1910-1940: The Comics Come of Age
In the last installment the argument was made, for
all of us collectors to consider, that educating ourselves about the history of
the things we collect can and should add a higher dimension to our enjoyment of
the whole collecting phenomenon. And, for sure, we are now writing histories of
toymakers, comic artists, comic strips, comic books that would otherwise have
been lost.
Mainline historians are interested in things like politics,
wars, and important things like that – not comic books, not Tootsietoys, and not
old lunchboxes in Mint condition. So if the history of comic art and comic
strips and comic books and comic artists is going to be written, then who is
going to write it?
We are writing it now, with every issue of magazines
like Comic Book Marketplace, Alter Ego, and all the other publications like
Overstreet’s Guides and Ernie Gerber’s Photo-Journals. We – the fans, the
aficionados – are taking the time and energy to seriously research these areas.
In weaving this tapestry of information and opinion concerning all types of 19th
and 20th Century collectibles, we are leaving behind a permanent history for
future generations.
As a collector, I get a special enjoyment out of
reading Sunday newspaper comic sections from the ’20s through the ’50s. To a kid
who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s, getting a big fat Sunday comic section was a
once-a-week event, something to look forward to, something to pounce on and
devour as soon as it hit the porch.
I like to think that newspaper
comics “grew up” in the ’20s and ’30s. From their beginnings with
the Yellow Kid and Buster Brown, Little Nemo and Mutt & Jeff, the comic
pages started to evolve. Many comic sections went from 4-page or 8-page sections
in the teens and ’20s to 12-page, 16-page, and even 24-page comic sections. As
these comic strips caught the eye – and the pocketbook – of the public, lots of
different kinds of people started making lots of money with comic strips; better
artists were attracted to comics; little kids who laid on their bellies to read
the Sunday comics in the mid-1930s were inspired to become the artists and
writers who produced the comic book boom in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s.
As
1920 rolled around, the Sunday funnies were all funny or fanciful. Mutt &
Jeff did vaudeville routines, falling backwards out of the panels; Little Nemo
had a wild imagination and his dreams took him to fantastic places; the
Katzenjammer Kids and their cousins, The Captain and the Kids (there’s a story
there!), were parallel strips from different artists and different syndicates
about these two German imps, Hans and Fritz, as they made life miserable for the
Captain and the Professor. During WWI, when we were at war with Germany, the
strip had its name changed to The Shenanigan Kids. They were supposedly Irish,
no longer German Katzenjammers, but still speaking pigeon-German. And when you
think about it, the Katzenjammer Kids never made much money in merchandising.
The strip itself was a long-running success, but they were never really
successful in comic books, cartoons, etc., compared to Popeye for
example.
With immigrants flooding into the country, strips like Bringing
Up Father, about a lower-class Irish couple, Jiggs and Maggie, who come into a
fortune, were very popular. Women were becoming liberated and starting to have
careers, and Polly and Her Pals, Tillie the Toiler, Jane Arden, and Winnie
Winkle showed the way.
I have heard it argued that the first adventure
comic strip that had much success was Kahles’ HAIRBREADTH HARRY. It featured
cliffhangers in the style of THE PERILS OF PAULINE and other popular movie
serials of the time, in a stagy old-fashioned and corny melodrama.
Remember, now, this is the 1920s. There is no television, no radio yet
to speak of, and movies are silent. If you wanted visual stimulation in a
narrative format, you had a choice of reading the comics or going to the movies.
And while you might go to the movies once or twice a week, the comics came every
day, with a big color bonus every Sunday. The ’20s saw the blossoming of strips
like GASOLINE ALLEY, which critic John Benson has called “the great
American comic novel.” Millions could identify with Walt and Skeezix and
their family living in a small town in the midwest. For a while, Sidney Smith’s
THE GUMPS was hugely popular. There was WINNIE WINKLE for the working girl and
HAROLD TEEN for the high school soda-shop raccoon coat jalopy crowd. And the
antics of Moon Mullins and Lord and Lady Plushbottom were aimed at the working
class people who might frequent the pool hall and have too many beers on
Saturday night. The comic sections tried to have something for everyone.
As newspaper circulation increased and new papers started appearing
outside of the major metropolitan areas, there was a problem – what is a
newspaper published in Topeka, Kansas, or Denver, Colorado, or Omaha, Nebraska
going to do as far as offering comics pages to their readers? Certainly each
newspaper could not afford to have its own cartooning staff, and even if they
did, how could their comics compare with the ones from New York and Chicago that
already had national followings? The obvious answer was to syndicate the comics.
