The Fabuleous Fifties

Toby or not Toby

Monday Cartoon Day.

Last month, in the second part of his interview in Alter Ego #101, Jack Mendelsohn said he breifly worked for Toby press, doing cartoon magazines for them. He describes buying up the left over cartoons that were not bought by any of the major publications and somtimes having to write new captions to them. At first, these vottom of the barrel carton books were hard to find until someone pointed me to Minoan, one of the publishing names of Toby. The cartoosn I am showing today are from one of their titles, Inside Stuff. It was published in 1956, which might be just after Mendelsohn worked there - or just in the middle of that period. In the interview he doesn't give any dates, although 1955/56 seems the most likely. He also mentiones a piece of original art that the previous editor had bought for one of the magazines by Harvey Kurtzman and that turned out to be a piece from 1951, which was used in US Crime. As Mendelsohn tellts the story, that piece of art came in when he was just working there. whch makes 1956 a bit late. He also took the art home and later sold it to Glen Bray, or at least three pages of it.

Anyway, the cartoons I chose to show all have a comic book or comic strip connection. Vic Martin was a popular cartoonist from the fifties, who worked in a lot of Mad imitation, before landing a spot as a regular at Cracked. Jack o'Brien moved to Charlton, where he became the packager of Mad imitation Crazy and drew some of the Sad Sack spin-off titles. Gill Fox is there, whose work in comics and newspaper strips I have showcased here from the start. There's Frank Ridgeway, who created the newspaper strip Mr. Abernathy. And Jerry Fasano, who most comic book collectors know fo one of those comic strip ads that appeared in many comic books for years.