Wayback Whensday – No Complacency
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Radical Socialist Cartoonist William Gropper
Since 1920 Cartoonist William Gropper has been busy as a beaver, trying to gnaw down the capitalist system. One day that year Manhattan’s Tribune rashly sent Gropper to caricature an I. W. W. rally. Instead,he became a convert. This week Manhattanites from Red to pink and some who just like pictures celebrated “20 Years of Bill Gropper” with a show of his recent paintings at the A. C. A. Gallery, a Gropper monograph (36 reproductions, text by self-taught fellow Artist Joe Jones), a rousing rally in Mecca Temple.
Last month Time magazine pulled from the archives a 1940 profile of revolutionary cartoonist Willam Gropper.
Unfortunately that covered less than half his career, so here is Spartacus Educational continuing the profiling Gropper through the World War II and McCarthyism years. And to make up for the lack of images in the Time article – Revolution Newstand present Gropper art (and others) from those early years.
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Topps Sports/Not Sports Football Cards
The United States was in turmoil as the latter half of the 1960s began to play out. The Vietnam War was causing all kinds of fallout at home and abroad. The Cold War was raging, too. Hard drugs became a plague. Parents were more than a little dismayed at how their kids dressed and talked. Rock music carried a sharper edge.
Topps tried to figure out how to reach kids who may have been a little different than the ones who had bought its products a decade earlier. One of the more obscure issues born in those strange times was the 1967 Topps Football Comic Pennants. Inserted into packs of that year’s AFL release but also a standalone product released on a very limited scale, the set is part NFL, part college, part wacky packs before wacky packs. The set is also sometimes referred to as Krazy Pennants.
Sports Collectors Daily pulled some 1967 Topps cartoon trading cards from the box.
The Trading Card Database gives a view of them all. The Topps archivist, who gives much more details, thinks Wally Wood did much of the drawing with Jay Lynch coming up with the gags:
The set is full of anarchic style humor and was clearly worked on by some of the underground comix artists Topps used as free-lancers at the time. I’d say Wally Wood did a lot of the artwork but the captions sound like Jay Lynch had a hand in them.
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Carmine Infantino’s Hometown
As long as we are on DC Comics artists not at DC, here’s a Comic Strip That Never Was.
Presented on the Silver Age of Comic Book Art Facebook page commenters say it was a failed attempt by Carmine Infantino to get a syndicated comic strip into newspapers. They also put the time of execution some time during the late 1950s to the early 1960s (the 1975 copyright is when it appeared in The Amazing World of DC Comics #8).
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Prince Valiant Meets Julius Caesar
Comic book artists weren’t adverse to swiping art from the likes of Alex Raymond and Milton Caniff.
A favorite for artist to swipe from for comics dealing with The Middle Ages and earlier was Hal Foster.
Ruetir reports on Lucas Smeets comparison of Joe Orlando‘s art for the 1955 Classics Illustrated book Caesar’s Conquests with Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant art from years prior.
From Smeets’ Prince Valiant meets Julius Caesar:
Classics Illustrated no. 130 (Caesar’s Conquests) is a prime example of visual plagiarism or “comic swiping.” The story was ostensibly drawn by Joe Orlando, but most of the artwork was actually derived from Hal Foster’s classic Prince Valiant comics. Lucas Smeets discovered no less than 167 cases of Valiant-inspired drawings in this 44-page story. This booklet convincingly showcases them all.
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Taxes, Mud Slinging, The Swamp, Immigration, Scandals, Impeachment
Not 2024 but 1924.
Paul Berge’s look at cartoons from a century ago.
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