Potrzebie
Thursday, April 05, 2012
Roy Crane's Buz Sawyer
Buz Sawyer and Christy Jameson married on December 13, 1948. Their son, Pepper, was born in 1951. For more than 30 years, Buz Sawyer was scripted by Mississippi novelist Edwin Granberry, and Pepper Sawyer was named after Granberry's great nephew, William R. Chalker, aka Pepper Chalker.
To see the events during the month before the wedding, go to DailyINK and click each day through November and December. For my previous reviews of DailyINK, click on label at bottom.
Buz Sawyer and Christy Jameson married on December 13, 1948. Their son, Pepper, was born in 1951. For more than 30 years, Buz Sawyer was scripted by Mississippi novelist Edwin Granberry, and Pepper Sawyer was named after Granberry's great nephew, William R. Chalker, aka Pepper Chalker.
To see the events during the month before the wedding, go to DailyINK and click each day through November and December. For my previous reviews of DailyINK, click on label at bottom.
Labels: buz sawyer, dailyink, edwin granberry, roy crane
¶ 9:11 AM 2 comments
Friday, September 17, 2010
Roy Crane's Mexico sketchbook
Roy Crane visited Mexico in the 1920s, and this was part of a press package Newspaper Enterprises Association sent out to newspapers promoting Wash Tubbs' arrival in Mexico in 1927.
¶ 11:37 AM 4 comments
¶ 11:37 AM 4 comments
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Puck the Comic Weekly
At bottom are typographical emoticons from the March 30, 1881 issue of the satirical humor magazine Puck, published from 1871 until 1918. In 1916, it was purchased by Hearst, who later assembled Sunday comics under his Puck the Comic Weekly masthead (where Puck proclaimed "What fools these mortals be" each week). Puck the Comic Weekly was distributed to the 17 Hearst Sunday papers with a combined circulation of 5,000,000.
By the mid-1940s, Puck expanded to 16 pages (two eight-page sections). Puck in the New York Journal-American for January 11, 1948 carried George McManus' Snookums, Bringing Up Father, Flash Gordon, Dick's Adventures, Blondie, Prince Valiant, Uncle Remus, Little Annie Rooney, Tim Tyler's Luck, Seein' Stars, Gene Ahern's Room and Board, Harold Knerr's Dinglehoofer Und His Dog, Tillie the Toiler, Dudley Fisher's Right Around Home, Edwinna Dumm's Tippie, Buz Sawyer, Jungle Jim, Little Iodine, The Little King, Donald Duck, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, The Lone Ranger, Ripley's Believe It Or Not!, The Phantom and The Katzenjammer Kids.
Control click heading above to hear The Comic Weekly Man as broadcast August 6, 1950.
At bottom are typographical emoticons from the March 30, 1881 issue of the satirical humor magazine Puck, published from 1871 until 1918. In 1916, it was purchased by Hearst, who later assembled Sunday comics under his Puck the Comic Weekly masthead (where Puck proclaimed "What fools these mortals be" each week). Puck the Comic Weekly was distributed to the 17 Hearst Sunday papers with a combined circulation of 5,000,000.
By the mid-1940s, Puck expanded to 16 pages (two eight-page sections). Puck in the New York Journal-American for January 11, 1948 carried George McManus' Snookums, Bringing Up Father, Flash Gordon, Dick's Adventures, Blondie, Prince Valiant, Uncle Remus, Little Annie Rooney, Tim Tyler's Luck, Seein' Stars, Gene Ahern's Room and Board, Harold Knerr's Dinglehoofer Und His Dog, Tillie the Toiler, Dudley Fisher's Right Around Home, Edwinna Dumm's Tippie, Buz Sawyer, Jungle Jim, Little Iodine, The Little King, Donald Duck, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, The Lone Ranger, Ripley's Believe It Or Not!, The Phantom and The Katzenjammer Kids.
One of two statues of Puck on the Puck Building at 295 Lafayette Street.
Labels: blondie, buz sawyer, dudley fisher, hearst, pepsi, puck, roy crane
¶ 5:08 AM 2 comments
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Roy Crane's forgotten Frank Battle
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In 1929, Roy Crane introduced Captain Easy into his Wash Tubbs daily strip. By the following year, he was ready to do a Sunday page. But it wasn't Captain Easy. Instead, it was Frank Battle, an adventure in a Treasure Island vein. The Sunday Captain Easy didn't come along until 1933. Frank Battle was created as a sample and submitted to NEA in 1930 with an attached note indicating that a second page might exist. Has anyone ever seen it?
For more on Frank Battle, see the new Fantagraphics Captain Easy collection. It features a selection of Crane's original color guides, a biographical/critical introduction by comics scholar Jeet Heer illustrated with rare Crane art, a preface by series editor Rick Norwood, and a foreword by Charles M. Schulz (from the 1974 Luna Press Wash Tubbs collection).
