No Mager Feat

Tuesday Comi Strip day.

Some time ago I clipped a whole lot of Gus Mager's early Monk strips, a funny animal series that predated his more famous Sherlock Holmes spoof Hawkshaw the Detective. One of Mager;s gags in this irregular daily strip was the way he started naming his monkeys, as you can see here: first as Mufti the Monk, later Rhymo, Braggo and even Sherlocko. Famously, this way of naming was taken up by the Marx Brother, who based their own names on the same principal.

Book Making

Monday Cartoon Day.

Some time ago I found a charming little cartoon series in The Berkshire Eagle in the early fifties. It seems to have been a weekly cartoon, around the subject of books. My friend Craig Yoe used to have a Facebook group called Library Porn and this would have suited there very well. As for the cartoonists, followers of this blog know I have seen a lot of cartoons and can place most artists in a certain circle. Here, I can recognize some (big names even from the middle tier group, like Shafer and Adams and Brown), but some are completely unfamiliar. There is no syndicate mentioned and no magazine here they could have been taken from (Saturday Literary Review, maybe?). It seems to have run for at least two years and I clearly did not get all of them. If they were hilariously funny, I would go back and find more. But I understand why I stopped here. It is nothing more than a curiosity. But a damn intriguing one.