My friends at Barnacle Press just posted a WHOLE LOT more of Johnny Gruelle’s obscure Mr. Twee Deedle (which I mentioned with an example the other day)… they just more than doubled the number of these fantastic and gorgeous strips that I’ve seen in my life. Don’t miss them… click the image to go to Barnacle Press’ Mr. Twee Deedle collection.
Here is a portrait I did the other night of my friend Bud Burgy’s characters (with his brother Fud) Meatfist and Gronk…
Below is a logo I entered in the logo contest for the third volume of Bud and Amado Rodriguez’s ongoing Muscles and Fights anthology (I’ve had work in the first two volumes which came out this year… you can see a slideshow with a preview page of my collaborative strip with Zander Cannon from volume 2, and a lot of other great stuff from that volume, here). Note that the third volume will be coming out soon, and Bud and Amado are still looking for more comics… the deadline is January 15th (submission info can be found on the site). They just put a very flattering write up about me on the site too, currently at the top of the home page! Aw, shucks, I’m blushing… Thanks fellas.
Click the above image to read the current strip.
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I wish someone would collect some or all of Johnny Gruelle’s neglected comic strip Mr. Twee Deedle into a book. Gruelle is better known as the creator of Raggedy Ann and Andy, so I suspect there would be a big market for his work. The obscurity of this strip puzzles me somewhat considering the high quality of the work and the potentially large market for the material… I have probably seen less than ten examples of it. What little I’ve seen of the strip is a lot of weird and surreal fun. Here’s an example I scanned (not in color, unfortunately… the color ones I’ve seen have been spectacular). Click the image to see the full strip.
Here’s what Don Markstein’s Toonopedia says about Mr. Twee Deedle.
A lot of comic strips can be formulaic… this isn’t necessarily a bad thing at all. The brilliant Krazy Kat‘s most basic premise is a mouse hitting a cat on the head with a brick, after all. Indeed, a number of strips have taken a limited premise and woven it into inventive strips for years, or even decades… limitations can inspire a lot of inventiveness.
No strips that I’m aware of have used as cockamamie a premise as Gustave Verbeek’s The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo (which I wrote about previously here). Each week the mad Verbeek drew a strip where the first half was read right-side up, and the second half was read in the same panels upside-down. Most cartoonists would have had a good time with this concept one time for a lark and then moved on. Verbeek explored this insane premise for over a year (October 1903- January 1905) before going on to other things.
His other major work, The Terrors of the Tiny Tads (1905-1915), is equally bizarre, full of weird creatures and strange (and frequently violent) situations. The conceits here are that they are told in rhyming verse, and that the creatures have names where they are made of two words running into each other… like the pelicantilope and the boa constrictortoise, for example. Both of these wondrous creatures are seen below in three rare strips I scanned for you to enjoy… click on the images to read the full strips.
From March 31, 1907:
From May 1, 1910:
From April 24, 1910:
Click here to see a whole lot more Terrors of the Tiny Tads at Barnacle Press.
Click here to the wikipedia entry on Verbeek, which has some good links about him.
Click here to read the lambiek.net entry on Gustave Verbeek.
UPDATE: Marco of nonsenselit.org was nice enough to point out that he has 3 examples of another great Verbeek strip, The Loony Lyrics of Lulu, here.
Here’s a lovely tribute by Alan Moore to the late, great Robert Anton Wilson, read at the Robert Anton Wilson Memorial night at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, March 2007.
More videos from the event (including this one with Alan Moore doing a wonderful reading of an excerpt from Wilson’s Masks of the Illuminati) can be found here.
