Your Comics Page 6-25-2014


 scout-table-that.jpgScout welcomes you to sit down at her table and read another blog post with more of your favorite comics!

krazy-kat-5-18-to-5-23-42.jpgHere’s Krazy from 5-18 to 5-23-1942. It’s mousecellaneous gags this week, some featuring Ignatz and some Offissa Pupp. In the 5-21 and 5-23, Herriman uses his Coconino Stage idea for knothole gags in the floor. Can anyone tell me what Ignatz is poking Offissa Pupp in the face with in the 5-21? I guess it could be a billy club, but Ignatz usually uses bricks! The 5-23 Saturday strip was culled from the San Antonio Light of that date. It’s interesting that the King Features Syndicate archive has so many holes in it, and that the strips they use on their Comics Kingdom website rarely go back earlier than 1936. It’s also interesting that some times they claim not to have a strip in the archive, say an old Barney Google, only to find that the reason they claim they don’t have a particular strip, is because it contains an appearance by a comical black porter, or has an ethnic gag in it that they don’t feel comfortable in reprinting. Here’s another example of a big business, in this case the Hearst Corporation, making profit from comic strips and characters that in many cases are 80 to 100 years old, and yet not held responsible for maintaining a complete archive of their features and strips! I suppose that means that KFS relies on collectors and library sources and collections of old newspapers for the truly vintage material. It seems strange to me that they could be reprinting the early Segar material, like “The Five-Fifteen” or Thimble Theatre before Popeye, but because they don’t have that material, they resort to recent strips like “Quincy” or “Boner’s Ark” and try to convince us that they are old classics. I am a devoted reader of Comics Kingdom, but as an archive, it’s pretty chewed up.

myrtle-2-9-to-2-14-48.jpgHere’s Myrtle, 2-9 to 2-14-1948. This week, it’s pure fantasy as Dudley Fisher presents Supersonic Cecil, the baby bird that breaks the sound barrier! Alice and Archie, the two sparrows who are running characters in “Right Around Home”, hatch out their offspring, Cecil, who demonstrates remarkable flying ability for a youngster. Cecil flies so fast that he breaks Sampson’s watch a couple of times. In the 2-14, Cecil comes in for a landing and uses a wheel from Sampson’s broken watch as landing gear. 

felix-5-7-to-5-13-34.jpgFelix, from 5-7 to 5-13-1934, again eludes some crazy looking Messmer bulldogs, by providing them with a giant dinosaur femur to eat. The dogs are rounded up by the pound, but Felix steals a key from the dogcatcher and frees them all, saving them from the gas chamber. In the Sunday, Felix continues his adventures with the two aviators in Antarctica and makes a soft mattress for himself out of walrus whiskers.

yogi-7-5-64.jpg

yogi-7-12-64.jpgyogi-7-19-64.jpgyogi-7-26-64.jpgYogi Bear Sundays are from July, 1964, clipped from the St. Louis Post Dispatch back then. Yogi continues his Hollywood adventures in support of his debut feature film: “Hey There It’s Yogi Bear”. In the 7-5, we see a caricature of Zsa-Zsa Gabor, (real name: Gabor Sari, Miss Hungary of 1936) who evidently was a close neighbor of Joe Barbera in the Studio City neighborhood where he lived. The cartooning by Harvey Eisenberg is quite strong in the 7-26. I love Yogi’s disdainful attitude in the fifth panel, and Mr. Casholder’s attitudes in panels 4 and 7 are delightfully over the top. Layouts this strong would have been welcome in the Yogi Bear TV cartoons of the period, but often the background drawings were better than the character attitudes in those episodes. 

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