Showing posts with label Carolynn Wells. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carolynn Wells. Show all posts

28 September 2019

The Last Of Lilly?

As i mentioned last time, very few of Carolyn Wells & G. F. Kaber's macabrely odd (and lovely) Adventures of Lovely Lilly strips are known to survive 113 years later.

In addition to the 3 strips run previously, these are all that i have ever seen, or even heard of. Hopefully, i'm wrong. Anybody got a stash of old New York Herald papers from 1906 & 1907?

The last two of these are directly from old papers, so they're actually still in colour, too -






I'd love to find more.

Also, so far as i know, this was Kaber's only excursion into comics. As noted last time, his art fame comes from his paintings.

colour strips from New York Herald (1907, June 2 & 9)

25 September 2019

Before Brightburn, Before Superman...

What happens with super powers in the hands of a child? The terrible potential of super powered toddlers is not a new topic for fiction. In fact, the notion pre-dates comic book heroes like Superman by decades. (But a few years after Hugo Hercules)

Let us meet Lovely Lilly, who had her brief run in the newspaper comics back at the end of 1906 and beginning of 1907. Lilly comes to us from the mind and quill of Carolyn Wells, back before she turned her prolific pen to mystery tales. The lovely renderings of Lilly are by George Frederick Kaber, who is better known for his paintings. The strip only lasted a couple of months, and not a lot of them survive today.

The comics typically let us see what happens when a child of power encounters the dangerous creatures dwelling in this world. Here we have the Hippo, the Crocodile, and the Tiger...




Wasn't she sweet?

strips by Carolyn Wells & G.F. Kaber (ca. 1906)