Your Comics Page-So Long Nebbishes and “Cat” news!!
 Here’s the only other example of Herb Gardner’s “The Nebbishes” I could find for now. It’s the episode of March 1st, 1959, which could be titled “Irving’s identity crisis”. Irving takes off his glasses and Gladys (who knows both Irving and Seymour) mistakes him for Seymour. The gag builds upon Irving’s declaration in the third panel that he must “distinguish myself from the masses in some way”. If I find any more of these pages I’ll run them here. I would love to see these available in book form, but “The Nebbishes” are a forgotten chapter in comics history and a collection probably wouldn’t sell. So back on the dusty shelf they go.
 Krazy from 11-3 to 11-8-1941, uses the first four strips to do a little continuity about Krazy’s ambition to be a sculptor. He does a bust of himself and a bust of Offissa Pupp, but the bust of Ignatz proves to be just…a bust. The balance of the week’s strips involve shadows and silhouettes. My favorite drawing of the week is the last panel of the 11-5 as Offissa Pupp react’s to Ignatz’s sneeze. The scratchy pen line really has movement to it; Pupp’s cigar is just a few lines hanging in the air.
 Felix is from 12-23 to 12-29-1935 this time. Felix is caught between the guns of Fooy Tu Yu and Punk Chow as he hides in the “junk” ashcan with his precious diamond. Felix gets away before the Chinese bad guys spot him. In the Sunday, we have part one of a fanciful story of Felix’s descent into the substrata of the Earth by “Gravity-Rocket”. Felix’s old friend (?) the chemical scientist, puts him into his new rocket as a reluctant experimental animal. If you want to see what Felix found underground, go into the blog archives and find “Time Trifles With Felix”, August 8th, 2010 for the 1-6-1936 Sunday. We’ll fill in the last dailies of 1935 next time.
 Myrtle is here, from 7-28 to 8-2-1947. A new boy joins the cast named “Snoggons”, his name reads the same way backwards or forwards. He snips off one of Myrtle’s braids and makes a wall hanging and a bike tassel out of it. When Sampson tries to avenge the theft of the braid, Snoggons takes off Sampson’s top-knot! I like the 7-28 gag, which continues Bingo’s facility with opening doors. Bingo is supposed to fetch Aunt Susie’s pillow from the back yard, but a sweet little pekingese is asleep on it. Bingo just wordlessly refuses to move the little dog and the idea is expressed by just cutting back to the inside of the house with Bingo closing the door.
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT!! 
We took second prize in the ASIFA East Competition for Independent Shorts! That’s in New York City, folks! If you can make it there you can make it anywhere! We are now the Avis Rent-A-Car of cartoon shorts, we’re number two, so we’ll try harder! Congrats and love to all our stalwarts who made the cartoon possible, Greg Ford, Kim Miskoe, Igor, Ronnie Scheib, Cathy Hill and many more! I think we can safely say that this cartoon is the very LAST cel-animated analog production in the USA!! We’ve thrown down the cat-gut, no other cartoon producer can make that statement!
Charles Brubaker says:
I like that Snoggons character. How many kids these days would make a bicycle tassel out of some kids’ braid?
I really enjoyed “The Nebbishes”, in spite of its short-run. I’d buy a complete collection; somebody should call Fantagraphics or IDW.
I found some more samples on this site:
http://allthingsger.blogspot.com/2012/10/ordinairy-blobs-tuesday-comic-strip-day.html
Charles Brubaker says:
And congrats on winning the second prize!
Daryl Boman says:
Great news about the short!
Will it be available on the web?
Mark says:
Hi Daryl,
“There Must Be Some Other Cat” won’t be available for streaming very soon, as we must first Academy qualify the short and the Academy doesn’t approve of any short films streaming before they are played off in festivals or have qualifying runs in theaters. I’ll announce if and when the short will be on the ‘net when the time comes. I’ll also let my readers know when and if the short will play in a film festival.
Thanks for asking, Mark and Itza
Roberto Severino says:
I’ll be waiting for sure! It would be cool if you could do what Louis C.K. did with several of his stand up specials (specifically “Live at the Beacon Theater) and offer your short at a low price, let’s say 5 dollars or so, and the people who have access to your short would be able to watch it anytime they want without having to worry about it expiring. There would be rules on where you could post it, copyright, and personal use though. I think being able to creatively profit and reap the sow out of your own hard work is important too while giving back at the same time.
Do you think taking up comics is a good idea if I wanted to experiment further with staging and all that other good stuff? I already have many ideas I wanted to experiment with and I actually used to do comics when I was a kid in the 3rd grade, but they were probably very primitive in comparison.
Mark says:
I don’t know if my short will be available for paid downloads or not. I was on two pay download animation sites with my first short and they both went belly-up. One of them collapsed literally overnight! We took in very little money, not enough to justify the fees the sites charged to be on them. Marketing short films is very tough, so is making them. That’s why I probably won’t do another one, unless somebody else pays for it, that’ll happen!
Of course experiment with comics all you want to, any kind of drawing is better than none. Don’t neglect drawing from life or nature along with your cartooning. One supports the other. Making any money from an independent comic book however is very difficult. My wife, Cathy Hill, did seven issues of the comic book “Mad Raccoons” back in the 1990s. Very little money came in. We even paid for most of the production costs on the trade paperback anthology of her work. Artistically, however, I loved her characters, drawing and writing, so for me it was well worth it. It’s my dream that her raccoon characters will be discovered by readers in the back issue stacks through the years.
Mark
Milton Gray says:
Congratulations on your win in New York! And best wishes with the Academy! I’ll be eager to see how that goes, although I guess it’ll be almost a year before we’ll see the outcome of that. Best of luck with marketing, too!