Crankshaft Leadtime (again).
Last week I implied that Crankshaft was at least a year ahead on its deadline. This week has me rethinking that.
Today’s Crankshaft uses an actual Jumble puzzle from April 13, 2024 putting it four months ahead.
Now I’m thinking Tom Batiuk has the plots and scripts further ahead than Dan Davis has the art.
That’s Entertainment?
Little Orphan Annie is older than Crankshaft and has an even more doleful life.
In the summer of 1924, American comics readers met a new kind of heroine: a 10-year-old girl with curly red hair, a wisecracking mouth, and an unshakeable tendency to look on the sunny side of life, no matter how often she’s beaten down.
Nowadays, the Little Orphan Annie comics that Harold Gray drew from Aug. 5, 1924, through his death in 1968 are less well-known than the 1977 musical that adapted the spunky orphan’s story for the Broadway stage, and the 1982 movie that adapted that Tony Award–winning musical for the big screen.
I really wish that we’d reassess Annie’s iconic status, and not just because it gets orphanhood all wrong. When you really look closely at it, her narrative is plain weird.
I spent a lot of time with Annie while researching and writing my forthcoming book on American orphanhood—it would have been impossible to write a book correcting America’s mythical misconceptions about child welfare without understanding the beats of her narrative. I even titled the book The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood to push back against the silver linings Annie prods us to look for when it comes to hardship.
Kristen Martin for Slate writes that Annie knew nothing about the real hard knock life.
Well that was depressing. Let’s lighten the mood.
Thank you Mike (Cornered) Baldwin and Jeff (Moderately Confused) Stahler.
Never Was Comic Strip
Vault is thrilled to announce they have acquired the licensing rights for KID MAROON, the legendary 1940s boy detective comic strip created and drawn by bizarre comics genius Pep Shepard.
The fascinating history of Kid Maroon and his creator, Pep Shepard, is one of the legends in comic book circles. While the details are often debated, one thing is certain: Kid Maroon is one of the most influential cartoon characters of all time, inspiring underground and independent comics for decades.
Pep Shepard began his comics career as an apprentice with newspaper strip legend Irvin Batch in Pittsburgh, guest-inking on several Sunday strips in the final years of Batch’s famed “How ‘Bout That?” But once “How ‘Bout That?” was canceled (after the apocryphal “Let’s Poison Tommy” story), Shepard found himself without work and enlisted in the Merchant Marines. A dishonorable discharge in ‘39 for public intoxication left Pep out of active service during the war effort and without a job. Shepard soon found himself working for the printing press of the Baltimore Companion in the early 40’s…
Somebody on Vault Comics staff came up with a brilliant press release to publicize an upcoming project.
… The Kid Maroon strip ran daily. Written, drawn, and lettered (with copy corrections) by Pep, who took to working six days a week at his drawing board, further neglecting his family, which they would later argue was better for them in the long run, given his predilections for loud opera records, corporal punishment, and sudden outbursts of tears. All in all, this incessant work totaled 216 Kid Maroon strips printed in the Baltimore Companion from the spring to fall of 1948…
Kinks Komiks
Always a thrill when a Kinks reference hits the funny pages.
Thanks Robb, today’s JumpStart really got me!
While I bow to no one in my admiration for Ray Davies total oeuvre, and especially love the ’66-’67 period of British post-hard rock band ballads (“Set Me Free,” “See My Friends,” “Till the End of the Day,” “Dedicated Follower of Fashion,””Sunny Afternoon,” “Waterloo Sunset,” “Dead End Street,” “Autumn Almanac,” “Wonderboy,” “Days” “Plastic Man,” “Drivin’,” “Shangri-La,” and “Victoria,” are an astounding string of classic singles, almost all of which barely made a dent in the charts, especially in America). But while Bobby Hebb was, sadly, a one-hit wonder, that does not prevent “Sunny” from being a perfect single which sold like crazy and became an American standard. And, best of all, both “sunny” songs were on the chart in the same summer of 1966, which exactly describes my memories of that season (having scrubbed all traces of that year’s Easter vacation, spent in delirium with a debilitating bout with mononucleosis, replaced with Top 40 music, comic books, superhero model kits and TV nostalgia, baseball having heartlessly departed when the Braves abandoned Milwaukee for big bucks in Georgia). Every song from that summer transports me back fifty years to the warm breezes of my bedroom, but this particular pair sums it up for me.
Mike, Being a huge Kinks’ fan, I have to quibble about your comments about the band. A bunch of the singles you mention came out before 66-67- “Friends”, “Set me Free”, “Tired of Waiting”, “TTEOTD”were all released in 1965, and I’ve never heard the latter described as a ballad. “Wonderboy” and “Days” came out in ’68 while “Plastic Man” was released in 1969. There were also a lot of great songs that appeared as the “B” side to these records that could have been “A” sides – “I Need You”, “Where Have All the Good Times Gone?”, “I’m Not like Everybody Else”, “This Is Where I Belong”, “Act Nice and Gentle”, “King Kong”, and “Motherless Child of Motherhood”. If they could only have toured the USA during their peak or if they had had better management, or maybe just shorter song titles, they might be in the discussion for best band ever. Progenitors of what would become Garage, Heavy Metal, Punk, and BritPop they are held in high esteem by a lot of past and current artists. Over 11,000 recorded covers of their songs – and still counting.