Potrzebie
Saturday, November 26, 2011
In 1946, newspaper editors received this limited edition book as a promotional gift from King Features Syndicate. With a Hal Foster cover, the slipcased hardcover presented Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" in 160 pages with a gathering of King Features characters in the end papers.
Labels: hal foster, king features
¶ 8:57 AM 0 comments
Monday, August 29, 2011
Death of Newspapers #20: Jimmy Murphy
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Here's how King Features introduced Jimmy Murphy's Toots and Casper in July 1919 to newspaper editors in Editor & Publisher. The strip began seven months earlier in Hearst's New York American.
The Sunday strip began July 1920.
Here's how King Features introduced Jimmy Murphy's Toots and Casper in July 1919 to newspaper editors in Editor & Publisher. The strip began seven months earlier in Hearst's New York American.
The Sunday strip began July 1920.
August 17, 1930
(l to r) Jimmy Murphy, William Randolph Hearst,
Rube Goldberg and George McManus lunch at
Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel in the late 1930s.
Rube Goldberg and George McManus lunch at
Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel in the late 1930s.
June 22, 1930
Bud Duncan as Casper in Smile, Buttercup, Smile (1929)
Labels: death of newspapers, george mcmanus, hearst, jimmy murphy, king features, rube goldberg, toots and casper
¶ 10:32 AM 0 comments
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
DailyINK expands vintage strip selections
Great news! King Features is, at long last, doubling the number of DailyINK vintage selections. And no indication so far that they will be increasing the $15 annual subscription fee, an amazing bargain. For Potrzebie's earlier review of DailyINK, go here.
The new line-up adds Billy DeBeck's wonderfully rich and funny Barney Google, John Cullen Murphy's Big Ben Bolt, Stan Drake's Heart of Juliet Jones, Jack Mendlesohn's clever Jackys Diary, Rudolph Dirks' The Katzenjammer Kids, Jimmy Hatlo's Little Iodine, the Lee Falk/Phil Davis Mandrake the Magician, Ted Shearer's Quincy and Radio Patrol by Eddie Sullivan and Charlie Schmidt.
Now we're rolling! This is what I had in mind when I suggested to King Features editor Jay Kennedy many years ago that he put vintage King strips on the Internet. His reaction then was, "Where's the money?" But he eventually succeeded in launching DailyINK only months before his tragic drowning in Costa Rica, ripped from life by a riptide.
This is the opening page of a 14-page story in Little Iodine #9 (December-January 1952). Mike Lynch has the full story at Mike Lynch Cartoons.
The new line-up adds Billy DeBeck's wonderfully rich and funny Barney Google, John Cullen Murphy's Big Ben Bolt, Stan Drake's Heart of Juliet Jones, Jack Mendlesohn's clever Jackys Diary, Rudolph Dirks' The Katzenjammer Kids, Jimmy Hatlo's Little Iodine, the Lee Falk/Phil Davis Mandrake the Magician, Ted Shearer's Quincy and Radio Patrol by Eddie Sullivan and Charlie Schmidt.
Now we're rolling! This is what I had in mind when I suggested to King Features editor Jay Kennedy many years ago that he put vintage King strips on the Internet. His reaction then was, "Where's the money?" But he eventually succeeded in launching DailyINK only months before his tragic drowning in Costa Rica, ripped from life by a riptide.
June 13, 1915
Labels: barney google, dailyink, jay kennedy, king features, little iodine, mandrake
¶ 9:21 AM 2 comments
Sunday, August 09, 2009
The Roots of Mandrake
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The origin of Mandrake the Magician seems blurred. Perhaps we can make a stab at clearing up the confusion. The St. Louis illustrator Phil Davis met Lee Falk in 1933, and their King Features strip began June 11, 1934, initially drawn by the 23-year-old Falk. Coulton Waugh, in The Comics, found the early art and continuity of the strip "very shaky and insecure."
Davis soon developed a crisp and clean approach to illustrating the strip, and the Sunday page was added in February 1935. According to Ron Goulart (in The Encyclopedia of American Comics from 1897 to the Present), since Falk and Davis "were dark-haired gentlemen with moustaches, King Features publicity suggested, at various times, that each was the model for the dapper wizard."
