Jim Tyer Felix Dell pages this week are from “A Sample Assignment” continuing Felix’s search for Kitty’s fabric sample at the department store. All the comics I reprint here generally fall into the “humouous (or ‘hoomerous’) continuity” type of strip. They are not necessarily telling a joke every day, but amuse because they LOOK funny. They tell a story that may actually be serious underneath the clown make-up. MARVELOUS MIKE is certainly an example of that “sad clown” syndrome, sometimes Mike is very emotionally moved at his adopted parents’s problems. He is very serious and efficient at almost everything he does, the humor mostly comes from Cliff Crump’s Dagwood-like clumsiness. Cathy and I painted a flower garden in Sierra Madre, CA. last week with our painting group and ran into our friend William Wray on the main street, Sierra Madre Blvd. Bill is an imaginative plein air oil painter and lives in Sierra Madre, his comment to us: “What are you guys doing in my town?” Go to his website www.williamwray.com and look at his book “Dirty Beauty”, it’s full of Bill’s contemporary “ashcan school” oil paintings of the Los Angeles urban landscape. Thanks for all the great comments on the “Joanie” stories, see you next time with more Bullmoose, Mike and Felix.