Give Us Our Daily Laugh

Saturday Leftover Day. Reamer Keller was one of the hardest working huys in cartooning. And not for a short period either. His first cartoons appear in the early forties and his last ones as late as the seventies. His style is always loose and funny, even if the subject matter was unsuitable for this time as in his treatment of women. When he worked for the girlie cartoon magazines he always kept it clean, probably because he wasn't that good at drawing sexy women. And his work appeared everywhere, like that of his contemporary Henry Boltinoff. Like Boltinoff, he ventured into newspaper cartoons every now and thenm as well. Most prominently with his own Sunday tabloid pages of cartoons, which he first did around 1950 and later picked up as a filler strip for the New York Sunday News in the sixties and seventies.In 1947 he joined mid-tier artists Rodney DeSarre, Tom Hendersen, Jeff Keate, Bill Kng, Jefferson Machamer and Frank Owen to create a daily feature called Today's Laugh which featured one artist per day and was distributed by the Chicago Tribune syndicate. The format was similar to Crackups which had Virgil Partch, Syd Hoff and Chon Day - clearly the classier line-up (which you can see if you follow the link). Still, Keller stood out among this crowd, if only for his loose and modern style. I had a scan of a Saturday Evening Post featurette and added it just for fun.