Excelsior!

Saturday Leftover Day.

I have shown most of these Sundays before in various forms, but never this complete. 

In January 1951 Stan Lee (and signed) wrote three episodes for Chad Grothkopf's Sunday only comic strip version of the popular children's television puppet series Howdy Doody. The series had started earlier in 1950 and the writing was co-credited to Milt Neil, a former Disney animator, who had perfected the design of the Howdy Doody puppet. Some writers assume that Neil was also the writer of the strip, although that abillity is in none of his other credits. The style of the strip is totally that of Grothkopf. Anyway, his name disappeared from the strip in early December (though most papers were slow in adjusting it on the top). All of the following December jokes are simple enough to have been thought of by Grothkopf himself.

According to several sources he asked his friend Stan Lee (whom he had work for at Timely and who had written one of the episodes of his earlier newspaper Sunday only strip Famous Fiction, Under The Flag anonymously) to write some episodes for him. They appeared in January 1951 and all three of them were signed.  They are also typically Stan Lee gags, with the same bad puns he was using for the comic series My Friend Irma he did with Dan DeCarlo. In his storyline, he introduced a kid version of the Featherman character that was introduced in the tv show as an adult indian chief (very much in the manner of that time).

Here you can see the run-up to that moment in The Commercial Appeal. They added the strip in November 1950, starting with the first strip which had first been made for much earlier that year. But as you can see it has no date, but rather 'number 1'. After that there are some single visual gags, probably written by Grothkopf himself. Then the usual holiday greetings and then the start of the Featherman story.

Featherman is now a little indian kid, who lives in an indian reservation and gets introduced at Howdy Doody's school. At the end of the gag, there is a figure in a large hat peeking in the classroom and the text is added: "Who's the mystery man at the window?" The next week we see it seems to be an adult indian, but we don't get to know yet what he wants from Howdy and/or Featherman. In the third episode the mystery man is knocked out at a barber's shop and we are told his identity will be revealed in the next week.

That next week is no longer signed by Stan Lee, but I think it was written by him, too. First of all, the whole sequence leads up to the reveal. Secondly, the same type of misunderstanding puns are used. Thirdly, when the mysterious 'indian' is finally revealed he turns out to be Spencer Spout, the Talent Scout - who seems to be a caricature of Stan himself. The long face, the premature balding head... and his hucksterlike attitude, when he says he is a talent scout, who wants to take Featherman to Holywood.

The story goes on for another eight episodes. Featherman (and his new friends, of course) go to Holywood, where is discovered and becomes so famous that he has to return home to escape the fans. I don't think that Stan Lee wrote the whole story. Although it does follow his style of continued narrative with gags along the way, the gags themselves usually are not in his style. The episode of February 14 is anybody's guess. The gag "Can I take your bag - No, go find-um your own!" is something Stan would write and the sarcastic joke "Let's do something different - I know, let's do a cowboy movie!" could be his as well. But then he would have started (and possibly done) the rest of the storyline as well and I don't think he did.

Anyway, now you can see for yourself.  As I said, I showed many of these before, but never this complete. But some of the others were in color, some were the full half page and some were both. If you want to see those, just follow the link.

I am also selling two of the Stan Lee Sundays and some more on Ebay right now. Get them while they are hot.