In the Pipeline

I'm working on a new mini-comic to have a grand unveiling at San Diego COMICON INT'L this summer, published by my friends, the team at Sparkplug Comic Books and Books and Distributors. It'll be an historical essay in comics form. I have to get it turned around pretty fast, it looks like (I might give up, too).

Henry Boltinoff

Here's a few strips by Henry Boltinoff! They're dumb, but the guy can cartoon astonishingly. I get old comics now and then, I'll try to post these here and on Flickr as I come across them. Boltinoff did comics to fill space in DC magazines for 150 years.

More Boltinoff
My Previous Boltinoff Post

Gluyas Williams Stuff

I noticed this when I was looking around in Google's newspaper search for more Gluyas Williams stuff:

Times sure have changed.

Links: Henry Boltinoff

I saw this post at Pappy's Golden Age and was reminded of how nice Henry Boltinoff's cartooning is. I don't have any scans of my own to show or anything, but here's a LINK ROUND UP: Gorilla Daze: some one- and half-pagers from DC Comics Dial B for Blog: A selection of Super-Turtles Stripper's Guide: Woody Forest Toonopedia: Boltinoff bio Mania Dos Quadradinhos: Info and Woody Forest(Google Translation) DC Indexes: Mother Lode of Boltinoff DC Filler Strips

I really like this smarmy "publicity man" from Alan Ladd #8.

X-9 by Mel Graff

click for larger version

I discovered today that I like the look of Mel Graff's 40's-50's cartooning, so I tracked down some strips at Heritage Auctions. I turned them into line art and put them into one page as a fun comic strip continuity project! Thrill to the adventures of Corrigan (aka X-9), Corrigan's double, Joe Otterfoot, and the handling of illegal venison. Strips are from 1944, 1949 and 1955.

Also make note of Graff's special lettering for the caption boxes--good stuff!

Graff promo art and bio at Joakim Gunnarsson's blog

Secret Agent X-9 wikipedia entry

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Chinese Comics: Peng Di (aka 朋弟), A Molin 2

Here's another batch of strips scanned from a book I brought back from China in 2004. This stuff is by cartoonist 朋弟 (aka Peng Di, Feng Di, Peer Di), and I'd say these examples are from the 30's/40's, but I can't say for sure. The title seems to be A Molin 2, which, according this this guy is a funny tranlation:

"I found a better dictionary and noticed that the word 阿木林 can mean someone who is easily decieved or a fool. I think that is what the name 阿摩林 should be translated as. Perhaps this is a way to say the same thing in Shanghai. From now on Ah Molin will be known as Suckah."

Maybe "A. Dupe" would be a good name.

Anyway, this is from a series of reprints published in 2003; I bought three different ones, but gave the other two to friends. This book is all four-panel strips, while the others I saw looked like longer stories. The strips from this book deal with class struggle, the male/female dynamic, and hygiene, I guess.

Title Translations:
pg 1: Eat Well
pg 2: The Suction Kiss
pg 3: Standard Table Lamp.

That's about all I can figure out. I found these on the Google-translated page here. I'll make up unfunny but jokey fake titles from here on.

Thus,

pg 11: Now He Has One Leg!

pg 19: Sharing Hooker's Bed Bugs
pg 31: Popeye Contest
pg 39: Baby Collector ???
pg 46: Fickle Lady

pg 52: Ass Licker
pg 57: Rickshaw and Severed Head

LINK ROUNDUP

Peng-Di Wikipedia entry, Google translation

Peng Di series on Amazon.cn

Translated Peng-Di Comics on wobumingbai.typepad.com:
The Real Shanghai, introductory post,
The Real Shanghai, subsequent pages
Make Your Fortune and Return Home

Ther was some controversy over characters in the seemingly pretty profitable Old Master Q series being plagiarized from Peng Di's comics (and they are obvious rip-offs). More info on this:
Old Master Q Wikipedia Entry
People.com.cn Article, Google Translation

That's it, have fun!

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Title Block

I have to put in some overtime at work this week (so my comic strip for this week is lagging), but a benefit, along with time-and-a-half, of course, is coming across stuff like this:

click for larger

Back in the old days big architects firms knew a good logo when they saw one. Nowadays I'm not so sure, they're a little too plain for me. This thing was handlettered by a professional! A couple more nice bits:

A graceful "of" can make even the ugliest stencilled numbers look nice.