Hearst’s organization formed King Features Syndicate, which controlled all the
Hearst “Puck” comics and “rented” them to newspapers all
over the country. The Chicago Tribune Syndicate, which owned rights to all
products involving GASOLINE ALLEY, THE GUMPS, WINNIE WINKLE, DICK TRACY, TERRY
AND THE PIRATES, HAROLD TEEN, MOON MULLINS, etc., competed with King Features by
syndicating their comics to hundreds of other papers. United Features Syndicate,
with TARZAN, LI’L ABNER, and others to offer, followed suit. A few Sunday
papers, like the Montreal Standard, subscribed to strips from several
syndicates, so that in those comic sections you could see UFS’ TARZAN page
alongside KFS’ FLASH GORDON and CTS’ GASOLINE ALLEY.
Roy Crane’s
pioneering strip WASH TUBBS started as a gag-a-day strip and evolved into one of
the very first adventure strips, changing its name to CAPTAIN EASY. And standing
in the impressionistic background of this whole panorama is the mysterious KRAZY
KAT – mysterious because it was both a popular failure and a favorite of
intellectuals and cognicenti. Many comics historians consider KRAZY KAT to be
the greatest, most articulate and artistic comic strip of all, and it was never
a financial success for its creator, George Herriman, nor its syndicate, King
Features. Supposedly, it continued to survive because William Randolph Hearst
liked it.
Dick Calkins and Phil Nowlin launched their BUCK ROGERS comic
strip from the Chicago offices of the John Dille Company. This pioneering
science fiction strip was set 500 years in the future in the 25th Century, but
aside from the rocket ships, anti-gravity belts and ray guns (ZAP!) the story
was space opera. The first story of Buck Rogers came from the pulps, and at
about the same time, another hero who was born in the pulps found his way to the
comics page: Tarzan of the Apes.
By 1929, the Great Depression was a
stark reality for millions of out-of-work Americans. One of these was a young
advertising artist living in Chicago – Harold Rudolph Foster. When the
advertising business went south, he started doing the TARZAN comics to put bread
on his table (and the tables of several other of his co-workers at the ad
agency). Foster took over the TARZAN Sunday page in late 1931 and drew this
feature until 1937, when he started his own PRINCE VALIANT strip. Foster’s
Tarzan raised the bar for a “realistic” comic strip, and by 1932
TARZAN was running in hundreds of Sunday comic sections all over the world. At
almost the same time as the Sunday TARZAN started, Col. Joseph Patterson of the
Chicago Tribune Syndicate added a new adventure strip to their already powerful
line-up with the debut of Dick Tracy in late 1931.
Elzie Segar had been
drawing a comedy strip called THIMBLE THEATRE with a vaudevillian cast of
characters like Castor Oyl and Olive Oyl, and the feature was a moderate success
for King Features Syndicate until Segar introduced a new character named Popeye
the Sailor. With the addition of Popeye, THIMBLE THEATRE became one of the most
popular strips of the 1930s, spinning off into merchandising, licensing,
animated cartoons, etc.
The movies had learned to talk by 1931, radio
shows were being broadcast coast-to-coast, and people bought popular recordings
to play on their Victrolas. The competition was stiffer than it had been at the
turn of the century, and the comics were becoming big business because of
syndication and licensing.
Barely in his twenties, Alexander Raymond
worked as a ghost artist for Chic Young (BLONDIE) and his brother Lyman Young
(TIM TYLER’S LUCK) before January 1934, when three new comic strips made their
debut in the same week: FLASH GORDON and companion feature JUNGLE JIM in the
Sunday comics, and Dashiell Hammett’s SECRET AGENT X-9 in the daily papers.
Raymond, blessed with a natural talent and aspiring to be an illustrator,
rapidly changed his style from the cartoony 1934 pages to the lush inking that
makes the 1935-36 period a favorite of Raymond aficionados.
Col.
Patterson, the brains behind the Chicago Tribune Syndicate’s hugely successful
stable of comic features, again recognized the potential of the young Milton
Caniff, and TERRY AND THE PIRATES joined the Chicago Tribune line-up. United
Features Syndicate, which distributed TARZAN, added a new humor strip to their
line-up with LiL ABNER, and the stage was set. The 1930s ended with comic
artists like Foster, Raymond, Caniff, Al Capp, Burne Hogarth, Chic Young, Cliff
Sterrett, and many others carrying the ball into the 1940s.
For me,
the greatest period for the Sunday comic sections started around 1930 and lasted
into the early 1940s. Even by the late 1930s, something bad was happening to
many strips…they were shrinking! Advertisers had discovered the Sunday comics
had a high readership and they wanted their ads placed there, so why would a
newspaper run a full page TARZAN strip or a full page GASOLINE ALLEY when they
could run a half page (exactly the same number of panels, but smaller) and have
a half page left to sell to an advertiser? Then the paper shortages in the 1940s
led to further shrinkage; some strips which had a few years earlier been full
pages would now shrink to one-third of a page, with some of the panels being
editorially dropped to save room. Now the cartoonist had to worry about which
panels were “droppable,” becoming more compromised in how he told
his story. Strips which depended on having lots of space, like FLASH GORDON,
BUCK ROGERS, TARZAN, PRINCE VALIANT, and even the homespun GASOLINE ALLEY, were
forced by the syndicates who owned them into smaller and smaller spaces. They
eventually died a lingering death.
