Late Mail

TueadY COMIC STRIP DAY.

Four more Willie Lumpkin sundays.

One of the previous ones was mislabeled 07-03-60 instead of 07-31-60. I didn't know these labels are visible to the readers here, but don't put too much attention to them. These tabloids by the way, are from a paper that ran their sunday comics on a saturday. That's why the date in the strip (the 'official date') is one day further along than the date on top of some of the pages.

To me, the first one is a perfect joke.

Willy Lumpkin Always Blogs Twice.

Here are some new sunday pages of Willy Lumpkin I received recently.

The first one is the earliest I have seen so far. As far as I can see Dan DeCarlo started out with a simpler style, but he soon reverted to his old full way of drawing. Still, graphicly, I think this is all very well done and it's a shame the strip never caught on.



The second is a very funny and personal joke, as is the third. In some of the publicity material Stan Lee said the hard part wasn't to think of jokes, the hard part was to make them personal and appropriate to the material. This seems like a good example to me of a very personal joke. It could have played in other strips as well, but it fits very well with the general tone of the strip here.



This latest batch I recieved are all full tabloid pages. if you compare them to the thirds a few posts down, you can see how the pages were drawn in such a way that they could be reconstructed. There are some ways this can be done without losing any art, but here they have chosen to do it in such a way that a small panel in the first tier was dropped. This was usually a close-up of Willy with some sort of comment. Sometimes the same pose was even used. You won't see those in these tabloid versiosn, so you will have to make up your own.

For instance... after the first panel here, Willy could be saying: "I am the postmaster of my own fate!"



As long as I am plundering Heritage... here are two daily originals I got from their archives. To me they show what as masterful artist Dan DeCarlo was and how well-balanced most of the drawing for this strip was.

Harting along.

I scanned two early BC sundays from 1964 and added a scan of a 1959 original from the Heritage Archives. I also added a couple of daily originals fro Heritage, some of which I used in the Stripschrift article and others I didn't have any room for. The last one shows the development of Hart's graphic style. In the interview with Richard Marshall Hart syas he deliberately gave his cavemen weird bodies, because he wanted to create a distinctive style, like Virgil Partch. It's only when he discovered he had created characters that couldn't even bent over to pick something up, that he took it down a notch.









These two sundays from 1964 illustrate the importance of timing in Johnny Hart's work. I don't even think I completely understand these gags. It's just the way they are presented that makes you laugh.

More Willy Lumpkin.

I have added another BC to the bottom of the previous post. I also have another Willy Lumpkin form the same sunday section, but I decided to create a new post for that. This may very well be the last Willy Lumpkin sunday. As far as I know, the strip ran til january 1961.

More from the Hart.

For the most recent issue of the dutch fanzine Stripschrift I have translated the Johnny Hart interview Richard Marshall did for Hogan's Alley #2. The issue itself has since been sold out, but the interview can still be read in full on the Alley website at:http://cagle.msnbc.com/hogan/interviews/hart/home.asp

It's a long and meandering interview. For Stripschrift I took the liberty of cutting it down and adding informative bridges. I also collected as much rare illustratrations as I could. I think I succeeded pretty well. Johnny Hart's BC has never been reprinted well. There is a whole bunch of paperbacks from the late sixties and early seventies, but they only reprint a fraction of the dalies. There's also one sunday reprint book, that is now out of print and doesn't even turn up that much on e-bay. After that, nothing. B.C. may have been one of the best syndicated strips of it's time - that clearly didn't translate into a good book contract. Recently Checker Publishing did a rather slim book about all five decades of the strip. Johnny Hart even collaborated in the last months of his life. And at least it shows how funny the strip was in the eigthies and nineties still. In fact, it stayed quite good until the end, although the characters were moved to the background in favor of maybe too many wordplay-gags. I hope the book is a big success and one day B.C. will get a complete reprinting in the way that Dennis the Menace and Peanuts are enjoying.

That left me with the opportunity to show many of my never before reprinted sundays from the early sixties and mid-seventies. To that I added one of Johnny Hart's rare advertising examples and a couple of his and Brent Parker's cartoons. I also had room to show a couple of sundays from The Wizard of Id, an equally funny strip that has had only marginally better luck in the reprint department.

But there is never enough room. I have many more B.C. Sundays that I would like to share with you and I will do so over the next couple of days. After that, I will also add all of Johnny Hart's cartoons I could find from cartoon collections and magazines I could find. Some even came in after the magazine had already gone to the printers. After that, maybe it's time for a couple of early Wizard of Id sundays. I have quite a few from the second and third year of the strip, when the look and tone of the strip weren't completely set yet. And maybe a few from the early seventies, just because they are funny.

