Inkie, The Self-Drawn Character

It might be somewhat difficult to grasp in an age of profound corporate and personal narcissism, but once upon a time someone tried to pretend he wasn't the creator. (And it wasn't a politician talking about a disaster or anything like that.)

A couple weeks back we started to look at Inkie, an odd little comic character that interacted with his artists. When the strip started out, the concept was slightly more off the wall - Inkie wrote and drew his own adventures. In fact, he even named himself -

As mentioned several times previously, i enjoy seeing creators inserted into the comics. The editor of Crack Comics at this time was John Beardsley. How much of his own boss went into Al Stahl's editor in the strip...? Hard to say. How self-deprecating was Beardsley? Stahl is portraying himself as talentless and essentially useless, so Beardsley may have gone along with it and allowed himself to be the model for the character. He only worked in comics for a few years at the dawn of the '40s, primarily at Quality Comics, and very little is known about him these days. Certainly not enough known by me to make any sort of educated guess.

Were the other artists based on folks at Quality at the time? Was the janitor based on a real person? How did he feel about that portrayal? Was having everyone completely ignore his presence - turn the page, move along - a social commentary? So many questions for my rambling mind.

We'd best move along to the next issue before i get bogged down in mental morass -

So - Eat That! Ant Man and Atom. You guys might ride arrows and T-spheres, but Inkie rides (and guides) bullets!

As noted in the final caption of the tale above, in the third tale Inkie and Al join forces -

page art by Al Stahl (and Inkie) for Crack Comics #s 28-30 (1943)

Drawing Inkie

I've mentioned in the past my fondness for seeing artists putting themselves into the comics. There's one old character who made that gimmick a staple of the series - Inkie.

Let's take a look at a couple of his stories - one from Milt Stein and one from Jack Cole. Both names should be familiar to many readers. Jack Cole, of course, created Plastic Man - among his many works over the years. Milt Stein is perhaps more familiar to visitors of The 1940s Funny Animalphabet for his work on titles like Supermouse, though general audiences may know him better from his animation work - most prominently his work with Terrytoons.

Here they're working with someone else's creation (we'll get to that) and, as you'll see, the artist is by design a part of the strip. Here's Jack Cole's tale from #34 of Crack Comics -

Well - that could have been gruesome. Good thing Judge Doom hadn't introduced Dip yet, eh? But getting into trouble was one of Inkie's talents as we can see in Milt Stein's story from the following issue -

Inkie was indeed an odd little character. Even more-so in the beginning. The original conceit was that he wrote and drew his own tales. We'll get to that, and to his creator, next time.

page art by Jack Cole and Milt Stein for Crack Comics #s 34 & 35 (1944)