Am I waxing nostalgic about these
wonderful comic sections of the 1930s? Not at all. I never saw a comic section
from the 1930s until I was well into my thirties, and what led me to discover
these comic sections is exactly what we are talking about here. I was born in
1937, and by the early 1940s I was reading, but by that time the glory years of
the 1930s were gone. My nostalgia trips centered around the EC comic books I had
read as a teenager in the years 1951-55. I started collecting because of that
nostalgia, but that activity led me to discover many significant things about
our hobby that had happened before I was around.
I loved the science
fiction art of Al Williamson in WEIRD SCIENCE and WEIRD FANTASY, and I read
somewhere that Al had idolized the art of Alex Raymond. That piqued my
curiosity, and I made the effort to try to see some of Raymond’s work which was
done “before my time.” I became friends with artist Frank Frazetta
in the 1960s and heard him sing the praises of Hal Foster’s work on the Sunday
TARZAN page, so naturally I wanted to see some of those pages to see what had
impressed Frazetta so deeply.
As a kid growing up in Missouri in the
1940s, I never once saw a KRAZY KAT strip. The strip had run in only a few
newspapers from its beginnings in the 1910s until the death of creator Herriman
in 1944. But every time I would read something about comic art, there would be a
mention of KRAZY KAT and what a wonderfully artistic strip it was, so I was
intrigued enough to want to go back and see for myself what all the hubbub was
about. This process continued for many years as I started to collect old Sunday
comic sections from the 1920s and 1930s. So it was nostalgia for EC comics that
led me to discover other comic books, Sunday comic sections, and all the other
areas which appeal to the comic collector of the present. Now here we are in the
21st century, and my grandchildren, who like Spider-Man and X-Men, will be able
to trace Jack Kirby’s earliest inspirations back to Hal Foster and Alex Raymond
because of the work we have done in the past few decades to preserve these high
points of the past and to document the history of comic art in
America.
So tonight before I go to bed, I will pick up an old comic
section from the mid-1930s and read through it, and just for a fleeting moment I
will be a little kid again, revisiting all my old friends from the ’30s. I will
learn from GASOLINE ALLEY what it was like to grow up in a small midwestern
town; DICK TRACY will teach me what scam the Chicago gangsters are trying to
pull and how modern scientific crime-fighting is winning the war; the incisive
satire of Al Capp will illuminate his jaded view of the world; and the visual
poetry of KRAZY KAT will sing sweet songs to my soul.
And all because I
liked EC comics and wanted to see what came before!
Tarzan of the Apes.
par
par By the year 1929 the Great Depression was a stark reality for millions of out-of-work Americans. One of these was a young advertising artist living in Chicago, Harold Rudolph Foster. When the advertising business went south, he started doing the TARZAN comics to put bread on his table (and the tables of several other of his co-workers at the ad agency). Foster took over the TARZAN Sunday page in late 1931 and drew this feature until 1937, when he started his own PRINCE VALIANT strip. Foster’s Tarzan raised the bar for a ”realistic” comic strip, and by 1932 his popular TARZAN strip was running in hundreds of Sunday comic sections all over the world.
par
par And at almost the same time as the Sunday TARZAN started, Col. Joseph Patterson of the Chicago Tribune Syndicate added a new adventure strip to their already powerful line-up with the debut in Dick Tracy in late 1931.
par
par Elzie Segar had been drawing a comedy strip called THIMBLE THEATRE, with a vaudevillian cast of characters like Castor Oyl and Olive Oyl, and the feature was a moderate success for King Features Syndicate until Segar introduced a new character named Popeye the Sailor. With the addition of Popeye, THIMBLE THEATRE became one of the most popular strips of the 1930s, spinning off into merchandising, licensing, animated cartoons, etc.
par
par By now (1931) the movies had learned to talk, radio shows were being broadcast coast-to-coast, and people bought popular recordings to play on their Victrolas. The competition was stiffer than it had been at the turn of the century. And the comics were becoming big business, because of syndication and licensing.
par
par Barely in his twenties, Alexander Raymond worked as a ghost artist for Chic Young (BLONDIE) and his brother Lyman Young (TIM TYLER’S LUCK) before January 1934, when his three new comic strips made their debut in the same week: FLASH GORDON and companion feature JUNGLE JIM in the Sunday comics, and Dashiell Hammett’s SECRET AGENT X-9 in the daily papers. Raymond, blessed with a natural talent and aspiring to be an illustrator, rapidly changed his style from the cartoony 1934 pages to the lush inking that makes the 1935-36 period a favorite of Raymond aficionados.
