Showing posts with label 1947. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1947. Show all posts

16 September 2020

Finally, The Bear Begins (No, Really)

Okay, let's try this once again, eh? 
We're talking about the odd origins of The Bear as a feature in Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact.

One of the things that was quite unusual about the beginnings of the Bear is that he started as a text feature. And that's how he appeared for his first few years. The Grand Comics Database will tell you that The Bear first appeared in the latter half of volume 5, but that's not accurate. He had his premiere tale late in v.4 -


As you may have noticed, though Postal Regulations only require two pages of text, TC0F&F actually used those pages for more than mere filler and decided they needed three pages every issue.
 
The Bear had several tales in text form before he graduated to comics...
 







The most indicative of his popularity was El Vaquero -
 

This one would seem to show that these stories were quite popular indeed. And not simply because they promoted him from required filler text to comic stories.
After all - when's the last time you saw a comic's text pages take the cover of the book?


That's pretty freakin' amazing, as the saying goes.

Another odd little note - While the comics stories are written by Eric St. Clair, he used the name Ray St. Clair while doing the text stories. 

pages from Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact v4 #18, v5 #s 12 & 18, v6 #s 10 & 17, v7 #12, v8 #s 7 & 14, and v9 #1 (1946-1951)

10 September 2020

My Favorite Booby Bear (Not Bare)

Before The Bear came to stay at Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact, there was Booby Bear hanging out with Perky Penguin. For extra Fun - the strip was drawn (and written?) by Jim Mooney. Mooney is one of those guys who seemed "fresh" enough to my friends and i back in the '60s & '70s that we never realized just how long he'd been around in comics. These come to us from 1946 and he'd already been drawing comics for a half dozen years by then.

Perky Penguin And Booby Bear was a short feature, only two pages per. It started running in the second year (the first full year) of TCoF&F, and had 9 episodes that year. (#6 is my fave) Here are the first year's worth of the strip -







As noted above, my fave for this year is watching Jim Mooney getting meta and having fun with 'reality' almost 75 years ago...





Over the next few years, Perky & Booby returned for another 9 or 10 strips (plus one more a decade later, but that was a reprint). Booby Bear may have been there before The Bear, but he wasn't there nearly as long. Perhaps because Mooney was doing a lot of work for DC and proto-Marvel at the time. He was drawing Captain America and Batman & Robin, among others - so he did get pretty busy. Or maybe they just found out what else Jim liked to draw, and figured he wasn't a good fit. (Probably not that last one)

Or maybe somebody realized that Perky Booby wasn't a great combo for a Catholic comic? (And Jim walked off laughing at how long he got away with it?)

The World may never know...


page art by Jim Mooney from Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact v2 #s 1-4, 6, 8, 16, 17, & 19 (1946, 1947)

01 September 2020

Stupor, Snooper, or Blooper?

Today we've got a semi-random sampling of old comics with little connective tissue. They're all comedy strips and they offer up the choices titling this post - StuporMan, the Snooper Man, and BlooperMan.  The first two come from the '40s, and the last one comes from the '60s; twice. They all just jumped out as i was passing while thinking about another, harder to write, post.

Nonsense is always easier. Just ask our government.

From the first issue of Joker Comics, by Douglas Grant and Harry Ramsey, we've got StuporMan -


Twas only single digit minutes later when i bumbed into Soapy Sam, the Snooper Man - close enough for the rhyme to ring...
 

And not 15 minutes after that, BlooperMan got in on the act - and so a post was born. We've actually seen Blooperman before, on the cover of Go-Go Comics, back when we were looking at Bunny Luv, i think. Or maybe while visiting Grass Green's work on Superella. Either way, now we can finally see who that guy on the cover was, with Jon D'Agostino drawing the strip...



Some days are sillier than others.

page art by Douglas Grant & Harry Ramsey, ???, and Jon D'Agostino from Joker Comics #1, Terry And The Pirates #4, and Go-Go Comics #s 3 & 4 (1942, 1947, 1966)