Falk said he got the name for his character from John Donne: "Goe, and catche a falling starre... Get with child a mandrake root." But what about the magician Leon Mandrake? While he was touring with his stage act, he met Phil Davis in St. Louis, and they became friends and corresponded for years. Leon Mandrake was married to his first wife, Narda Mandrake, from 1939 to 1946, and Narda was a character in the comic strip. His second wife, Velvet Mandrake, was also featured in the comic strip. Falk claimed that he invented the name Narda by adding the letter "a" to the acronym for the National Association of Retail Druggists, but note that the letters in Mandrake contain an anagram of Narda. (Another character with an anagramatic name is Nardraka.)
After Mandrake met Davis, a huge promotional opportunity loomed, and a handshake sealed the deal. Or perhaps they just gestured hypnotically at each other. Lon Mandrake, the son of Leon Mandrake, recalled, "Phil Davis, well, he had eventually seen my father and drew the cartoon to look just like him. They ended up with a kind of verbal agreement at that point, and together they participated in a cross-promotion. Falk and Davis had said that my father was the best promotion they could have."
For more on Leon Mandrake's family, go to Leon's Family. For dozens of Mandrake strips, gesture hypnotically. For the entire "Manduck the Magician" story from Mad #14, go here.
Mandrake invents the Roomba in 1940.
"The Mirror World" story from 1944.
The origin of Mandrake the Magician seems blurred. Perhaps we can make a stab at clearing up the confusion. The St. Louis illustrator Phil Davis met Lee Falk in 1933, and their King Features strip began June 11, 1934, initially drawn by the 23-year-old Falk. Coulton Waugh, in The Comics, found the early art and continuity of the strip "very shaky and insecure."
Davis soon developed a crisp and clean approach to illustrating the strip, and the Sunday page was added in February 1935. According to Ron Goulart (in The Encyclopedia of American Comics from 1897 to the Present), since Falk and Davis "were dark-haired gentlemen with moustaches, King Features publicity suggested, at various times, that each was the model for the dapper wizard."
Falk said he got the name for his character from John Donne: "Goe, and catche a falling starre... Get with child a mandrake root." But what about the magician Leon Mandrake? While he was touring with his stage act, he met Phil Davis in St. Louis, and they became friends and corresponded for years. Leon Mandrake was married to his first wife, Narda Mandrake, from 1939 to 1946, and Narda was a character in the comic strip. His second wife, Velvet Mandrake, was also featured in the comic strip. Falk claimed that he invented the name Narda by adding the letter "a" to the acronym for the National Association of Retail Druggists, but note that the letters in Mandrake contain an anagram of Narda. (Another character with an anagramatic name is Nardraka.)
After Mandrake met Davis, a huge promotional opportunity loomed, and a handshake sealed the deal. Or perhaps they just gestured hypnotically at each other. Lon Mandrake, the son of Leon Mandrake, recalled, "Phil Davis, well, he had eventually seen my father and drew the cartoon to look just like him. They ended up with a kind of verbal agreement at that point, and together they participated in a cross-promotion. Falk and Davis had said that my father was the best promotion they could have."
For more on Leon Mandrake's family, go to Leon's Family. For dozens of Mandrake strips, gesture hypnotically. For the entire "Manduck the Magician" story from Mad #14, go here.
Leon and Velvet Mandrake performing the Enchanted Pagoda dollhouse illusion. When the pagoda was pierced, Velvet vanished.
June 8, 1941
January 18-20, 1937
April 29, 1945
Mad #14 (August 1954)
Labels: falk, king features, kurtzman, mandrake, manduck, mirror, pagoda, phil davis, roomba elder
¶ 9:08 AM 4 comments
Monday, June 29, 2009
Death of Newspapers #3: DailyINK
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Why have I been postponing my rave review of King Features' superb email service, DailyINK? I don't know. Could it be that I have been waiting for them to add more classic King strips to the line-up?
Not long after Jay Kennedy became the comics editor at King Features Syndicate in 1989, he invited me over and gave me a tour of the place. At some point, he showed me press kits for the new comic strips. As Jay explained it, King Features' staff designers had the job of creating these press kits for salesmen to leave at newspapers when they went in to pitch new strips to the newspaper editors. These glossy press kits were a surprise because they looked identical to movie press kits. Well, okay, not as elaborate as the press kit for Steven Spielberg's 1941 (1979), but you get the idea. The King Features salesmen needed all the help they could get when confronting newspaper editors who did not want to change any strips on their comics pages.