par
par Col. Joseph Patterson, the brains behind the Chicago Tribune Syndicate’s hugely sucessful stable of comic features, recognized the potential of the young Milton Caniff and TERRY AND THE PIRATES joined the Chicago Tribune line-up. United Features Syndicate, which distributed TARZAN, added a new humor strip to their line-up with LI’L ABNER, and the stage was set, and the decade of the 1930s ended with comic artists like Foster, Raymond, Caniff, Al Capp, Burne Hogarth, Chic Young, Cliff Sterrett, and many others carrying the ball into the 1940s.
par
par For me, the greatest period for the Sunday comic sections started around 1930 and lasted into early 1940s. Even by the late 1930s, something bad was happening to many strips...they were shrinking! Advertisers had discovered the Sunday comics had a high readership and they wanted their ads placed there, so why would a newspaper run a full page TARZAN strip or a full page GASOLINE ALLEY when they could run a half page (exactly the same number of panels, but smaller) and have a half page left to sell to an advertiser? Then the paper shortages in the 1940s led to further shrinkage...some strips which had a few years earlier been full pages would now shrink to one-third of a page, with some of the panels being editorially dropped to save room. Now the cartoonist had to worry about which panels were ”droppable”, becoming more compromised in how he told his story. Strips whichb i depended on b0i0 having lots of space...strips like FLASH GORDON, BUCK ROGERS, TARZAN, PRINCE VALIANT, even the homespun GASOLINE ALLEY...were bi forcedb0i0 by the syndicates who owned them into smaller and smaller spaces, and they eventually died a lingering death.
par
par Am I waxing nostalgic about these wonderful comic sections of the 1930s? Not at all. I never saw a comic section from the 1930s until I was well into my thirties, and what led me to discover these comic sections is exactly what we are talking about here.
par
par I was born in 1937, and by the early 1940s I was reading, but by that time, the glory years of the 1930s were gone. My nostalgia trips centered around the EC comic books I had read as a teenager, in the years 1951-55. I started collecting because of that nostalgia, but that activity led me to discover many significant things about our hobby that had happened before I was around. I loved the science fiction art of Al Williamson in WEIRD SCIENCE and WEIRD FANTASY, and I read somewhere that Al had idolized the art of Alex Raymond. That piqued my curiosity and I made the effort to try to see some of Raymond’s work which was done ”before my time”. I became friends with artist Frank Frazetta in the 1960s, and heard him sing the praises of Hal Foster’s work on the Sunday TARZAN page, so naturally I wanted to see some of those pages to see what had impressed Frazetta so deeply.
par
par As a kid growing up in Missouri in the 1940s, I never once saw a KRAZY KAT strip. The strip had run in only a few newspapers from its beginnings in the 1910s until the death of its creator, George Herriman, in 1944. But every time I would read something about comic art, there would be a mention of KRAZY KAT, and what a wonderfully artistic strip it was, so I was intrigued enough to want to go back and see for myself what all the hubbub was about. And this process continued for many years, as I started to collect old Sunday comic sections from the 1920s and 1930s. So it was nostalgia for EC comics that led me to discover other comic books, Sunday comic sections, and all the other areas which appeal to the comic collector of the present.
par
par And now here we are in the 21super stnosupersub Century! And my grandchildren, who like Spiderman and X-Men, will be able to trace Jack Kirby’s earliest inspirations back to Hal Foster and Alex Raymond, because of the work we have done in the past few decades to preserve these high points of the past and to document the history of comic art in America.
par
par So tonight, before I go to bed, I will pick up an old comic section from the mid-1930s and read through it, and just for a fleeting moment I will be a little kid again, revisiting all my old friends from the 30s. I will learn from GASOLINE ALLEY what it was like to grow up in a small midwestern town, DICK TRACY tab will teach me what scam the Chicago gangsters are trying to pull, and how modern scientific crime-fighting is winning the war. The incisive satire of Al Capp will illuminate his jaded view of the world, and the visual poetry of KRAZY KAT will sing sweet songs to my soul.
par
par And all because I liked EC comics and wanted to see what came before!
par fs32
par f1fs20
par }
ngs to my soul.
par
par And all because I liked EC comics and wanted to see what came before!
par fs32
par f1fs20
par }
can’t bring it into sharp relief without your help!
par
par cf0 As we said in the previous article, collectors retain a spark of childhood that never dies. They perpetuate their education through comic character collectibles by refocusing their intellectual efforts on the history of the artifacts
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Overstreet Access Quick Links
1910-1940: The Comics Come of Age
In the last installment the argument was made, for
all of us collectors to consider, that educating ourselves about the history of
the things we collect can and should add a higher dimension to our enjoyment of
the whole collecting phenomenon. And, for sure, we are now writing histories of
toymakers, comic artists, comic strips, comic books that would otherwise have
been lost.
