Monday Cartoon Day.
It is no secret that I am a huge fan of the cartoons of Virgil Partch. He had an enormous output and almost all of it was funny. I recently found out that he produced even more cartoons than I thought. Apart from doing weekly cartoons for Collier's and The Saturay Evening Post, monthly ones and illustrations for True and lots of cartoons for other magazines, he also was one of a rotating set of cartoonists who worked on the daily newspaper cartoon panel Crack-Ups. This series, which I discovered through Alan Holtz' American Newspaper Comics - a complete listing of all newspaper strips ever done in the US, with startings dates, creator names and often even infromation on assistants. I will be using it a lot to find the oddball stuff I am interested in. I can not recommend this book high enough.
When I looked up Virgil Partch I didn't only find his two newspaper strips, George and The Captain's Gig, but also his contribution to Crack-Ups. This daily cartoon panel ran from the early forties until te late forties and it seems Partch joined in very early. He finally ended up with the saturday spot, effectively producing one cartoon a week for over six years. The ones I am showing here are from 1945, three years after Partch started cartooning. It has all the absurdity of his best work but it is still in his earlier, more bulky style - which I may even prefer to his more slick style of the fifties or certainly the more homely style he settled in towards the end of his career. At this point, Partch's biograher say he was drafted into the army, but it seems he was still producing his weekly cartoons.
The quality of these microfiche scans are so so. I would love to be able to preserve a good set of scans for future generation. If anyone has a set of VIP cartoon clippings, I would love to hear about it.
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