HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : Jack Kirby’s Black Magic Mutilated : January 19th, 2009

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The Jack Kirby museum highlights needless changes to Kirby’s artwork in 1970’s DC reprints of the 50’s horror title Black Magic.

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : F.M. Howarth in Scribner’s at Unattended Baggage : January 16th, 2008

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Unattended Baggage brings us some rare F.M. Howarth (author of the wonderful Lulu and Leander strip which I have featured numerous times on this site) cartoons from Scribner’s Magazine. See them here and here. Both Howarth and Frederick Opper (Happy Hooligan) were magazine cartoonists who adopted a simpler style for their transitions to the newspaper comics page (not that Howarth’s style ever looks simple)… I wonder if this was a common phenomenon at the time?

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : Tom K Tells it Like it is : January 14th, 2008

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Oy, another out of control long, long list. Been a while, huh? Anyone still reading? Well, welcome back!

Let me just dispense with the illusion/self-delusion that this blog is going to be updated on a regular basis. Starting now, it will be updated whenever I damn well feel like it, and only then, just as it always has been, only with no pretense of operating otherwise. It shall always be feast or famine in these waters. Are you with me, or are you against me?!?

Well, I hope you’re with me. I really do appreciate the fact that people choose to read this blog, in spite of my constant abuse of their expectations. Dear reader, I salute you!

In any case, to avoid the frustration of checking back for updates, I encourage you to subscribe to this blog with a newsreader, so the updates come to you. I use and recommend Google Reader if you need a newsreader… it is free and it works like a charm.

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On his Transatlantis blog, my friend Tom Kaczynski hits the nail on the head…

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : The Harvey Kurtzman Collection : December 19th, 2008

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Boing Boing points us to The Harvey Kurtzman Collection, where Joey Anuff is posting scans of his huge collection of rare Harvey Kurtzman art, including a ton of unpublished preliminary materials.

CRUMBLING PAPER: Taking a look at Newspaperarchive.org… The New Pittsburg Press Staff Includes the World’s Greatest Humorists Cartoonists Writers and Illustrators

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Allan Holtz at the excellent blog The Stripper’s Guide (which, if you follow this blog, you have probably noticed I link to it almost every day I post) had a special offer the other day… he was giving away three free month-long memberships to newspaperarchive.com. Anyhow, I wrote him quick and I got one. Thanks, Allan!

I was just exploring it a little bit, and found the below article from the June 1, 1920 New Castle News. Ironically, the two issues of the New Castle News that I just explored had the comics cut out of them (other than George McManus’s Bringing Up Father, which was on it’s own page). I would guess most of the New Castle News editions on the site are that way if some of them are… presumably a comics fan or comic strip dealer “strip mined” the comics out of them before they were scanned, which is not at all an uncommon scenario (I would approximate that 60-70% of the bound books of newspapers that come up on Ebay have been cannibalized this way). Sunday editions appear to be entirely missing.

Strangely, this article seems to be referring to the comics section of The Pittsburg Press… I am not sure what the relationship was to The New Castle News. This is most likely an ad for a paper owned by the same company, I think.

Anyhow, the cannibals missed this article, so, enjoy! Click the image to download a pdf of the page. It is titled The New Pittsburg Press Staff Includes the World’s Greatest Humorists Cartoonists Writers and Illustrators. It has art by and photos of Herriman, McManus, Opper, Hershfield, Tad and many others… although, as I said, the quality is absolutely terrible.

The papers at newspaperarchive.com are simultaneously fascinating and heartbreaking… there is so much to see, but the artwork and text is all converted to vector art (and in most or all cases, they were first mutilated into microfilm or microfiche, and then to vector art)… the quality is abysmal, but the strips can usually be deciphered for their codified meaning with some patience, like the dead sea scrolls.

CRUMBLING PAPER: Bub, He’s Always to Blame

Here’s an example I scanned of Bub, He’s Always to Blame from 1905 by Everett Lowry. This strip would appear to be very influenced by Swinnerton, specifically his Little Jimmy (which I’ve featured here previously).

Click the image to view the full strip.

Click here to read Everett Lowry’s Mr. Bones in these Chicago Tribune Sundays at Barnacle Press. These also include some amazing, experimental proto-jam comics called Crazy Quilt, done with the Tribune’s staff of cartoonists at the time (which included Gasoline Alley‘s creator, genius Frank King). Don’t miss these!

Here is another example of Everett Lowry’s Bub, He’s Always to Blame at Shorpy.

Click here to read more about Everett Lowry at lambiek.net.

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : Carl Barks’ Donald Duck : December 15th, 2008

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“The Good Duck Artist,” Carl Barks excelled at both short humor comics (his ten-pagers in Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories) and longer adventure stories… in fact he did both better than just about anyone else in comics at the time he worked (using the pseudonymn of “Walt Disney”).

I have examples of both types of stories today… on the adventure side of things, Rodney Bowcock’s Comics and Stories brings us the Donald Duck classic The Gilded Man.

On the short humor strip side, courtesy of the Fortress of Fortitude we have Donald Duck in Silent Night, doing battle with his ongoing next-door nemesis in the 10-pagers, Neighbor Jones. Although drawn in 1945, this story was initially rejected for violence, and was not printed until decades later.

INTERESTING LINKS: Seth’s Dominion City at the Drawn and Quarterly Blog: December 15th, 2008

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This report from the Drawn and Quarterly blog on a speaking engagement by Seth and Chris Ware in Waterloo, Ontario includes photos of the gorgeous miniature city that Seth has built (“Dominion City,” not Palookaville)… I would love to see that in person. Click the above image to go see the large photos.

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : Tom Kaczynski’s Transatlantis Blog : December 13th, 2008

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Boy, this has to be my most unwieldy list of links yet… so many links, I actually had to break it into two posts, as WordPress seemingly can’t handle one post that big. So much good stuff, I’m not going to even attempt to summarize the highlights. In fact, I’m going to start dealing with these huge lists of fun comics in a new way… rather than emphasizing the highlights, I’m going to choose one random item to talk about. This should prevent me from talking about Herriman, Wolverton, Kelly and the rest of my ‘usual suspects’ every time I see their work, and hopefully highlight some more obscure treasures.

Tom Kaczynski's Transatlantis Blog
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My friend Tom Kaczynski has been posting a lot of wonderful work from his sketchbook on his Transatlantis blog lately. I’ve been reading and re-reading a lot of back issues of the fantastic MOME anthology from Fantagraphics lately on the bus, and Tom’s work really stands out in there, which is saying a lot, as he is among excellent peers.

Going on a tangent speaking of MOME, boy is it a great anthology, and it keeps getting better… I’ve got to hunt down the issues I’m missing when I have the scratch. I’d put it somewhere in my top five comics anthologies of all time. It really sets a different tone from any other comic anthology series I’ve ever read… it is a rare thing for an anthology to really feel like it has a unique voice and aesthetic of it’s own besides the voice of its individual artists (Weirdo and Raw being two other examples of this), and MOME definitely does. It regularly features wonderful work from Tom, Eleanor Davis, Zak Sally, Jim Woodring, Paul Hornschemeier, Gabrielle Bell, Al Columbia and many, many other excellent cartoonists… and has introduced me to a lot of wonderful artists I was not previously familiar with, which is one of the best things an anthology can do. If you have the cash, it looks like you can get the first ten issues bundled at a deep discount from the Fantagraphics website.