Around 1995, I suggested to Jay that he put a batch of the classic King strips from the 1930s and 1940s on the Internet. This seemed like an obvious idea, but his response was to question how such could turn a profit. However, a decade later, he did manage to push through this idea, introducing King Features' online DailyINK service in 2006. It's an amazing bargain. For only a $15 annual fee, subscribers can see their choice of strips either on a web page or via email or both. They can choose from more than 90 vintage and current comic strips, puzzles and editorial cartoons. They can read, save or print. Here's the King Features press release from February 23, 2006 when they introduced DailyINK.
The vintage strips currently sent to subscribers are Beetle Bailey, Brick Bradford, Bringing Up Father, Buz Sawyer, Flash Gordon, Krazy Kat, The Little King, Office Hours, The Phantom and Rip Kirby. Only Flash Gordon and The Phantom feature Sunday strips as well as the daily strips. DailyINK is a near perfect service. There's very little to complain about, apart from the disappointment over so few Sunday pages and the fact that many other vintage strips still have not been added. Further, there is scant historical background about the strips and no display of dates to indicate when the original classic strips were first published. Perhaps the vintage section was not developed or expanded because of Jay's tragic death at age 50 when he vacationed in Costa Rica and drowned in a rip current. It happened only a year after he introduced DailyINK and only a few months after he added more vintage strips to the package.
On the plus side, subscribers can go to the DailyINK site, and use the "magnifying glass" to enlarge the strips for easier readability. And of course, it's great to sit down with a cup of Chock full o' Nuts Heavenly Hazelnut Coffee as the email scrolls and the morning strips magically appear.
I say "magically" because seeing the vintage strips each morning has a time-travel effect, bringing back the memory of those years when the continuity strips reigned. The reader was forced to wait 24 hours for the next installment in the continuity, and now DailyINK's digital delay also generates a 24-hour anticipation. In a like manner, Stephen King wrote The Green Mile as a paperback mini-series in order to recreate the experience of those long-ago readers who waited at the dock for the arrival of each new Charles Dickens chapter.
I mainly subscribed to read Buz Sawyer, and by now, DailyINK subscribers have followed Buz through WWII as a Navy fighter pilot and later as he headed home in 1945, landing a job with an oil company. The storyline is reminiscent of The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and it is fascinating to realize that Roy Crane's readers daily followed the similar themes of this story arc well over a year prior to the release of The Best Years of Our Lives.
To illustrate this review, I've selected key strips to show the transition from WWII: a panorama of ships, Buz learning of the end of the war and the death of Tot Winters. The date on the WWII finale strip reveals that Crane managed to keep almost in synch with actual events. The Japanese surrender came on August 15, 1945, and this strip ran on August 28, the same date the occupation of Japan began. Note that the entire horizon line is filled with ships.
In the stunning sideways strip of February 5, 1946, Tot Winters is frightened by Taboo the tiger and falls to her death. No sooner does Buz enter civilian life than he is falsely accused of murdering Tot because he unknowingly walked into her apartment only moments after she fell. (A set-up worthy of Cornell Woolrich!) Notice Taboo the tiger in the lower left corner and Crane's cityscape with the incandescent street lighting effects he achieved by his skillful use of CraftTint double-tone paper.
This was not the first time Crane turned the drawing sideways; he did an earlier sideways strip of a plane making a descent just before the crash. These must have been eye-catching on the printed page. Many might have turned their newspapers sideways to look at these strips, but it's doubtful people today will tilt their computer monitors.
When you click to enlarge these sample Buz Sawyer strips, the images will expand to the same size as the strips enlarged with DailyINK's magnifying magical mystery tool. As Arthur C. Clarke put it, "Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic."
In King News: An Autobiography (1941), Moses Koenigsberg wrote about the origins and early history of King Features Syndicate. Below is the entire book. Use the little triangles, the contents page and the clickable page numbers in the index to navigate to other pages.
Roy Crane's Buz Sawyer (February 5, 1946)
Why have I been postponing my rave review of King Features' superb email service, DailyINK? I don't know. Could it be that I have been waiting for them to add more classic King strips to the line-up?
Not long after Jay Kennedy became the comics editor at King Features Syndicate in 1989, he invited me over and gave me a tour of the place. At some point, he showed me press kits for the new comic strips. As Jay explained it, King Features' staff designers had the job of creating these press kits for salesmen to leave at newspapers when they went in to pitch new strips to the newspaper editors. These glossy press kits were a surprise because they looked identical to movie press kits. Well, okay, not as elaborate as the press kit for Steven Spielberg's 1941 (1979), but you get the idea. The King Features salesmen needed all the help they could get when confronting newspaper editors who did not want to change any strips on their comics pages.