In 1929, Roy Crane introduced Captain Easy into his Wash Tubbs daily strip. By the following year, he was ready to do a Sunday page. But it wasn't Captain Easy. Instead, it was Frank Battle, an adventure in a Treasure Island vein. The Sunday Captain Easy didn't come along until 1933. Frank Battle was created as a sample and submitted to NEA in 1930 with an attached note indicating that a second page might exist. Has anyone ever seen it?
Labels: captain easy, jeet heer, nea, roy crane, treasure island
¶ 2:17 PM 4 comments
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Death of Newspapers #12: Audio interview with Roy Crane
Verne Greene (Bringing Up Father) did this 1961 interview with Roy Crane on New York's WRVR. To read R.C. Harvey's "A Flourish of Trumpets: Roy Crane and the Adventure Strip" go here. Below is the sideways strip of December 7, 1943. To read previous Potrzebie posts about Roy Crane (including the other sideways strip) go here.
September 18, 1946
September 19, 1946
Verne Greene (Bringing Up Father) did this 1961 interview with Roy Crane on New York's WRVR. To read R.C. Harvey's "A Flourish of Trumpets: Roy Crane and the Adventure Strip" go here. Below is the sideways strip of December 7, 1943. To read previous Potrzebie posts about Roy Crane (including the other sideways strip) go here.
December 7, 1943
February 6, 1938
September 1-7, 1950
Labels: buz sawyer, captain easy, death of newspapers, roy crane, verne greene, wash tubbs
¶ 1:54 AM 2 comments
Saturday, November 28, 2009
More Buz Sawyer
Look at this! Roy Crane's Craftint solution to drawing fog. Artistic brilliance, and meanwhile, Buz is still trapped on an iceberg.
Labels: buz sawyer, roy crane
¶ 1:22 PM 2 comments
Friday, October 16, 2009
Death of Newspapers #9: Grafix fades out
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Leading cartoonists once had their own Sunday pages to fill, and many people bought newspapers for the comic strips. So the newspapers made the strips small and then even smaller. Why? Instead of improving, color printing became inferior. New strips by people who could not draw were introduced. The logic is elusive, leading to this question: Why didn't the National Cartoonists Society do something about the impending doom?
When Roy Crane launched Buz Sawyer in November 1943, no one thought newspapers would fade away. Here are the first five Buz Sawyer Sunday pages (running from November 28 to December 26, 1943). In the dailies, Buz went on adventures with his sidekick Roscoe Sweeney. (Why is Roscoe spelled two different ways?) In the Sunday strips, Sweeney was the star. Instead of a single Sunday situation, Crane kept the story continuity going, and despite the passage of seven days, readers were so involved that they had no problem remembering previous weeks.
End of an era footnote: While newspapers die, it was announced last month that Grafix Duoshade and Unishade papers are being discontinued due to a decline in demand, says Grafix prez Hayley Prendergast. These papers were long used by editorial cartoonists for shading, and Roy Crane used this product effectively back in the days when it was known as Craftint. Cleveland's Craftint Manufacturing Company sold the process to the Ohio Graphic Arts Systems, also in Cleveland. Then in 1990, Ohio Graphic Arts changed their name to Grafix.
Crane's artful application of Craftint gave his Wash Tubbs and Buz Sawyer strips a unique three-dimensional look. The process involved brushing a chemical solution over an inked drawing to develop shading lines embedded in the paper. A separate solution brought out cross-hatching. Crane used this for watery wave effects, smoke clouds, atmospheric perspective and leafy jungles. He effortlessly turned panels into miniature b/w paintings, and no one else doing comic strips ever equaled his Craftint creations.
Leading cartoonists once had their own Sunday pages to fill, and many people bought newspapers for the comic strips. So the newspapers made the strips small and then even smaller. Why? Instead of improving, color printing became inferior. New strips by people who could not draw were introduced. The logic is elusive, leading to this question: Why didn't the National Cartoonists Society do something about the impending doom?
When Roy Crane launched Buz Sawyer in November 1943, no one thought newspapers would fade away. Here are the first five Buz Sawyer Sunday pages (running from November 28 to December 26, 1943). In the dailies, Buz went on adventures with his sidekick Roscoe Sweeney. (Why is Roscoe spelled two different ways?) In the Sunday strips, Sweeney was the star. Instead of a single Sunday situation, Crane kept the story continuity going, and despite the passage of seven days, readers were so involved that they had no problem remembering previous weeks.
End of an era footnote: While newspapers die, it was announced last month that Grafix Duoshade and Unishade papers are being discontinued due to a decline in demand, says Grafix prez Hayley Prendergast. These papers were long used by editorial cartoonists for shading, and Roy Crane used this product effectively back in the days when it was known as Craftint. Cleveland's Craftint Manufacturing Company sold the process to the Ohio Graphic Arts Systems, also in Cleveland. Then in 1990, Ohio Graphic Arts changed their name to Grafix.