Mainline historians are interested in things like politics,
wars, and important things like that – not comic books, not Tootsietoys, and not
old lunchboxes in Mint condition. So if the history of comic art and comic
strips and comic books and comic artists is going to be written, then who is
going to write it?
We are writing it now, with every issue of magazines
like Comic Book Marketplace, Alter Ego, and all the other publications like
Overstreet’s Guides and Ernie Gerber’s Photo-Journals. We – the fans, the
aficionados – are taking the time and energy to seriously research these areas.
In weaving this tapestry of information and opinion concerning all types of 19th
and 20th Century collectibles, we are leaving behind a permanent history for
future generations.
As a collector, I get a special enjoyment out of
reading Sunday newspaper comic sections from the ’20s through the ’50s. To a kid
who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s, getting a big fat Sunday comic section was a
once-a-week event, something to look forward to, something to pounce on and
devour as soon as it hit the porch.
I like to think that newspaper
comics “grew up” in the ’20s and ’30s. From their beginnings with
the Yellow Kid and Buster Brown, Little Nemo and Mutt & Jeff, the comic
pages started to evolve. Many comic sections went from 4-page or 8-page sections
in the teens and ’20s to 12-page, 16-page, and even 24-page comic sections. As
these comic strips caught the eye – and the pocketbook – of the public, lots of
different kinds of people started making lots of money with comic strips; better
artists were attracted to comics; little kids who laid on their bellies to read
the Sunday comics in the mid-1930s were inspired to become the artists and
writers who produced the comic book boom in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s.
As
1920 rolled around, the Sunday funnies were all funny or fanciful. Mutt &
Jeff did vaudeville routines, falling backwards out of the panels; Little Nemo
had a wild imagination and his dreams took him to fantastic places; the
Katzenjammer Kids and their cousins, The Captain and the Kids (there’s a story
there!), were parallel strips from different artists and different syndicates
about these two German imps, Hans and Fritz, as they made life miserable for the
Captain and the Professor. During WWI, when we were at war with Germany, the
strip had its name changed to The Shenanigan Kids. They were supposedly Irish,
no longer German Katzenjammers, but still speaking pigeon-German. And when you
think about it, the Katzenjammer Kids never made much money in merchandising.
The strip itself was a long-running success, but they were never really
successful in comic books, cartoons, etc., compared to Popeye for
example.
With immigrants flooding into the country, strips like Bringing
Up Father, about a lower-class Irish couple, Jiggs and Maggie, who come into a
fortune, were very popular. Women were becoming liberated and starting to have
careers, and Polly and Her Pals, Tillie the Toiler, Jane Arden, and Winnie
Winkle showed the way.
I have heard it argued that the first adventure
comic strip that had much success was Kahles’ HAIRBREADTH HARRY. It featured
cliffhangers in the style of THE PERILS OF PAULINE and other popular movie
serials of the time, in a stagy old-fashioned and corny melodrama.
Remember, now, this is the 1920s. There is no television, no radio yet
to speak of, and movies are silent. If you wanted visual stimulation in a
narrative format, you had a choice of reading the comics or going to the movies.
And while you might go to the movies once or twice a week, the comics came every
day, with a big color bonus every Sunday. The ’20s saw the blossoming of strips
like GASOLINE ALLEY, which critic John Benson has called “the great
American comic novel.” Millions could identify with Walt and Skeezix and
their family living in a small town in the midwest. For a while, Sidney Smith’s
THE GUMPS was hugely popular. There was WINNIE WINKLE for the working girl and
HAROLD TEEN for the high school soda-shop raccoon coat jalopy crowd. And the
antics of Moon Mullins and Lord and Lady Plushbottom were aimed at the working
class people who might frequent the pool hall and have too many beers on
Saturday night. The comic sections tried to have something for everyone.
As newspaper circulation increased and new papers started appearing
outside of the major metropolitan areas, there was a problem – what is a
newspaper published in Topeka, Kansas, or Denver, Colorado, or Omaha, Nebraska
going to do as far as offering comics pages to their readers? Certainly each
newspaper could not afford to have its own cartooning staff, and even if they
did, how could their comics compare with the ones from New York and Chicago that
already had national followings? The obvious answer was to syndicate the comics.