Penny by Haenigsen

This is a collection of Penny strips by Harry Haenigsen. Haenigsen's a great stylist, his drawing's really something, in spite of all the turned-up Frankenstein noses. I've collected some jpgs of other stuff by him that I'll try to post one of these days, though I have a feeling it's not for everyone. But I think we can all appreciate the beauty of this plain-jane early 50's cover design! RIGHT?

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Chinese Comics: Sanmao

This will be the first of a few posts with scans of comics I got while I was in China in 2004. They're all old, as I didn't see much of anything contemporary. If I ever go back I'll try to do some legwork beforehand and find out where a comic shop is.

Anyhow, first up is Sanmao, who's a very popular chracter over there with a long running strip. Sanmao literally means "three hairs" or "three whiskers," and he's a put-upon, typically homeless urchin just trying to get by. These comics are from the late 40's during China's cultural revolution, so you see lots of political stuff going on. I'm not sure if the book I have starts with the very first strip or if it's a ways into the story, but here he's just heading to the city and seems pretty naive:

He's taken in by a kindly old fisherman, however:

After being back on his own for a few strips he's taken in by a family, until their house burns down, then he's back on the street alone again. In the book he goes through a series of these kinds of ups and downs, matching wits with other street kids, overfed fat rich people, wild animals, the thoughtless, the greedy, the mean. He dreams of a better life, but not much comes of it, even though he's a good guy.

That's it! Mostly pretty good comics, but maybe a little melodramatic or political in places. They're almost all wordless, too, for easy reading.

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1906 Atlantic Monthly on Comics

Thanks to Boingboing.net I learned that The Atlantic Monthly now has its archive freely viewable. I just started looking at it and already found this great quote about Sunday comics from 1906:

"Ten or a dozen years ago,—the exact date is here immaterial,—an enterprising newspaper publisher conceived the idea of appealing to what is known as the American "sense of humor" by printing a so-called comic supplement in colors. He chose Sunday as of all days the most lacking in popular amusements, carefully restricted himself to pictures without humor and color without beauty, and presently inaugurated a new era in American journalism. The colored supplement became an institution. No Sunday is complete without it,—not because its pages invariably delight, but because, like flies in suummer, there is no screen that will altogether exclude them."

also, this one's good--these are both in the opener of the story!:

"One and all they unite vigorously, as if driven by a perverse and cynical intention, to prove the American sense of humor a national shame and degredation. Fortunately the public has so little to say about its reading matter that one may fairly suspend judgment."

The author here is Ralph Bergengren, and this article is his indictment of comics, specifcally color comics (apparently the color printing of 1906 wasn't to his liking, as he says the black and white versions look "twice as attractive"), and the simple, cheap humor they dealt in. I'm actually still not sure it isn't satirical, but I'm assuming he's in earnest.

On some points I agree with him, on others he's crazy. His descriptions of the immoral activities of the color supplement sound better than any turn of the century comic i've ever seen, more lurid, lunatic and wily--he should have been making comics. On the other hand, he makes the point that all the "types" created by the cartoonists dilutes the variety that humor generally has to offer that maybe partly true.

The writing overall here is a lot of fun to read, even though the author is a stuffy traditionalist. If you're interested in old-time comics, take a look here. He cites Winsor McKay as one of the good ones, while rival versions of the Yellow Kid (I think? not specifically named) both stink.

To me, reading this a hundred years later, all he proves is that the more things change, the more they stay the same, and I think that's what happens anytime you read a hundred year old magazine article of any kind. Strangely, I'd really feel good about making a comic composed of "pictures without humor and color without beauty."

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Ralph Barton

I nabbed this Ralph Barton gag from the Library of Congress' site. I doctored it a little to make a print-ready black & white file from it. See the unadulterated scan here.

The Library of Congress site has tons of material if you're willing to dig a little. I've found that they don't always give you easy access to the highest quality images, you instead have to go to the root directory and navigate to the bigger file (like this one, for instance). Happy hunting.

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