Crane's artful application of Craftint gave his Wash Tubbs and Buz Sawyer strips a unique three-dimensional look. The process involved brushing a chemical solution over an inked drawing to develop shading lines embedded in the paper. A separate solution brought out cross-hatching. Crane used this for watery wave effects, smoke clouds, atmospheric perspective and leafy jungles. He effortlessly turned panels into miniature b/w paintings, and no one else doing comic strips ever equaled his Craftint creations.
Labels: buz sawyer, death of newspapers, grafix, roy crane
¶ 7:49 AM 6 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
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Death of Newspapers
Control-click heading to hear Paul Whiteman playing a "Joe Palooka Medley" on the Kraft Music Hall (December 28, 1933).
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Maureen Dowd: "Slouching Towards Oblivion": "Maybe it’s because I’m staying at the Sunset Tower on Sunset Boulevard, but I keep thinking of newspapers as Norma Desmond. Papers are still big. It’s the screens that got small."
This is an excerpt from an article by Virginia Combs that ran December 31, 2007, in The Kentucky Post. It provides a portrait of rural households minus radios during the 1930s when kids opened newspapers to the comics pages for entertainment. To read the entire article, go here.
It was with much regret and sadness that I learned The Cincinnati Post would be closing December 31. For more years than I like to admit, The Post has been part of my life six days each week.
I grew up on a small farm during the Depression in the foothills of Kentucky. We were poor and each penny (literally) was spent only for necessities - that is except for one item. At Dad's insistence our one luxury was a subscription to The Cincinnati Post.
We received The Post one day after it was printed (we didn't have a radio until 1939) and this was our connection to the outside world. Six days each week someone in the family would walk the half mile or maybe ride a horse to our one-room rural post office.
My dad would end each day - if in the summer in his rocking chair on the front porch or if in the winter with his long legs stretched out toward the fireplace - with The Post spread open and reading it intently. The Post kept him informed of state, national and world affairs and whomever he met he could discuss any of this with up-to-date knowledge.
I first took interest in The Post around seven or eight years of age when I heard my older brother mention that a new comic strip was coming to the "funny page" - Li'l Abner by Al Capp. I had to see what this was about so I made sure I read Li'l Abner the first time it was printed in the paper. Of course, this led to reading the other comic strips. So through the years I enjoyed reading Major Hoople, Out Our Way, Abbie and Slats, Captain Easy and Wash Tubbs, Alley Oop, Boots and Her Buddies, Tarzan of the Jungle, Nancy and many others I cannot recall now.
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Maureen Dowd: "Slouching Towards Oblivion": "Maybe it’s because I’m staying at the Sunset Tower on Sunset Boulevard, but I keep thinking of newspapers as Norma Desmond. Papers are still big. It’s the screens that got small."
April 8, 1906
October 23, 1921
September 26, 1926.
June 11, 1933
Roy Crane's first Captain Easy Sunday page
The Post Was Part Of Her Life
It was with much regret and sadness that I learned The Cincinnati Post would be closing December 31. For more years than I like to admit, The Post has been part of my life six days each week.
I grew up on a small farm during the Depression in the foothills of Kentucky. We were poor and each penny (literally) was spent only for necessities - that is except for one item. At Dad's insistence our one luxury was a subscription to The Cincinnati Post.
We received The Post one day after it was printed (we didn't have a radio until 1939) and this was our connection to the outside world. Six days each week someone in the family would walk the half mile or maybe ride a horse to our one-room rural post office.
My dad would end each day - if in the summer in his rocking chair on the front porch or if in the winter with his long legs stretched out toward the fireplace - with The Post spread open and reading it intently. The Post kept him informed of state, national and world affairs and whomever he met he could discuss any of this with up-to-date knowledge.
I first took interest in The Post around seven or eight years of age when I heard my older brother mention that a new comic strip was coming to the "funny page" - Li'l Abner by Al Capp. I had to see what this was about so I made sure I read Li'l Abner the first time it was printed in the paper. Of course, this led to reading the other comic strips. So through the years I enjoyed reading Major Hoople, Out Our Way, Abbie and Slats, Captain Easy and Wash Tubbs, Alley Oop, Boots and Her Buddies, Tarzan of the Jungle, Nancy and many others I cannot recall now.
January 5, 1936
September 6, 1936
1937
November 3, 1940
May 17, 1942
October 10, 1943
1947
December 21, 1947
June 4, 1950
June 9, 1956
December 18, 1964
November 27, 2006
Chris Ware
Labels: abbie an' slats, al capp, alley oop, captain easy, chris ware, coulton waugh, death of newspapers, maureen dowd, roy crane, smokey stover, tarzan, the new yorker, wash tubbs
¶ 8:54 AM 11 comments