Hearst’s organization formed King Features Syndicate, which controlled all the
Hearst “Puck” comics and “rented” them to newspapers all
over the country. The Chicago Tribune Syndicate, which owned rights to all
products involving GASOLINE ALLEY, THE GUMPS, WINNIE WINKLE, DICK TRACY, TERRY
AND THE PIRATES, HAROLD TEEN, MOON MULLINS, etc., competed with King Features by
syndicating their comics to hundreds of other papers. United Features Syndicate,
with TARZAN, LI’L ABNER, and others to offer, followed suit. A few Sunday
papers, like the Montreal Standard, subscribed to strips from several
syndicates, so that in those comic sections you could see UFS’ TARZAN page
alongside KFS’ FLASH GORDON and CTS’ GASOLINE ALLEY.
Roy Crane’s
pioneering strip WASH TUBBS started as a gag-a-day strip and evolved into one of
the very first adventure strips, changing its name to CAPTAIN EASY. And standing
in the impressionistic background of this whole panorama is the mysterious KRAZY
KAT – mysterious because it was both a popular failure and a favorite of
intellectuals and cognicenti. Many comics historians consider KRAZY KAT to be
the greatest, most articulate and artistic comic strip of all, and it was never
a financial success for its creator, George Herriman, nor its syndicate, King
Features. Supposedly, it continued to survive because William Randolph Hearst
liked it.
Dick Calkins and Phil Nowlin launched their BUCK ROGERS comic
strip from the Chicago offices of the John Dille Company. This pioneering
science fiction strip was set 500 years in the future in the 25th Century, but
aside from the rocket ships, anti-gravity belts and ray guns (ZAP!) the story
was space opera. The first story of Buck Rogers came from the pulps, and at
about the same time, another hero who was born in the pulps found his way to the
comics page: Tarzan of the Apes.
By 1929, the Great Depression was a
stark reality for millions of out-of-work Americans. One of these was a young
advertising artist living in Chicago – Harold Rudolph Foster. When the
advertising business went south, he started doing the TARZAN comics to put bread
on his table (and the tables of several other of his co-workers at the ad
agency). Foster took over the TARZAN Sunday page in late 1931 and drew this
feature until 1937, when he started his own PRINCE VALIANT strip. Foster’s
Tarzan raised the bar for a “realistic” comic strip, and by 1932
TARZAN was running in hundreds of Sunday comic sections all over the world. At
almost the same time as the Sunday TARZAN started, Col. Joseph Patterson of the
Chicago Tribune Syndicate added a new adventure strip to their already powerful
line-up with the debut of Dick Tracy in late 1931.
Elzie Segar had been
drawing a comedy strip called THIMBLE THEATRE with a vaudevillian cast of
characters like Castor Oyl and Olive Oyl, and the feature was a moderate success
for King Features Syndicate until Segar introduced a new character named Popeye
the Sailor. With the addition of Popeye, THIMBLE THEATRE became one of the most
popular strips of the 1930s, spinning off into merchandising, licensing,
animated cartoons, etc.
The movies had learned to talk by 1931, radio
shows were being broadcast coast-to-coast, and people bought popular recordings
to play on their Victrolas. The competition was stiffer than it had been at the
turn of the century, and the comics were becoming big business because of
syndication and licensing.
Barely in his twenties, Alexander Raymond
worked as a ghost artist for Chic Young (BLONDIE) and his brother Lyman Young
(TIM TYLER’S LUCK) before January 1934, when three new comic strips made their
debut in the same week: FLASH GORDON and companion feature JUNGLE JIM in the
Sunday comics, and Dashiell Hammett’s SECRET AGENT X-9 in the daily papers.
Raymond, blessed with a natural talent and aspiring to be an illustrator,
rapidly changed his style from the cartoony 1934 pages to the lush inking that
makes the 1935-36 period a favorite of Raymond aficionados.
Col.
Patterson, the brains behind the Chicago Tribune Syndicate’s hugely successful
stable of comic features, again recognized the potential of the young Milton
Caniff, and TERRY AND THE PIRATES joined the Chicago Tribune line-up. United
Features Syndicate, which distributed TARZAN, added a new humor strip to their
line-up with LiL ABNER, and the stage was set. The 1930s ended with comic
artists like Foster, Raymond, Caniff, Al Capp, Burne Hogarth, Chic Young, Cliff
Sterrett, and many others carrying the ball into the 1940s.
For me,
the greatest period for the Sunday comic sections started around 1930 and lasted
into the early 1940s. Even by the late 1930s, something bad was happening to
many strips…they were shrinking! Advertisers had discovered the Sunday comics
had a high readership and they wanted their ads placed there, so why would a
newspaper run a full page TARZAN strip or a full page GASOLINE ALLEY when they
could run a half page (exactly the same number of panels, but smaller) and have
a half page left to sell to an advertiser? Then the paper shortages in the 1940s
led to further shrinkage; some strips which had a few years earlier been full
pages would now shrink to one-third of a page, with some of the panels being
editorially dropped to save room. Now the cartoonist had to worry about which
panels were “droppable,” becoming more compromised in how he told
his story. Strips which depended on having lots of space, like FLASH GORDON,
BUCK ROGERS, TARZAN, PRINCE VALIANT, and even the homespun GASOLINE ALLEY, were
forced by the syndicates who owned them into smaller and smaller spaces. They
eventually died a lingering death.
