A week ago I did a huge Al Hirschfeld post I am pretty proud of. Go and follow the link if you haven't seen it yet. Today I have a smaller one, that is just as special to me. Three years ago, when I was in New York, I went to the Public Library to look at the microfiche files of PM and the New York Star papers. Two liberal papers (the second a continuation of the first in 1949) that had a lot of rare and very well made comic strips, like Elmer Wexler's Vic Jordan, Jack Sparling's Hap Hopper and later on the first run of Pogo. But I also found that they had an original daily cartoon series called Cracked-Up that was done by a set group of cartoonists, one of which was Virgil Partch (VIP). he always provided the Saturday cartoon (which in PM was published on Sunday). In more than five years he did over 300 original cartoons. I copied some of them but also found an online microfiche source later on, so I have been able to share a few. I believe this is the best period of Virgil Partch's work and the creative basis for most of his later career. I gave the information to Jon Barli, who has used some of them in his book on Partch as well as some o the cartoon reprint book after that. I also had a look for Walt Kelly's political cartoons and copied as many of them as possible. Even though the microfiche material for 1949 was pretty bad, I have a whole set of these never seen cartoons that I will share later.
Today I am just showing one cartoon, an advert that Al Hirschfeld did for NBC color tv. It too was badly scratched, so it took me over an hour to clean it up at least enough to be presentable. it is not from PM or the Star, but another New York paper I looked at for Sunday comics, The New York Sunday News from 1955. I took out all the scratches in the drawing, but left a few in the lettering.
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