Your Comics Page 8-1-2015
 Here’s Felix, 10-1 to 10-7-1934. The homeless puss manages to get into a vacant hotel room, order room service and escape from the hotel dicks unscathed! In the Sunday, Messmer uses a tried and true Felix formula, he is chased by angry sailors who are convinced he is a jinx, then he manages to plug a leak in the ship with the body of an escaping mouse (Skidoo?). Felix is once again “in good” with the sailors.
 Myrtle is from 7-5 to 7-11-1948 and Dudley Fisher’s special timing is most in evidence in the 7-5 as Freddie is in the “doghouse” with Susie after scolding Bingo and making him cry. I like the wordless final panel. I also like Freddie’s struggle with nicotine addiction in the 7-7 after he throws his cigarette out the window and lives to regret it, and the Sunday page is fun with the boys away at a business convention and the wives and girlfriends at home playing cards, which so many people did as a past-time in the early twentieth century.
 Krazy was originally published from 10-12 to 10-17-1942 and the strips seem a bit trimmed around the edges, don’t they? I love the 10-17 as Krazy and Ignatz trip over puns and Kat Langwidge. “Harmony”, “Hominy” and “Quantidy”, as Krazy interprets Hominy as “How Many?” Garge comments on his own work as Ignatz says “Corn” and Offissa Pupp says “..and in more ways than one, Corn is right.”
 Here’s Yogi from the month of August, 1965. I’m missing the 8-8 Sunday page, so perhaps old dog buddy Yowp at http://yowpyowp.blogspot.com will dig it up. (UPDATE: Yowp posted a black and white image of the 8-8 and I have it! I just didn’t know the date, so here it is thanks to the great Internet dog!) These appear to be Iwao Takomoto’s work once again. He does an attractive job of designing these pages, I especially like the 8-1 as Iwao handles the trees and landscape that Yogi and the ram inhabit as a little island surrounded by blue sky. The kid with a huge baseball bat up to bunt in the 8-22 seems like an old Percy Crosby “Skippy” baseball joke, reworked for Yogi. Ranger Smith pops up in the 8-29 along with Iwao’s personal brand of cute squirrels. Again, there is something essentially flat in his character design, especially in the last panel as the squirrels catch the falling walnuts. Harvey would have drawn them rounder and cuter, making them look more like the squirrels in the Barney Bear cartoons “The Uninvited Pest” and “Sleepy-Time Squirrel”. This post got side-tracked for awhile; the power supply on my computer was knocked out by a Glendale power outage on Tuesday night. Evidently the old power supply couldn’t handle the surge when the lights came on again after two hours down. Thanks to Robert Karsian of Jewel City Computers, the old Dell Demension 4550 is now operational and works a little better. Robert restored a “dead” computer back to life with a rebuilt power supply. He even makes house calls! If you are local here in Glendale, CA or surrounding communities, give him a call at 818-457-1207 or email him with your problems at Robert@JewelCityComputers.com . He really knows his stuff!
Steven says:
For some reason, I find the art in George Herriman’s later years to be very appealing, in the same way that I really like Charles M. Schulz’s drawing in the later years of Peanuts
Mark says:
I love just about ALL of Garge’s cartooning, but I like the early 1940s Kat art quite a lot. As he got more feeble with age and arthritis his line became more tentative, just as Charles Schulz’s drawing hand became palsied as he grew older and produced quite a shaky line. Oddly, this gives a more modest feel to the Peanuts strip. The hesitant quality of the line creates an undercurrent of earnestness to the enterprise. I was lucky enough to meet Charles Schulz at a San Diego Comic-Con many years ago. But George Herriman died four years before I was born. How I would have loved to meet him!
Charles Brubaker says:
I’m old enough to remember seeing the later Peanuts in print when Schulz was still drawing them (I even remember seeing his final strip when it ran). I know not everyone likes the later Peanuts, but I think there’s something special about the entire run of the strip. I think it reflected Schulz through his life, and there’s no doubt that he changed as he got older.
Jealous that you got to meet him, Mark.
Mark says:
Thanks Charles,
Have you visited the Charles Schulz Museum up near San Francisco? It’s really a lot of fun and they have re-created his studio with all his drawing materials and even his small TV set! One Snoopy Place isn’t labelled as such anymore, (that’s where he actually drew Peanuts) but it’s just the other side of the baseball field Schulz built for the neighborhood kids. I really felt close to him visiting the Museum and seeing his special table in the Warm Puppy Cafe in the lobby of the Ice Skating rink he built. I also visit George Herriman’s house in the Hollywood hills from time to time as I’ve reported on the blog. I like to sit across the street from his house near what used to be the little park he built for the neighborhood, great view from up there. I think a lot about Garge when I’m there, almost as if I was visiting him.
Mark
Charles Brubaker says:
I want to make it a goal to visit the Schulz museum someday. People who went there all told me it’s a wonderful place.
Coincidentally, I re-watched “Snoopy Come Home” yesterday with a friend. Of the four “Peanuts” films, I thought that one is the best. I was told that it was Bill Littlejohn who animated Snoopy and Lucy’s boxing fight.
Mark says:
Yup, that was Bill’s stuff, with the boxing glove on Snoopy’s snout! He found the humor in that sequence, the effects animation looked just like Schulz’s comic strip ink lines.
scott jeralds says:
hey mark…i’m pretty sure that willie ito drew the yogi bear squirrel strip….i went over my copies of these strips with iwao and jerry eisenberg and they were able to identify who did what for me….
Mark says:
Hey Scott,
If you know who drew these pages, don’t be afraid to speak up! Jerry Eisenberg and the late Iwao Takamoto ought to know, they were there!
Mark