Am I waxing nostalgic about these
wonderful comic sections of the 1930s? Not at all. I never saw a comic section
from the 1930s until I was well into my thirties, and what led me to discover
these comic sections is exactly what we are talking about here. I was born in
1937, and by the early 1940s I was reading, but by that time the glory years of
the 1930s were gone. My nostalgia trips centered around the EC comic books I had
read as a teenager in the years 1951-55. I started collecting because of that
nostalgia, but that activity led me to discover many significant things about
our hobby that had happened before I was around.
I loved the science
fiction art of Al Williamson in WEIRD SCIENCE and WEIRD FANTASY, and I read
somewhere that Al had idolized the art of Alex Raymond. That piqued my
curiosity, and I made the effort to try to see some of Raymond’s work which was
done “before my time.” I became friends with artist Frank Frazetta
in the 1960s and heard him sing the praises of Hal Foster’s work on the Sunday
TARZAN page, so naturally I wanted to see some of those pages to see what had
impressed Frazetta so deeply.
As a kid growing up in Missouri in the
1940s, I never once saw a KRAZY KAT strip. The strip had run in only a few
newspapers from its beginnings in the 1910s until the death of creator Herriman
in 1944. But every time I would read something about comic art, there would be a
mention of KRAZY KAT and what a wonderfully artistic strip it was, so I was
intrigued enough to want to go back and see for myself what all the hubbub was
about. This process continued for many years as I started to collect old Sunday
comic sections from the 1920s and 1930s. So it was nostalgia for EC comics that
led me to discover other comic books, Sunday comic sections, and all the other
areas which appeal to the comic collector of the present. Now here we are in the
21st century, and my grandchildren, who like Spider-Man and X-Men, will be able
to trace Jack Kirby’s earliest inspirations back to Hal Foster and Alex Raymond
because of the work we have done in the past few decades to preserve these high
points of the past and to document the history of comic art in
America.
So tonight before I go to bed, I will pick up an old comic
section from the mid-1930s and read through it, and just for a fleeting moment I
will be a little kid again, revisiting all my old friends from the ’30s. I will
learn from GASOLINE ALLEY what it was like to grow up in a small midwestern
town; DICK TRACY will teach me what scam the Chicago gangsters are trying to
pull and how modern scientific crime-fighting is winning the war; the incisive
satire of Al Capp will illuminate his jaded view of the world; and the visual
poetry of KRAZY KAT will sing sweet songs to my soul.
And all because I
liked EC comics and wanted to see what came before!
Tarzan of the Apes.
par
par By the year 1929 the Great Depression was a stark reality for millions of out-of-work Americans. One of these was a young advertising artist living in Chicago, Harold Rudolph Foster. When the advertising business went south, he started doing the TARZAN comics to put bread on his table (and the tables of several other of his co-workers at the ad agency). Foster took over the TARZAN Sunday page in late 1931 and drew this feature until 1937, when he started his own PRINCE VALIANT strip. Foster’s Tarzan raised the bar for a ”realistic” comic strip, and by 1932 his popular TARZAN strip was running in hundreds of Sunday comic sections all over the world.
par
par And at almost the same time as the Sunday TARZAN started, Col. Joseph Patterson of the Chicago Tribune Syndicate added a new adventure strip to their already powerful line-up with the debut in Dick Tracy in late 1931.
par
par Elzie Segar had been drawing a comedy strip called THIMBLE THEATRE, with a vaudevillian cast of characters like Castor Oyl and Olive Oyl, and the feature was a moderate success for King Features Syndicate until Segar introduced a new character named Popeye the Sailor. With the addition of Popeye, THIMBLE THEATRE became one of the most popular strips of the 1930s, spinning off into merchandising, licensing, animated cartoons, etc.
par
par By now (1931) the movies had learned to talk, radio shows were being broadcast coast-to-coast, and people bought popular recordings to play on their Victrolas. The competition was stiffer than it had been at the turn of the century. And the comics were becoming big business, because of syndication and licensing.
par
par Barely in his twenties, Alexander Raymond worked as a ghost artist for Chic Young (BLONDIE) and his brother Lyman Young (TIM TYLER’S LUCK) before January 1934, when his three new comic strips made their debut in the same week: FLASH GORDON and companion feature JUNGLE JIM in the Sunday comics, and Dashiell Hammett’s SECRET AGENT X-9 in the daily papers. Raymond, blessed with a natural talent and aspiring to be an illustrator, rapidly changed his style from the cartoony 1934 pages to the lush inking that makes the 1935-36 period a favorite of Raymond aficionados.
