Congrats to "Stripper's Guide," which just celebrated its 1000th post! For those who still don't know the name, the Guide is a blog that's dedicated to archiving historical newspaper comic strips. Man, there's some good stuff on this site!
http://strippersguide.blogspot.com/
Straight from Stripper's Guide, here's (the two pictures above) some more George Herriman from 1907. Be sure to click to enlarge. Really, can there be any doubt that Herriman was one of the 5 or 10 greatest cartoonists of the last century?
More Herriman (above). It's a shame that modern newspapers insist on regular, repeating characters. Some cartoonists are better off doing whatever enthuses them at the moment.
Herriman (above) loved to play with novel layouts.
Allan Holtz, the hero who runs the Guide, takes a special interest in finding neglected strips that no one else knows about. Here's (above) an interesting one from 1903: "Crazy Charlie." The premise is simple: every week Charlie escapes from the insane asylum and gets in trouble in the town.
Here's (above) another lost classic: "Pussy Pumpkin." Every week an outraged animal stumbles on a bully then beats the daylights out of him. Not what you call plot heavy, but it was good enough to back up the weird graphics.
I couldn't resist one more Herriman.
8 comments:
That Crazy Charlie comic reminds me of John K's posts about how cartoons didnt need to deal with pointless exposistion and explanation of everything that happens.
Bam! hes escaped, 5 panel adventure, Bam! hes back in.
It almost seems like the writer might have belonged in an asylum (in a good way)
Excellent post! "Crazy Charlie" seems very similar to Milt Gross' "Count Screwloose". Could it be that Milt Gross ripped him off? I shudder to think of it!
Pussy Pumpkin is totally warped!
Pussy pumpkin sounds like the name of an all girl punk band
Those Herriman panels are great! It looks to me like he must have influenced Billy DeBeck (Barney Google).
Nope. Milt Gross' Count Screwloose really ripped off Danish cartoonist Storm Pedersen and his "Peter and Ping": http://www.peter-og-ping.dk/ Well-known in Denmark, but forgotten everywhere else, unfortunately... Gross turned Ping into the twin penguins Otto and Blotto, who apart from their comics appearances make an animated appearance with Screwloose in MGM's JITTERBUG FOLLIES.
Pedersen also drew Rube Goldberg-style wild invention cartoons about eight years before Goldberg, right down to indicating individual parts of the gadgets with A, B, C and the like. It's amazing what's gone down the memory hole.
Ramapith: Amazing! Many thanks for the interesting reply to Phantom! Unfortunately the article was in Danish, and had only one picture, but that picture looked a bit Grossish (though Gross was a better artist). I'll look up Storm Pedersen on the net and see what I can turn up. Thanks again!
Hey Eddie, if you're into Brit cartoons check this out:
http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/
The British Cartoon Archive just put up thousands of images online.
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