Master of His World

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Regular visitor may have noticed that I have not been keeping up my blog as often as I have been doing over the past ten years. The main reason for that is that I am in a deadline crunch for a book that I am doing here in Holland. Not only does that eat at my time, but it also onvolves a lot of scanning and cleaning up - which is exactly the same sort of work I am doing for this blog. So let me make you a deal. If you return next Saturday I will take care to have an extra special post. In the meantime, I have a good one here as well. And suited to official theme of this day, even.

As you may know, I have a fondness for comic strip movie ads. Lou Fine did a terrific run of them in the late forties, most of which you can find if you follow the link. I am also a big fan of the work of Alex Toth (also shown here with rare material). So imagine my surprise when I found a 1961 movie ad in a paper I bought for something else that I have not seen ever before.

No artist's work is so well loved and well documented by his fans as that of Alex Toth. So a find like this is really exciting and I can't really believe I am the first one finding it. A brief look at the internet yielded nothing, but please correct me is it is collected somewhere, at leats not in color. There is one black and white version on one of the Toth fansites.

The ad itself is from the time that Toth was working for Hanna Barbera as a character designer and for Disney as a story board artist. It has the best qualities of his work from the sixties; action, clarity, character and lots of design. It bears some similarity to the Ad for Journey to the Center of the Earth, which I have always suspected to have some Toth involvement - but the small version I have seen was not actually by him (you can find it by following the movie ad link).
This scan also clearly shows that the ad itself was made through Sponsored Comics, the commercial outfit run by Zek Zekely in California. He was also responsible for the short run free grocery store Family Comics newspaper section, which you can also find by following the link. Sadly, Toth was not in those. Lastly I would d myself short if I didn't mention the connection between this ad and the Hot Wheels ads he did for Mattel (also to be found by following the link). They are very similar in format and style and make one extra sad to note that Toth was not asked to do this sort of thing more often.

Moxey M.

Saturday Leftover Day.

As part of my trip to the US I stayed a couple of days in Columbus, Ohio to visit the Billy Ireland Cartoon center, which has one or the largest collections of donated art by people from the cartoon and comic strip community, as well as the complete newspaper archives of the Francisco collection from Bill Blackbeard. They also had a huge collection of stuff that must have come from artist David Gantz himself, because it not only contained samples and clippings from his two most famous newspaper strips, Dudley D. (follow the link for samples) and Don Q. (which I have never been able to get hold of, so I haven't shown it yet). There were also a lot publicity materials from a strip I always believed had remained unsold, Moxy. Early versions of this charming strip about a Mouse and a Lion (equally inspired by Aesop's Fables and Pogo) had appeared in the short run Family comics, a mock Sunday newspaper which was produced by Zek Zekely for Californian grocery stores (again, follow the link for a complete sample). After that he tried to sell it to a syndicate and when that worked, they tried to sell it to newspapers. In the files at the Ohio State University was a whole sheet of newspaper ads, with actual papers named. So either it was sold and disappeared quickly or it was retracted just before the actual start because of insufficient papers joining in. Anyway, I plan to do larger article about those, but I though this would be a a great opportunity to show you two pieces of original promotion art made for this strip by Davind Gantz as well as a promotional one-sheet. The latter one was also in the Ohio collection, but I got these from various Internet sources. Also included in the library was a complete daily story in black and white proof, which I hope will one day be available.

All For The Family

Saturday Leftover Day.

In 2007 Allen Holtz devoted a series of posts on his unmissable Stripper's Guide to a specialty newspaper section called Family Comics. Like me, he was alerted to it's existance by the fact that Ebay seller (and famous oriinal art dealer) Lowery had been selling original pages from the the strips in these sections. Without evidence of publication, they seemed to be either samples or unused pages by a lot of familiar names in the industry, most of which may or may not have been based on the West Coast (California) rather than the East Coast (New York). But they were pretty well done, stamped 'sponsored comics' on the back and some strips were represented with several samples. I myself even got two of them, one three tier half tabloid page of David Gantz' Wee 3 and a stylish full page of Gill Fox' The Mayor. Allan discovered these strips were actually used in a free give-away in Californian supermarkets, called Family Comics. Here is what he wrote initially:

"Family Comics. It consisted of 16 pages -- 11 pages of color Sunday-style comic strips, four pages of black and white recipe and homemaker articles, and an ad page on the back cover. The 'magazine' was on newsprint and priced at 5 cents.

The magazine was marketed to food store chains, mainly in California. I can vouch for two chains that used it - Shopping Bag Food Stores and Hughes Markets. It may have been marketed to other businesses as well, but for that I have no evidence. The food stores got their name in the masthead, ads on the back cover plus sometimes an additional ad inside. The marketing gimmick was obviously to get kids to beg their moms to shop at that grocery store chain every week so that junior could keep up with the funnies. To that end, the strips were tipped in favor of continuing adventures.