par
par Col. Joseph Patterson, the brains behind the Chicago Tribune Syndicate’s hugely sucessful stable of comic features, recognized the potential of the young Milton Caniff and TERRY AND THE PIRATES joined the Chicago Tribune line-up. United Features Syndicate, which distributed TARZAN, added a new humor strip to their line-up with LI’L ABNER, and the stage was set, and the decade of the 1930s ended with comic artists like Foster, Raymond, Caniff, Al Capp, Burne Hogarth, Chic Young, Cliff Sterrett, and many others carrying the ball into the 1940s.
par
par For me, the greatest period for the Sunday comic sections started around 1930 and lasted into early 1940s. Even by the late 1930s, something bad was happening to many strips...they were shrinking! Advertisers had discovered the Sunday comics had a high readership and they wanted their ads placed there, so why would a newspaper run a full page TARZAN strip or a full page GASOLINE ALLEY when they could run a half page (exactly the same number of panels, but smaller) and have a half page left to sell to an advertiser? Then the paper shortages in the 1940s led to further shrinkage...some strips which had a few years earlier been full pages would now shrink to one-third of a page, with some of the panels being editorially dropped to save room. Now the cartoonist had to worry about which panels were ”droppable”, becoming more compromised in how he told his story. Strips whichb i depended on b0i0 having lots of space...strips like FLASH GORDON, BUCK ROGERS, TARZAN, PRINCE VALIANT, even the homespun GASOLINE ALLEY...were bi forcedb0i0 by the syndicates who owned them into smaller and smaller spaces, and they eventually died a lingering death.
par
par Am I waxing nostalgic about these wonderful comic sections of the 1930s? Not at all. I never saw a comic section from the 1930s until I was well into my thirties, and what led me to discover these comic sections is exactly what we are talking about here.
par
par I was born in 1937, and by the early 1940s I was reading, but by that time, the glory years of the 1930s were gone. My nostalgia trips centered around the EC comic books I had read as a teenager, in the years 1951-55. I started collecting because of that nostalgia, but that activity led me to discover many significant things about our hobby that had happened before I was around. I loved the science fiction art of Al Williamson in WEIRD SCIENCE and WEIRD FANTASY, and I read somewhere that Al had idolized the art of Alex Raymond. That piqued my curiosity and I made the effort to try to see some of Raymond’s work which was done ”before my time”. I became friends with artist Frank Frazetta in the 1960s, and heard him sing the praises of Hal Foster’s work on the Sunday TARZAN page, so naturally I wanted to see some of those pages to see what had impressed Frazetta so deeply.
par
par As a kid growing up in Missouri in the 1940s, I never once saw a KRAZY KAT strip. The strip had run in only a few newspapers from its beginnings in the 1910s until the death of its creator, George Herriman, in 1944. But every time I would read something about comic art, there would be a mention of KRAZY KAT, and what a wonderfully artistic strip it was, so I was intrigued enough to want to go back and see for myself what all the hubbub was about. And this process continued for many years, as I started to collect old Sunday comic sections from the 1920s and 1930s. So it was nostalgia for EC comics that led me to discover other comic books, Sunday comic sections, and all the other areas which appeal to the comic collector of the present.
par
par And now here we are in the 21super stnosupersub Century! And my grandchildren, who like Spiderman and X-Men, will be able to trace Jack Kirby’s earliest inspirations back to Hal Foster and Alex Raymond, because of the work we have done in the past few decades to preserve these high points of the past and to document the history of comic art in America.
par
par So tonight, before I go to bed, I will pick up an old comic section from the mid-1930s and read through it, and just for a fleeting moment I will be a little kid again, revisiting all my old friends from the 30s. I will learn from GASOLINE ALLEY what it was like to grow up in a small midwestern town, DICK TRACY tab will teach me what scam the Chicago gangsters are trying to pull, and how modern scientific crime-fighting is winning the war. The incisive satire of Al Capp will illuminate his jaded view of the world, and the visual poetry of KRAZY KAT will sing sweet songs to my soul.
par
par And all because I liked EC comics and wanted to see what came before!
par fs32
par f1fs20
par }
ngs to my soul.
par
par And all because I liked EC comics and wanted to see what came before!
par fs32
par f1fs20
par }
can’t bring it into sharp relief without your help!
par
par cf0 As we said in the previous article, collectors retain a spark of childhood that never dies. They perpetuate their education through comic character collectibles by refocusing their intellectual efforts on the history of the artifacts