Around 1995, I suggested to Jay that he put a batch of the classic King strips from the 1930s and 1940s on the Internet. This seemed like an obvious idea, but his response was to question how such could turn a profit. However, a decade later, he did manage to push through this idea, introducing King Features' online DailyINK service in 2006. It's an amazing bargain. For only a $15 annual fee, subscribers can see their choice of strips either on a web page or via email or both. They can choose from more than 90 vintage and current comic strips, puzzles and editorial cartoons. They can read, save or print. Here's the King Features press release from February 23, 2006 when they introduced DailyINK.
The vintage strips currently sent to subscribers are Beetle Bailey, Brick Bradford, Bringing Up Father, Buz Sawyer, Flash Gordon, Krazy Kat, The Little King, Office Hours, The Phantom and Rip Kirby. Only Flash Gordon and The Phantom feature Sunday strips as well as the daily strips. DailyINK is a near perfect service. There's very little to complain about, apart from the disappointment over so few Sunday pages and the fact that many other vintage strips still have not been added. Further, there is scant historical background about the strips and no display of dates to indicate when the original classic strips were first published. Perhaps the vintage section was not developed or expanded because of Jay's tragic death at age 50 when he vacationed in Costa Rica and drowned in a rip current. It happened only a year after he introduced DailyINK and only a few months after he added more vintage strips to the package.
On the plus side, subscribers can go to the DailyINK site, and use the "magnifying glass" to enlarge the strips for easier readability. And of course, it's great to sit down with a cup of Chock full o' Nuts Heavenly Hazelnut Coffee as the email scrolls and the morning strips magically appear.
I say "magically" because seeing the vintage strips each morning has a time-travel effect, bringing back the memory of those years when the continuity strips reigned. The reader was forced to wait 24 hours for the next installment in the continuity, and now DailyINK's digital delay also generates a 24-hour anticipation. In a like manner, Stephen King wrote The Green Mile as a paperback mini-series in order to recreate the experience of those long-ago readers who waited at the dock for the arrival of each new Charles Dickens chapter.
I mainly subscribed to read Buz Sawyer, and by now, DailyINK subscribers have followed Buz through WWII as a Navy fighter pilot and later as he headed home in 1945, landing a job with an oil company. The storyline is reminiscent of The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and it is fascinating to realize that Roy Crane's readers daily followed the similar themes of this story arc well over a year prior to the release of The Best Years of Our Lives.
To illustrate this review, I've selected key strips to show the transition from WWII: a panorama of ships, Buz learning of the end of the war and the death of Tot Winters. The date on the WWII finale strip reveals that Crane managed to keep almost in synch with actual events. The Japanese surrender came on August 15, 1945, and this strip ran on August 28, the same date the occupation of Japan began. Note that the entire horizon line is filled with ships.
In the stunning sideways strip of February 5, 1946, Tot Winters is frightened by Taboo the tiger and falls to her death. No sooner does Buz enter civilian life than he is falsely accused of murdering Tot because he unknowingly walked into her apartment only moments after she fell. (A set-up worthy of Cornell Woolrich!) Notice Taboo the tiger in the lower left corner and Crane's cityscape with the incandescent street lighting effects he achieved by his skillful use of CraftTint double-tone paper.
This was not the first time Crane turned the drawing sideways; he did an earlier sideways strip of a plane making a descent just before the crash. These must have been eye-catching on the printed page. Many might have turned their newspapers sideways to look at these strips, but it's doubtful people today will tilt their computer monitors.
When you click to enlarge these sample Buz Sawyer strips, the images will expand to the same size as the strips enlarged with DailyINK's magnifying magical mystery tool. As Arthur C. Clarke put it, "Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic."
•
In King News: An Autobiography (1941), Moses Koenigsberg wrote about the origins and early history of King Features Syndicate. Below is the entire book. Use the little triangles, the contents page and the clickable page numbers in the index to navigate to other pages.
Labels: arthur c. clarke, buz sawyer, comic strips, cornell woolrich, dailyink, death of newspapers, google books, jay kennedy, king features, moses koenigsberg, roy crane
¶ 7:33 AM 0 comments
