DamnIt! We Lost Pete Again

As most of you likely already know, we lost Peter Tork on the 21st of February.

I guess it could be an advantage in being as isolated as i've been lately - for me, Peter was with us for a couple weeks longer. He passed peacefully, his family reported, at the age of 77. I'm sure others have already been reporting on his life and death. I've nothing new to add to the conversation. Instead, we'll go old - back to the 60s and, of course, The Monkees. Let's mix comics and articles (or excerpts) from 1967-68, all featuring Pete, of course -

For a final little brain melting bit of oddness - did you know that Jim Aparo drew a few Monkees comic strips?

In case you were wondering, Valleri was written by Boyce & Hart, so she's probably not actually from Pete's past.

So long, Pete. I'll miss you even though i'll hear you quite frequently.

The music lives on.

pages from The Monkees #s 6, 8, 13 & 16 (US), Monkees Annual '67 (UK), Meet The Monkees, TV Guide and Teen Times/Tunes (1967, 1968, unpub)

illustrations by -3- and Scott Shaw!

And The Universe Laughed...

Should have known better...

My system was more successful than Mickey.
Resurrection in progress.

Shaking It Off

So, obviously i've been rather down lately while my mind has been off doing it's own thing. Let's brighten things up and shake off some of those shadows to start the week, eh?

How about some old Disney comics? That should cheer things up. So let's go way back to 1930 and enjoy some of those early Mickey Mouse newspaper comics -

Hmm...
Need new plan.

strips by Floyd Gottfredson (under suggestion & guidance of Walt Disney) for Mickey Mouse dailies (October 8-24 1930)

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)