The best place to find Wizard of Id strips is the yearly reprint books that were done in Australia. I have quite a few of those (and would like to have their B.C. companions), but I am not quite sure if I want to do more than a few samples of those. We'll see how it goes. I have been collecting a lot of interesting newspaper strips from the fifties and sixties, so I could fill the blog only with those. My main interest at the moment is newspaper artists who came from comics, such as Stan Lee and Dan DeCarlo or Howard Nostrand (who did a very interesting strip called Bat Masterson), Jerry Robinson (who did Jet Scott in the early fifties), Bob Powell (Teena-a-go-go) and Joe Maneely (Mrs. Lyon's Cubs). I also fancy doing bits about the early cartoon work of later comic strip artists, such as Hank Ketcham, Virgil Partch and of course, Mort Walker.

If anyone has any wishes or preferences, please let me know.

Among the stuff we had no room for in the interview were these two daily examples of Johnny Hart's sarcastic humor. They are from the seventies and come from the Menomannee Falls Guardian.


We only had room for one Dr. Pepper ad, but here's another one...



As for Johnny Hart's cartoons, I could only find a few. The first is from Dell's 1000 Jokes and the second from a paperback collection of the best cartoons from True magazine. Here are two we couldn't use. There is one more that's still with Ruud Vroman, Stripschrift's wonderful designer. So I will have to add that later as well as any others I hope to find. If anyone has anything to contribute, please contact me privately.




Finally two sundays, from 1962 and 1963 respectively. I will be adding more sundays form the early sixties later, as well as some dalies from all periods. Remember, all this images can be clicked to view larger.




Finally, one from 1961.

Willy Lumpkin Part IV

Here are the last of my Willy Lumpkin Sundays. Or at least for now.

Since posting these I have recieved a couple more Sundays, which I will publish later.

If anyone has any others, you can send scans to me and I will put them up here. I'll even rearrange them chronologically.

I am glad I am not doing this seriously yet, because keeping this up on a regular basis needs a lot more structure in your life than I can manage at this moment. So I guess I'll be filling in these posts one by one under the radar until I have a good number of them, before I go public with them.

And boy, do I have a lot to share with you. First of all, I will finish up my run of Stan Lee and Dan deCarlo's Willy Lumpkin Dailies with a little more commentary. After that I have a couple of other rare newspaper strips from the fifties and sixties I'd like to share. In between I will try and ad a couple of posts about my other interest: sitcoms.

In the late fifties, Stan Lee was looking around for ways to leave the comic book grind. The Toni Mendez archives at Ohio State University show that he prepared several comic strip proposals, including a very early soap opera strip with Vince Colletta. Toni Mendez was the driving force behind Creator's Syndicate, a small outfit that was famous for allowing Johnny Hart to keep creative control and many of his rights to B.C. I hope some further research will make clear how Stan Lee arrived there, but one connection could be that some of his former collegues and employees at Timely were doing strips for them. One of those was Al Jaffee, who had a long running panel series called Tall Tales. In a private e-mail Jaffee told me that he had a good working relationship with Toni Mendez (a woman, by the way). Even after Tall Tales folded, he kept submitting new strip ideas. "I did one every two weeks," he told me. That could be hyperbole, but knowing Al Jaffee's supple mind and huge production, it could also be true (at least for some periods).

Stan Lee's first succes with Creator's Syndicate was Ms. Lyon's Cub Scouts, a gentle humor strip about a family whose children were in the club scouts. The artist was Joe Maneely, Stan Lee's favorite artist in the fifties. When Maneely died in 1958, Stan Lee had to look for a replacement. In a recent book about John Romita Sr. from Twomorrows a try-out by his hand is seen. But in the end he chose Al Hartley, another of his Timely mainstays. Unfortunately, Hartley drew the strip in a lackluster style. The amount of detail in the art was more than halved, the parents were dropped and the strip became even more juvenile. Later on I will show a few samples and talk a bit more about this strip.

But first, more Willy Lumpkin sundays.

BARNEY'S BEAT

In the late fifties Stan & Dan, as they affectionately called themselves in the comics, created a new strip called Barney's Beat, centered around an easygoing city cop. At the same time, deCarlo developed a strip on his own called Josie, another in a long list of dumb blondes. This time the main character was named after deCarlo's wife. He even gave her his wife's hairdo. Publisher's Syndicate was most interested in Barney's Beat, but asked for a less urban setting. Stan Lee had preferred the world of the suburban social climbers as he knew it well and it would give him a lot to saterize. But he agreed that a more gentle apporach might attract more papers and they changed their cop into a mailman and relocated him in the small town of Glenville, USA. Dan worked up a fresh batch of sampled and off they were...

As I said, most of this comes from Bill Morrison's excellent Art of Dan DeCarlo, although it is completely corraborated by the information in Stan Lee's own autobiography. Willy Lumpkin ran for 14 months before it was cancelled and I think it is a pretty good sample of the best both it's authors were capable of. It wasn't a hit, but in a way we should be glad for that, or otherwise we wouldn't have had the Marvel Universe or Dan DeCarlo later creation Josie and the Pussycats.

