I love looking at stuff other people like. Sometimes it makes me like it as well. Especially if they write about it in an interesting way. Paul Tumey is such a writer, maybe the best out there. His blog about the work of Jack Cole is exemplary, full of well thought essays. When he exhausted his subject he took his thoughts to another genre, starting a blog about what he dubbed screwball comics. Or maybe he didn't invent the name, as there was a collection of silly, absurd and slapstick comics from the pre-war period from Rick Marshall at Nemo years ago. Anyway, in it he highlights the work of silly artists such as George Swanson, Bill Holman, Rube Goldberg, George Gross and others like them. He also has a Facebook group called The Masters of Screwball, which is a good starting point.
One of the strips he introduced me to, was The Nut Brothers by Gene Ahern. This silly and absurd strip full of illustrated puns was the topper to Our Boaring House one of the dullest entries in what was already a very dull genre, the blowhard strip, featuring a usually pompous, fat man at odds with the world around him. Anyway, The NUt Brothers is great fun and here is a set of samples from an ebay seller who was so kind to make such good scans that I didn't have to buy his wares. The colorin seems a bit boring, but I am not sure it is the official one. I have come across more samples of papers having their own coloring (usually simpler and cheaper). More often than not that was, as it is here, in a paper that published their Sundays on Saturday.
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