Here’s a Rudolph Dirks Katzenjammer Kids strip I scanned from 1904. Watch as the little imps attempt to murder the Captain for our amusement. O rewar! Dod gast yer binnacles!
Go here to see more Katzenjammer Kids strips on this site.
Here’s what Don Markstein’s Toonopedia has to say about the Katzenjammers.
Click here to go to the Barnacle Press collection of Katzenjammer Kids strips.
Read about the Katzenjammer Kids on Wikipedia.
Click here to the Toonopedia entry on the Katzenjammer Kids.
Here’s a Rudolph Dirks Katzenjammer Kids strip I scanned from September 4th, 1904. The bottom half of the strip is missing, alas.
Go here to see more Katzenjammer Kids strips on this site.
Here’s what Don Markstein’s Toonopedia has to say about the Katzenjammers.
Click here to go to the Barnacle Press collection of Katzenjammer Kids strips.
Read about the Katzenjammer Kids on Wikipedia.
Click here to the Toonopedia entry on the Katzenjammer Kids.
Here’s a Rudolph Dirks Katzenjammer Kids strip I scanned from 1905.
Go here to see more Katzenjammer Kids strips on this site.
Here’s what Don Markstein’s Toonopedia has to say about the Katzenjammers.
Click here to go to the Barnacle Press collection of Katzenjammer Kids strips.
Read about the Katzenjammer Kids on Wikipedia.
Click here to the Toonopedia entry on the Katzenjammer Kids.
Happy New Year! Here’s a new year’s strip from 1904, featuring bizarre ball-boy and ball-buster Billy Bounce, drawn here by C.W. Kahles. Note this strip uses a joke in the title I erroneously had attributed in my mind to Wayne’s World… apparently it is much older. A brilliant joke it is- not.
I posted Billy Bounce strip earlier here.
Click the image below to see the full page (warning: contains offensive racial depictions, as is often the case with old comics).
Here’s a fantastic link for you. Over at Jimland, someone is posting a ton of amazing Jimland Novelties made by the one and only Jim Woodring. Most of these handmade wonders were items fantastically and mysteriously described in the back of various Woodring comics (like the one pictured above). I never got around to sending away for any of them, much to my eternal, wailing regret. These regrets are soothed somewhat by this wonderful online treasure trove.
The excellent cartooning history magazine Hogan’s Alley just posted a bunch of old cartoonists’ holiday cards on their website. A gorgeous one from Johnny Gruelle is pictured below… click it to go to the collection (which includes a larger version of the below image).
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.
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.