Sidelined

Saturday Leftover Day. 

The New York Herald Tribune had a lot of filler strips in their Sunday sections in the late forties. Various cartoonists (include some who also had their own strips in that same paper) did one tier 'specials' that rarely ran longer than a year. Some were expanded into actual Sunday only half page features, like Irv Spector's Coogy or Gill Fox and Selma Diamond's Jeanie. But most came and went (as interesting as they may have been, like Harvey Kurtzman's Silver Linings). By the fifties this practice stopped, but at that point the (tabloid sized) New York News picked it up. All through the fifties and sixties various fillers were used, but this time each was a half page. They included Cindy Wood by Mel Casson, Bibs an' Tucker and later This Man's Army by Henry Arnold, a full cartoon page by Reamer Keller and my personal favorite Bumper To Bumper by Gill Fox. Each arrtist left a stack of these things at the office, which were then used to fill out the issue in case there were less advertisements or in one or two of the editions (there were three, two in the city and one rural) if an advertiser only wanted to be in the other one.

Anyway, that is all a long preamble to show you another homegrown strip, which appeared as a filler in the Seattle Daily Times in the later years of WWII. The artist was the paper's sports artist, who apparently wanted to try and see if he could get something going alongside that. Cute as it was, Picklepuss stayed a filler for a year or so and disappeared without a trace.

A Plinth Of Sundays

Sunday Surprise Day. If I was ever able to work with of even from the Billy Ireland Museum at Ohio State University, I would take advantage of their huge collection of The New York Herald Tribune to write the definitive series of posts (or even a book) about their syndicate and their unusual appraoch to fillers. They are seen as a failed syndicate, because many of the strips they launched did not reach the broader audience. But If I had lived in New York between 1945 and 1955 their comics page would have been the first thing I looked for every morning. Not only did they have an outstanding roster of talent in various strips, they also bought a huge selection of one tier filler strips for their Sunday paper. Some made it into a regular strip, such as Irv Spector's Coogy and Gill Fox's Jeanie. Jeanie even went daily for a while. Some reached fame among connaisseurs and collectors, such as Harvey Kurtzman's Silver Linings. But there were many, many more. Here are a few I came across, when finally sold my Sundays on Ebay this year.

The Ghost of Coogies Past

Sunday Wait I Have More Day.

Not long after I started this blog I discovered Irv Spector's Coogy. Spector was a fromer animator and cartoonist, who developed the Indian Bears strip in the late forties as a one tier filler for the Herald Tribune. The similarity to Pogo was intentional, although it must be remembered that the nationally syndicated version of the Pogo newspaper strip still had to start at that point. But Walt Kellys opossum was of course already a hit in the comics before that and had started a limited run in a leftwing New York paper. Coogy was soon upgraded to a weekly (Sunday only) half page strip, allowing Irving to show his terrific art and funny ideas in all their glory. Like most Nerald Tribune strips, it was to good for the general public (or maybe they just had lousy sellers) and it only stayed in the Trib section until deep into 1954.

In the later years he started doing spoofs of comics, literature and movies as well. Included here is one episode of a four episode take-off of The Maltese Falcon. Accoridng to the family, he was contacted by Harvey Kurtzman to join Mad early on (my guess would be around #6, when Harvey had to move the succesful comic from two-monthly to monthly), but declined because he needed all his time for Coogy.

I loved this strip and I was lucky. There was an Ebay seller selling loads of Tribune sections and pages. I wish I had gotten more, but it did leave me with huge runs of Tom Corbett, Sherlock Holmes, The Saint, Jeannie and other unique Herald Tribune series. In cluding Coogy, of course. I shared many of those with my audience here and you can still find them if you follow the link below.

And that's not everything. The posts got me a reply from Irv Specor's son, who told me he still had all of his father's originals (excluding one whole box that got lost in a move). he sent me some scans of those and I started lobbying for a Coogy reprint book. As far as I am concerned it was a shoe-in for Fantagraphics (who also do the complete Pogo). Saly, I never got through to them. Spector's son fell off the radar and despite my many requests on the blog page he once opened for his father, I never heard from him again. I hope he is alright and still has the originals. If he ever wants to oart with them I am sure they will make him a lot of money (even if he donates them to the Billy Ireland Museum in return for a hefty tax deduction - they are the appropriate choice because they have a complete set of Herald Tribunes).