A lot of background material for this strip (and others by Stan Lee, Al Jaffee, Arnold Roth and Dave Gantz) is available at the Ohio State University in the Tony Mendez collection. I would love nothing more than to spend a couple of days there to prepare a definitive article about this strip... or maybe even the introduction to a nice collection.

Here are acouple more sundays.

You Have To Start Somewhere

WILLY LUMPKIN

Recently, for the special Stan Lee issue of prozine Alter Ego I wrote a lengthy article about the writings of Stan Lee from 1941 to 1961, which is when he revitalized the comic book industry together with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko by starting the Marvel comic book line with heroes such as Spiderman en The Fantastic Four. So lengthy infact, that Roy and I decided to leave it for another date. I did get him a couple of scans to use, including one of a sunday page of Stan Lee and Dan deCarlo's 1961 newspaper strip Willie Lumpkin.

In the next couple of days, I will upload one page a day of all the sundays I have for this delightful strip. This will give me a chance to get familiar with the working of Blogger and anyone who stumbles upon this site something to read and to come back for.

But first, some history.

In the late fifties, the comic book industry was faltering. Many publshers had thrown in the towel and others were either downsizing the number of their titles or at least reducing their page rates and find other ways to make the books cheaper to produce. many comic book artists took this as an incentive to try and leave as well. Most comic book creators wanted to be in newspaper strips or advertising anyway. So this was their chance to try and make it in the big leagues.

Among them was Stan Lee, who had a good job as editor of a huge line of comic books from his uncle-once-removed Martin Goodman. But a job is all it was, he didn't have a part of the company and from his point of view at that moment in time, it must have seemed like a dead-end job in a dying industry.

So he approached several artists and tried to get some proposals up. One of them was Dan deCarlo. Not a weird choice, as they had worked togetehr succesfully since the late forties on what we now would call Archie-type teen humor comics. But they were more than that. They were in fact, quite unique and of a style all their own, combining Stan Lee's love of cheap puns and silly situations with deCarlo's slightly sexy yet still innocent and very attractive illustration style.

Their most popular series had in fact already been a newspaper strip. My Friend Irma was based on a popular radio series in the forties and had been a newspaper strip in 1952. When the artist of that strip couldn't make a go of it, Stan Lee and Dan deCaro even took it over for a while. But they too, couldn't turn it into a hit. Still, some of their tries at newspaper strips followed the model of Irma closely. Maybe too closely. I get all of this information from Bill Morrison's book on the art of Dan deCarlo, which for some reason he called The Art Of Dan deCarlo (Fantagraphics). In my next post I will steal a bit more from this book, show a few samples and tell you how Willie Lumpkin got started.

But first the first of my Willie Lumpkin sundays. Click on the image for a larger scan.

First post.

I am still trying to decide if I am going to do this in Dutch or English.

Heck, I am still trying to decide what I am going to use the blog for. I wanted to secure the name, but in fact writing about my life as a sitcom writer here in Holland is just one of the things I could make this about. I have written sitcoms for almost twenty years now, so that would qualify as a subject or at least a title. In which case, it probably should be in Dutch, because I don't see why it would be of interest to anyone abroad.

On the other hand, I also write about television and humor for several magazines here in Holland and I could use this blog to give all my writings a permanent home. Again, Dutch would be the main language used.I could also use it to publish some of the interviews I did with some of the American sitcom writers I have not yet sold or had to bring down to their absolute minimum for publication. Last year I talked to Ken Levine, Jim Burrows, Rob Long, Lee Ahronson and Ian Gurvitz. Here's Ian, by the way. I also have an earlier interview with Phoef Suttton about his Cheers career and more.

But I also collect American comics and newspaper strips from the fifties and write about comics for the Dutch fanzine Stripschrift. I have been writing about comics (from all over the world) for more than 30 years now and have interviewed such greats as Will Eisner, Jean Giraud (Moebius) and Jeff Jones. I have found rare war material from Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman, which I could share. Or long runs of Stan Lee's comic strip work. I regulary send stuff to Roy Thomas to use for his excellent publication Alter Ego (a fanzine from Twomorrows about comics and comic creators from any period Roy likes or worked in). And I collect and scan rare art from various artists, which I could share here as well. All this would be in english, of course.

But... the main reason for me to pick this up right now is because I did my spring cleaning early this year and need a place to sell my surplus stuff. I will be listing all my double Timely books here to sell. You will have to add postage, but so had I when I bought them. It's usually best to buy a few at the time. I'll list the possibillities when I get back to post the list.

So, to lure all you potential buyers in, I will start by writing about the comic books and newspaper strips I like or have something interesting to say about. I'll start with Stan Lee and Dan DeCarlo's forgotten early sixties newspaper strip Willy Lumpkin. Which, due to the bloggers tradition of having the last post first, you will already have seen.