Above: The Squirrel Cage by Gene Ahern – December 13, 1936 You can’t outrace yourself but you can sure try hard. This is shown in today’s Screwball Sunday, an eructation-producing episode of The Squirrel Cage by that irrepressible devotee of ridiculous folly: Gene Ahern. Running as a topper to Ahern’s Room and Board from 1936 […]
09
Jul
Jul
Flash Gordon throughout the 1930s, as part of pop culture and as a foundational aspect of SF’s eventual breakthrough acceptance.
Screwball
Screwball Sunday: It’s Summertime and the Combs are Exploding—W.R. Bradford’s Jingling Johnson and Dr. Domehead (1916)
05
Jul
Jul
Below: Bradford’s Funny Folks, Philadelphia North American (August 20, 1916) Here’s a rare screwball treat: a never-before-reprinted Sunday page from the intrepidly idiosyncratic cartoonist, Walter R. Bradford. The topic of this page is sweltering summer heat, which is something many of us can relate to these daze. When this strip appeared in August 1916, temperatures […]
01
Jul
Jul
I’ve been trying to catch up on some of my to-read pile, and I came to Corto Maltese: The Golden House of Samarkand by the amazing Hugo Pratt. Like every Corto Maltese adventure, the story is thick with historical references and exotic locations. In this particular story, Corto is on the hunt for the lost […]
28
Jun
Jun
Below: “A Sardonic Soliloquy” Judge, January 17, 1903 From roughly 1890 to 1910 Eugene “Zim” Zimmerman enjoyed national prominence as the star cartoonist for Judge magazine. Emulating its predecessor, Puck, each issue of the humor weekly was stuffed with cartoons and funny prose. Much of the content was topical, reflecting both political and social issues […]
25
Jun
Jun
When Mort Walker began Beetle Bailey way back in 1950, he mostly likely never knew that it would become a world wide phenomenon seventy years later and a legacy that includes his three sons. Mort Walker passed away in 2018, but before he passed, his grandson, David, shot a documentary about the legendary cartoonist and […]
21
Jun
Jun
Ving Fuller created the first newspaper comic strip adaptation of the wildly popular animated character, Betty Boop—sort of. The strip was called The Original Boop-Boop-A-Doop Girl and the byline read “by Helen Kane.” The first five strips are drawn by Ving Fuller, who even signed his name on most of them. The below cartoon was […]
"Cap" Stubbs & Tippie, General News, King Features, LOAC Essentials, Popeye
They All Pass Through the Iron Gate (Fourth in a Series)
16
Jun
Jun
Old friends and glittery gals are featured in this fourth installment of our “Iron Gate” series
14
Jun
Jun
Below: Nize Baby – February 20, 1927 Nize Baby may be one of the few, if only, comic strips a cartoonist based on their own bestselling book. When publisher George H. Doran unleashed their modest orange hardback book entitled Nize Baby, in April of 1926 it became a bestselling sensation and catapulted Gross to national […]
07
Jun
Jun
There are five rare early Boob McNutt Sundays in full-color reprinted in Screwball! Today’s page is one that is not in the book. It is of special interest because the last panel was cut out, trimmed, and pasted into the famed 1921 magazine, New York dada, edited by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. Note the […]