I also kept on looking for more tearsheets. Unfortunately, they are hard to come by. Due to the fact that the strip is so unknown, it is never clipped. On Ebay these days, hardly anyone sells whole sections anymore. All people want now is quick samples, so it's tearsheets everywhere. But when choosing whoch strips to clip and which to ruin, most sellers never choose the unknown Coogy.

Last week I got a set of half page 1952 Jeannies from one of those sellers (sent about six weeks ago, but packages are slow these days). On the back I found three new Coogys, which I am sharing here. I also found one cut-up one tier Coogie, showing it was not deemed clippable by the seller.

I still hope to be able to get a complete five year run somewhere, put them together in a book along with loads of scans from the original. If there is anyone out there who can get me closer to this gaol, please contact me. And tell me what you think. Is Coogy as good as I say it is? I should have more episodes in the backlog, which I will try and add later.

Well there turned out to be one more, so here it is: I was reminded in the comments that I have one of the one tier strips in microfiche form...

The Shadow Lurks

Saturday Leftover Day.

The New York Sunday News is known for the fact that for many years they had various 'filler' strips, unique strips that were used by the editors to fill out the paper depending on the amount of ads sold and/or what they didn't like in the line-up that week. Some of these strips were created especially for them others seem to be leftovers from failed strip proposals. This practice seems to have started in the mid fifties and I have shared many of them. They were usually left at the office in batches, so that the editors could use whatever they needed at whatever time. My absolute favorite is Gill Fox' Bumper to Bumper, which I have shown here many times. My friend Michael Vassallo, who is scanning all strips from all issues of the New York Sunday News from as far back as he can get them, is showcasing them on the albums page of his Facebook The New York Sunday News Comics History Group and I recommend you have a look there.

But the The New York Sunday News wasn't the only paper using fillers and probably not the first either. The New York Herald Tribune started using fillers in the late forties, with Harvey Kurtzman's Silver Linings one of the best known among collectors. Most of these filers were one tier gag strips - but longer than a daily strip and always in clor. Some of these strips even developed into full Sunday only strips, like my favorites Coogy by Irv Spector and Jeanie by Selma Diamond and Gill Fox. Like the fillers, they were never distributed to another paper.

One of the weirder fillers is this strip I am showing here, about a shadowy silhouet figure doing normal things. Using characters like that must have been in the atmosphere, because around the same time cartoonist Ponce de Léon was doing a 'naughty shadow' type gag series for The American Legion. Of course, years later, Sergio Aragones did his own 'the shadow knows' version for Mad. I have more of The Imp, which I will show later (after I have cleaned them).

Spoogy

Saturday Leftover Day.

Coogy is one of my altime favorite strips from the early fifties. It was drawn and written by Ir Spector for the Haerald Tribune and a stand alone Sunday only. The first year it was done as a one tier color strip, but after that it continued as a full half page strip until wlel into 1954. I came across a couple of samples of this are strip, which was not distributed outside of the Herald Tribune. It's fun, it's satirical and yes, it resembles Pogo - but it has a charm all of it's own. Later in the run, Spector even took on a couple of larger literary targets nd did four week parodies of The Old Man and The See, Mary WOrth and George Bernard Shaw. I have shown quite a few of these, but I never could get hold of a longer run - until I was at the Billy ireland Museum in 2017. They had two bound newspaper volumes from Bill Blackbeard's collection, which had two complete years. I photographed all of them (as well as some other stuff), but when I got home I was sad to see that the resolution wasn't as good as I had hoped and the bound newspapers had made all my samples wavey. Here are two of them corrected as much as I could. What do you think, should I continue until I have done everything from those two years?

Fortune Coogy

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

I am glad I got that Hirschfeld out of my system yesterday. So today I will keep it simple and give you another early Coogy Sunday I came across. Ain't it pretty?

Duck Rabbit, Duck

Friday Comic Book Day.

It's been a while since I last showed some work by wonky cartoonist Irv Spector. After sharing a couple of Coogy Sundays and some of his earliest and latest comic book work, I ran out of stuff and thought I might have exhausted the well. This week, the Digital Comic Museum upload two more issues of Standard's Lucky Duck, both with many Spector stoies. Best know for his later work as a storyboarder for television cartoons, his work from the fifties has a remarkable weirdness. No wonder many of the more offbeat animators of the last few decades (including John Kricfalusi) admire his work. It has a touch of Walt Kelly, mixed with a little bit of Harvey Kurtzman and a dollop of Virgil Partch. If you haven't seen Coogy, follow the link below and join me in championing a complete reedition of that masterpiece. Or just enjoy these stories.