A Puzzling Period

 Sunday Surprise Day.

Four years ago I shared scans of a rare Harvey Kurtzman book. Kurtzman is best known for being the creator of Mad and doing Little Annie Fanny for PLayboy with Bill Elder. Fans will also know he did a remarkable line of war comics for EC and had a funny filler page in all of the Timely titles in the post war years called Hey Look!. In between Hey Look! and Mad he struggled. He had a partnership with Bill Elder and Carles Stern, did some work for Varsity, but mostly was looking around for new accounts. 

One of those included a company called Kunen, which produced children's puzzle books. Not vooks with puzzles, but books that were puzzled themselves. All of these books had thick double carton pakes and pieces your could take out (and sometimes switch for a nem effect). I don't know who originated this gimicky concept. It sounds like something Kurtzman would think of and he may have. I really should reread that part of Bill Schelly's excellent Kurtzman biography, But as far as I remember even Bill did not find out anything about that period I ddn't already know and Kurtzman himself was always quite tightlipped about it.

All in all Kurtzman did several of these books. Some he did with René Goscinny, a French/Argentinian jewish cartoonist who was staying in New York at that time and even shared or rented a desk at the socalled CharlesWlliamHarvey Agency. That is also where he met another French artist called Morris and started writing his already succesful comic strip Lucky Luke for the French-Belgian magazine Spirou. After a year or so he went back to France, started working with Albert Uderzo and evenually became famous as the writer and co-creator of Asterix and the editor and co-originator of the magazine Pilote.

Another artist who did some books for Kunen was Fred Ottenheimer. Not much is known about thos silly artist, except that he went to the same school als Kurtzman, Bill Elder and later Mad artist Al Jaffee. After doing a couple of books for Kunen, he did filler pages for various Fawcett comics (most of them unsigned and unidentified, although I am keeping a list) and became a publisher when he inherited his family's company. I don't know if he was part of the coterie of Kurtzman in the late forties (Al Jaffee wasn't), but he did become friends with Morris and shared an appartment or a studio with him for a short time (as well as publishing his one and only childrens book).

The one puzzle book I shared here (linked below) was done by Goscinny on his own. In my accompanying text I said I welcomed scans of the others. This week, I saw that a comment was added by Sue (I threw away the mail before noting her last name) offering just that. We exchanged information and she sent me the scans for one of Kurtzman's own books. I kindly let it go out to the world. Two down, four more to go.

Not So Plain Jane

Saturday Leftover day. Here is a nice bit of WWII government propaganda. My impression is that this series (there may be more) was distributed t papers to be used freeley as a filler. I have no idea who the (clearly competent) artist is.

 

Calling All Fans

Wedensday Extra Announcement.

For the last few years I have been assisting Bill Janocha on his book The Birth of a Beetle, out from Hermes soon. Bill worked as Mort's personal assistant for decades. When the family found a trunk full of originals by Mort, all from his stint as a cartoonist before he started Beetle Bailey, Bill was asked to put together a book. Knowing this would be the alst and only time such a book was made, it grew and grew to include an estensive history of Mort's career, his earliest wish to be a cartoonist and how it lead to his entry in the comic strip world. Apart from the originals found in the trunk, many cartoons were included from all of the publications they were sold to. I helped Bill search for these and even made a complete list of Mort Walker's notebook, where he kept detailed information on all cartoons he sold - and didn't sell. Together we found about 80% of Mort's published cartoons and we have a good idea where most of the others are (or at least, in what titles they were published).

Like the strips, Mort's cartoons (many of which I have shared here as well) are great. Bill has made them fresh by painstakingly restoring them and all in all the book has become a respectful, fascinating, insightful, very well drawn, comprehensive and outright funny document of the forgotten period of a grand master of cartoon art. It also has all of the Spider cartoons Mort made, both published and unpublished. Zpider, of course, was the student character that later became Beetle Bailey (who also was a student before he joined the army in 1952). The whole book was delivered to hermes press, who took on the responsibillity of publishing it in a climate where taste and distribution might not be what it was ten or twenty years ago. He also did a great book on Garfield, so it is not a one-off. But still, we will need all the sales we can get to make it profitable.

And this is where you come in. Hermes has placed a sollicitation ad for the book in the May issue of Previous. I understand that the new one arrived in comic shops this week, but maybe it it not to late to order it from #392. It is also available on Amazon as a pre-order. I get the impression that the price and page count are a guess, because there is enough material to make the book twice as large. What I do know, is that Hermes is probably putting out these ads to test readers interest - so the more people go and get this, the larer the print run will be. Allowing even more people to buy it later. It is also possible that Hermes will keep he print run pretty close to the order amount, so get it while you can. Thank of it as a Kickstarter for a book that is already almost done.

Hre are some of the rarer cartoons. I am not even sure if these are in the book. Bill and I exchanged so many scans I have lost track.

More Than You Can Gag

 Sunday Surprise Day.

Last Saturday I shared a run of cartoonist Reamer Keller's newspaper strip Kennesaw. I remarked that the hillbilly subject was bebeath Keller's more far ranging talent, as show in his many cartoons between the forties and the eighties. That talent is fully on show in the Sunday cartoon feature he did in the late forties called Friends of the Family. A new subject each week, that's more like it. Before those, I have a shorter set of samples from Today's Laugh, a rotating daily cartoon service by the Chicago Tribune/New York News syndicate, which would also buy a Sunday feature similar to Friends of the Family in the late fifties - which they used as a filler page until at least the seventies. . Friends of the Family was from the McNaught Syndicate, which ran the daily cartoon panel This Funny World 9which also used Reamer Keller a cartoon at least once a month). The last set is from This Week, who had a half page by a different cartoonist every issue.

The Case of The Missing Dalies

Saturday Leftover Day.

The Perry Mason newspaper strip was a short run affaire in the early fifties. Erle Stanley Gardner's detective hero had been a huge succes in the forties, helped by the writer's habit of prepublishing each new book in serealized form in various weekly magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post. The newspaper version was drawn by an Charles A. Lofgren, an unknown artist about whom I could not find a lot of information. On December 17 Mel Keefer took over with a new story. He continued the strip (unsigned) in a Alex Raymond inspired style until March 23. After that, a young Frank Thorne took over, fresh out of art school. He too adopted a Alex Raymond style, though his version was slightly more slickly inked than the scratchier Keefer. Thorne signed the strip and continued it until it's demise later that year, all the while developing his style.

I showed one of Lofgren's full stories in Sunday only version in an earlier post and I have various dailies and Sundays in other posts. But Perry Mason is a strip to be read, not only seen. So here is a longer run of Longren, going into the Mel Keefer months. I have a couple of those as well, but galfway through you will see it changes to Sundays only. The Sundays cover the handover to Thorne and I finish out his first story in Sunday only version as well.

Not the best quality (all these strips are clipped from a microfiche newspaper site), but in lieu of a real full color reprint it must serve as the only record of this forgotten but near really all that bad early crime strip.