17 January 2019

Barnacle/Seaweed Bill/Sam - The Singing/Rhyming Sailor/Rover

Last week we got a glimpse at an odd little strip from Victor Pazmiño that first appeared way back in 1935, in Famous Funnies - "the first true American comic book" - starting in issue #9.*  Pazmiño, by the way, also drew a whole lot of the covers for the magazine in those early years, and some of those '40s Funny Animal comics i tend to go on about.

One might expect me to have mentioned the title of the series by this point, but they had a bit of trouble with that in the beginning. In the first episode, he was called Barnacle Bill, The Singing Sailor. (Note that Seaweed Sam appears as a very different character here in panel 3) -


Now that he's got his tub, he's working on his name. Second time out he's called Seaweed Bill, The Rhyming Rover -


As they say, the third time's the charm, and they found the name the series kept - Seaweed Sam, The Rhyming Rover -


84 Year Old Spoiler: He wasn't dreaming -


Okay - maybe fever dreaming. It didn't take long for Pazmiño to get strange and twisted. (And sometimes rather uncomfortable, such as traveling to the city of Honk Honk to meet the Mandarin Menace. So he kind of foreshadowed the Mandarin as well as the Red Skull? Um... Points?)

Reading the series can be a little tricky sometimes.
First - since it's only one page per episode, you need to have a bunch of consecutive issues.
Second - having consecutive issues may or may not provide continuing story.

For example, let's start reading along with #47 -


That's from issue #51 above. The story does continue, but not until #60, after a different story fragment -


...but then, the following issue, it's back to some point after we left off them beanstalk climbing in the other story fragment...


...and that brings us around to where things started when they met the Scarlet Skull.

page art by Victor Pazmiño for Famous Funnies #s 9-13, 47-51, and 60-72 (1935, 1938, 1939,1940)

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*(In this incarnation. Pazmiño had syndicated strip Seaweed Sam as far back as 1929.)

2 comments:

  1. Seems to be a rather heavy Milt Gross influence here - particularly in the first five installments.

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    1. It might be more a case of both having the same influences. They were born only 4 years apart, back in the 1890s, so they were likely shaped by many of the same artists.

      But, yeah - i see what you mean.

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