Showing posts with label 1935. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1935. Show all posts

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.)

28 April 2018

Covering Margaret

As noted last time, Margaret Brundage produced a total of 66 covers for Weird Tales magazine.
I believe the proper phrase is "I've collected them together so you don't have to."

Presented in chronological order:
1932



1933









1934 
(the first year she owned all the covers)













1935

















The end of 1935 brings us to the halfway point. Join us tomorrow noon (pacific hermit time) for the Weird Tales covers of Margaret Brundage from 1936-1945.

covers by Margaret Brundage for the Weird Tales issues indicated (1932-1935)