Thursday Story Strip Day.
On Amazon you can get a book about Siegel and Shuster's other superhero strip, Funnyman. The Superman Duo started the strip after they saw they had maybe sold out their first creation to soon and for too little (even though at the time, that must have been quite an amount). Funnyman was everything Superman was not - silly, fast and not much of a hero, actually. That may have been the reason, it did not take off as much as the Krypton Warrior. As such, the newspaper strip and the comic book version are more of a rarity than an important part of comic strip history. The book by Thomas Andrae and Mel Gordon touches on that as well as the Jewish roots of the creators and their hero. Sadly, it mostly offer comic book stories as reprint material, with a couple of Sundays and one daily sequence added. All in all enough not to make me go and collect a whole run of it for my blog and yet I can't resist taking one every time I come across it. So instead of a nice readable sequence I offer you what I have... bits and pieces. Maybe someday I will go back and collect something more substantial. For now, it's nice to browse.
1 comment:
Ger:
Love Funnyman, but it's kind of sad thinking it came after Siegel and Shuster were fired by DC Comics, and before they were going to be in dire straits for decades.
Also - - I wonder how much of Shuster there actually is in this strip. If you look carefully, except for the very first strips that Shuster certainly penciled, he seems to have farmed out most of the artwork to such assistants and ghosts as John Sikela, Gerald Altman, Dick Ayers, and perhaps even Marvin Stein (who drew some Funnyman comic-book stories).
Best,
Alberto
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