Day After Funnies

So, yeah - I missed Sunday again. Pretty much missed the entire weekend, and i wasn't even off doing my Naruto imitation or anything. Just missed it. (When everyday is the weekend, it's hard to notice the real one sometimes. Of course, that doesn't explain why i've been missing days, so let's move along...)

Anyway, here we are once again with Monday Sunday Morning Funnies featuring our old fave, Ellis Chambers. Our first two comics are from Two-Bit The Wacky Woodpecker. These were some of the last strips published from Chambers that weren't reprints from early books. As are all of today's tales.

The first story was drawn at an odd aspect ratio which required a spot illo to fill the space on a typical comicbook page. This is the drawing used:

It appeared at the bottom of each page of the tale. I've omitted it here, since we're presenting the stories and not the comics, to allow a slightly larger display size in the page code:

The second tale in the book was more typically formatted -

Two-Bit ran for only 3 issues, but these are the only two stories signed by E.C. that appeared in the book.

Meanwhile, other Frisky Animals were running around. This one is unsigned, but believed to be Chambers' work, and he has done other Senor Tamale stories, lending further credibility to the assumption.

Since we're not completely certain that the above tale is indeed from Ellis Chambers, here's one more to make sure we have 3 today. Marmaduke Mouse and King Louie from Marmaduke's own title -

Hmm...
I think i see and Marmaduke & King Louie and Egbert & The Count post coming up the street...

page art by Ellis Chambers from Two-Bit The Wacky Woodpecker #1, Frisky Animals #50, and Marmaduke Mouse #24 (1951, 1952)

Sunday Morning Funnies w/ Ellis Chambers

It's been quite a while since we've had our Sunday Morning Funnies feature, so let's go with a fair sized batch today - all by one of our favorites around these parts, Ellis Holly Chambers.

Given that The 1940s Funny Animalphabet is off on its own now, we'll avoid his '40s funny animal works today. We'll look instead at work from the '50s and strips starring human rather than animal characters.

Let's start with one i mentioned very recently while talking about Wonderland Comics. Here's The Boy Pirate -

When speculating upon what might have happened to Ellis Chambers, i sometimes wonder if the drug use sometimes caused problems with his editors, possibly leading to hiring him less and less over time. While they seemed to like his work, the same might not necessarily be said for him. The tale above stands mute witness to this possibility. Twice more it ran in the same title, once the following year and again three years later. In both cases, his signature had been removed from the lower right corner of the title panel...

...and extra shame given the more interesting colour schemes used in the reprints.

Bonus Ellis Oddness:
I don't often post memes/image-macros here, but we've got a worthy exception here today. However, it will only fully make sense to those who are familiar with Howie Post's recollections of Ellis Chambers. (See Comic Book Artist #5 or this post for details.)

As often as i've seen this one out there, i don't think i've seen it better used. Certainly not for our purposes.
Thanks to Nick for sending his creation my way!

page art by Ellis Chambers for Wonderland Comics #8, Buster Bunny # 3, Sands Of The South Pacific #1, and Marmaduke Mouse #s 23, 33 & 56 (1946-7, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1955)

image macro by Nick (2018)