The first issue of Family Comics was dated the week of May 4-10 1959, and the latest issue I have is #10, dated July 6-12. If there are later issues we could probably determine it easily enough from original art as most of the strips were coded with the issuing week. For instance, on the strips in issue #10 each has the code 7/6-12 lettered on it."

After this he found out that the man behind this was former George MacManus assistant Zeke Zekley (through his outfir 'sponsored comics')

Allan finally got hold of an almost complete run of the publication that used these strips and discussed almost every one and it's possible artist. After that he sold his run of the section and I don't know why I didn't get it, but I believe I was outbit or sniped at the end. Darn. I would have loved to have seen all of them, especially that beautifull Gill Fox strip and Norman Maurer's contribution Happy Days 1969, which must be one of the smartest and best drawn things he ever did.

Ever since I have been looking for my own copies of Family Comics without luck. A couple of months ago I finally came across one single copy in excellent state. Sadly it is the same issue Allan seems to have used for his presentation, but that does not hold me back to share the whole thing with you here with some comments of my own. Here's to hoping the rest will follow before The End of Blogs.

I will use the information Allan has unearthed abd urge you to have a look at The Stripper's Guide for more.It may take me a while to annotated every one, so please come back for more.

Dave Davely

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

David Gantz was a classmate of Al Jaffee in the forties. For a long time he worked in comics. He even joined up with a guy called Brown to do realistic work, but nothing really stuck. In 1959 Al Jaffee got a newspaper strip Tall Tales)  at the Herald Tribune Syndicate. At that point, Gantz was also trying to sell comic strip ideas. One of them was called Moxy and was a reworking of a Pogo-like strip he had done for Zek Zekeley's Family Comics, a line of 'Sunday' comics done especially as give-aways for a chain of grocery stores in California. When he failed to sell Moxy, he tried again with a more bland subject, the story of a man and his dog. The dog was called Dudley D., which I take it stands for Dudley Dog. Zek Zekeley (who himself had done a newspaper strip called Dud Dudley) must have been an inlfuence on the name. The dog could not talk, but we did see his very human thoughts. Th strip ran from 1961 to 1964 before it fizzled out, like many Herald Tribune strips before it. Maybe the blandness of the strip itself was to blame, but the Herald Tribune Syndicate had a very poor record of selling it's strips and a couple of years later a very similar  strip, drawn in a similar style about a  Basset Hound and his boss, called Fred Basset became a world wide succes which is still running to this day. Fred Basset was created by the Scottish cartoonist Alex Graham in 1963, although I am in no way mplying he might have seen Dudley D. I am just wondering why that strip took off and this one didn't.

I have shown other samples of this strip before, both in color and black and white. The balck and white Sunday from december 196 is from a short period when the color engravers on the Herald Tribune were on strike. All of the other strips mentioned have been shown as well. Except for Fred Basset, which you'll have to find on your own.

All in the Family

Monday Cartoon Extra.

For all f you who liked Bil Keane's Channel Chuckles last week, here are three more I didn't show earlier. Together with that are three episodes of Keane' equally innocent and silly Silly Philly. This weekly compendium of reader provided puns (although Keane liked them himself and may have added or tweakerd a few of his own) was one of the first features he started and when he coulnd't keep it up anymore, he added it as a bonus to his Family Circus.

A Mox On You!

Tuesday Comic Strip Day

For some weeks I have been showing smaples of Irv spector's early fifties strip Coogy in thi sspot. Coogy was intended as a Pogo knock-off by the syndicate and whatever Spector tried to turn it into didn't work. Funny and welldrawn as it was, in the end it didn't catch on. Coogy wasn't the only strip that was influenced by Pogo. Some strips, like King Aroo, combined Pogo and Krazy Kat influences. Most were not a success. The best Pogo imitation was a Sunday only strip (like Coogy) that didn't even appear in the newspapers. It was Moxie, it was written and drawn by David Gantz and it appeared for eleven episodes only in a comic book section that was handed out for free in a chain of supermarkets in California. Family Comics was produced by the former George McManus ghost Zek Zekely. When McManus died in the fifties, his succesful strip was not turned over to his ghost of many years, but to syndicate stallward Vernon Greene. Zekely, a very funny and competent artist tried to find other ways to earn a living. Family Comics was just one of his projects. It had art by Zekely himself, Gill Fox, Norman Maurer, Boltinoff and even a young Russ Manning. For many years, originals from this interesting fake Sunday were sold by a California dealer under the names Family Comics and Sponsored Comics (which seems to have been te name of Zekely's company). I firts heard of it when Alan Holtz did a series of posts about it on his strippersguide blog. Moxie was one of those features. All my samples are taken from Alan Holtz or from various auctions. Unfortunately, I didn't get any of the originals or any of the Family Comics when Alan finally sold them. I still hope to see them all together in a book sometime.








David Gantz (who died recently) was a good friend of Al Jaffee. For a short time he worked in a style similar to that of Jaffee, when he had his own newspaper strip Dudley D. I hope to be showing more of these and other work by Gantz at a later time.