Here We Go-Go Again

I have to clean out my blog folder, so here are some odds and ends.

Saturday Leftover Day.

I am a fan of Bob Powell's work. The last ten years have been almost forgotten by evey historian. He drew a lot for Mad imitation Sick, of course. But when that died down, he had an actual newspaper strip, Teena-a-go-go. I did several posts with dailies and one with all the sundays I could find. I am combining that ast one here with a set of photos of the wash originals and the first Sunday, I missed the first time around. This means I am close to a complete run.

I have shown various Al Hirschfeld cartoons over the years. Recently I shared a couple of gags from Hank Ketcham's It's Only Your Imagination series in True. But he also sometimes illustrated The Saturday Evening Post's You Be The Judge column (as did many others, including Bill Elder).

I am still surprised there is no complete list, website or even book of his work. I keep coming across unknown ones and they are always great. Here is a Bob Hope poster from movie magazine Modern Screen.

 

I Know That Face

Saturday Leftover Day.

In 1944 Al Hirschfeld was asked to to the promotional art for CBS' radio line-up. Too many of Nirschfeld's excellent work has nog been collected. I would love to see a collection that is organised by name or at least has a celebrity/subject list in the back. But I guess that would invite people to pick them and use them for their own perpoises. For instance, I enlarged and clead the Burns and Allan image and used it for my own CD of collected shows. I showed some of these ads before, but when I decided to sell the clippings from the 1944 bound newspaper book I found them in, I decided to rescan them a bit better. So here they are. They remained unsoldd and anyone interested in this lot (which is actually larger because it includes some reformatted doubles) can contact me below or use my Facebook page.

Sketch Master

Wednesday Illustration Day.

There are a lot of books with the cartoons of Hirschfeld but if someone would do one just with all of his theatre impressions (for the New York Times) I would buy it immediately. Just imaging him sitting in the theatre thinking these up makes me very happy.

Hirschfavian

Monday Cartoon Day.

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.

Heeeeeeeeeeere's Hirsch!

Monday Cartoon Day.

It took me longer than I thought, but today I am ready to give you a post I am really proud of. I have always collected issues of Collier's (and other magazines of that period) to look for cartoons of my favorite artists, most importantle Hank Ketcham and Mort Walker. Ten years ago, when shipping wasn't as expensive as it is now (and there were really cheap ways to ship large and heavy lots) I often bought huge lots of magazines from all ages. That is how I came across some issues of Collier's from the midfifties. Not as interesting cartoonwise, until I found that Al Hirschfeld had done illustrations for John O'Hara's stage and screen gossip feature. I scanned what I had and shared them here. You can still find them (as well as a couple of solo illustrations he did) when you follow the link below.

A couple of years ago I found an online site that was scanning all issues of Collier's from which I started clipping all cartoons. I started with sharing everything I could find from Ketcham and Walker, but have periodically shared the others as well. The organisation is called Unz.org and you can find them here: http://www.unz.org/Pub/Colliers/. They deserve all the applause for what must be a huge undertaking. Unfortunately, they had not yet reached the mid fifties so I never looked for Hirschfeld material. Until someone told me they had now reached the late fifties in their scanning.

So I went back and indeed, I could pull all of the Hirschfeld illustrated O'Hare columns between early 1954 and late 1956. And since Collier's was a bi-weekly, we are talking about more than 50 columns, some with one, some with two cartoons. Many of these cartoons are rarely shared. It is as if this is a deliberately forgotten bit of Hirschfeld's well documented history. Among the people caricatured here are big names such as Hemingway, Liberace, Judy Garland, Steve Allen, Debby Reynolds, Gina Lolobrigida, Ernest Borgnine and shows such as I Love Lucy and the Honeymooners that I have never seen anywhere else. A quick look with those names on the internet shows that some people have found some and put them on Pinterest but on the whole we are talking about a forgotten treasure trove of carcatures. Even John Held Jr. the cartoonist is in there. Maybe these are not copyrighted the right way and in free domain and the Hirschfeld foundation is afraid people will use them as cover for their cd and dvd collections? I am sure they will tell me if they read this (as they have in the past).

This is all I could find now. It is not yet a complete set. The people of Unz.org do not have the last three months of 1955. Maybe someone can help them with those?