The Invicible Hand

Sunday Surprise Day.

When I was assembling panels for my post on Herriman's Emberrassing Moments, I got an unexpected bonus in the form of the daily vesrion of Felix the Cat. I have shown some of the Sunday pages here, but I had never actually seen a daily sequence and it is delightful. These dailies seem to have been set up as seperate reel, eaxh one running for a month or so. The artist even shows his hand at the beginning and the end of the story, but all comic strip historians know tht is not his actual hand - or name. The strip was prodcued and signed by Pat Sullivan, who became very rich and famous for it. But the actual work on the strip and the theatrical cartoons was done by his assistant Otto Messmer. How much Messmer actually did is still in dispute (since Sullivan signed everything and Messmer only claimed to have done the bulk of the work after Sullivan died). But here is what Wikipedia has boiled it down to: "Felix was the first cartoon character created and developed for the screen, as well as the first to become a licensed, mass merchandised character. Sullivan took the credit for Felix, and though Messmer directed and was the lead animator on all of the episodes he appeared in, Sullivan's name was the only onscreen credit that appeared in them. Messmer also oversaw the direction of the Felix newspaper strip, doing most of the pencils and inks on the strip until 1954". But whoever did it, or even if Messmer had his own assistants, the work itself is... mesmerizing.