I don’t often put rerun comic strips in my roundups, but this appreciation of Billy DeBeck by Richard Thompson is just too good to pass. As that link makes clear the piece originally appeared as a forward to the 2010 book Barney Google: Gambling, Horse Races & High-Toned Women, a collection of 1922 Barney Google strips that introduced Spark Plug to the world. The appreciation eventually immigrated to Thompson’s Richard’s Poor Almanac, and that is where it re-appeared today.
An aside. A bit of trivia regarding the Reuben Awards weekend which begins tomorrow. For the first eight years it was called The Barney Award and was presented by the widow of Billy De Beck. As Bhob Stewart explains:
DeBeck died in 1942, and four years later, the National Cartoonists Society was organized. Yoe recounts how DeBeck’s widow, Mary (who remarried as Mary Bergman), stepped in and said she would provide the prize for an annual award if it were in the name of her late husband. The award was a silver cigarette case engraved with DeBeck’s characters. Thus, the Barney Award was launched, but the selection was by a committee of one. Milton Caniff recalled, “Mrs. DeBeck arbitrarily decided who would win. I’ve never talked with anyone who was consulted about it… She just made the choice and presented the award and that was that.” An interesting angle, but Yoe missed the punchline, the strange story of how the NCS pulled the ol’ switcheroo to deny DeBeck lasting fame: On February 14, 1953, Mary Bergman was flying from Tampa to New Orleans in a National Airlines DC-6 when a thunderstorm sent the plane plummeting into the Gulf of Mexico, where it broke in half. Even as the last bodies, bubbles and debris surfaced from the ocean floor, the National Cartoonists Society had already submerged the Barney, replacing it with the Reuben (named for Rube Goldberg, the first NCS president). To freeze the NCS’ instantaneous revisionist history, the 1946-53 winners were all given Reuben statuettes and designated as Reuben winners rather than Barney winners.
This week saw a first run Zippy the Pinhead having fun with a contemporary of Billy De Beck.
Classic screwball cartoonist Milt Gross gets a shout-out from Bill Griffith.
Another honor came this week in Monday’s Mark Trail.
Tom Hill was Ed Dodd‘s longtime nature/animal artist and it was nice to see Jules Rivera give him a nod.
It is a bit of a disappointment that Bill Bramhall didn’t give a nod or even an “apologies to” to a few artists.
A nod and a wink to Brian Wilson and Mike Love with an “after R. Crumb“ would have been nice.
And finally, though Michael Fry and T. Lewis at Over the Hedge may not have intended the relationship,…
“collective unconsciousness” is far too similar to “collective unconscience” and so my mind immediately turned to Dan O’Neill:
Thank you for the explanation on where that Richard’s Poor Almanac page came from! It was always such an anomaly in the usual run of the panel and its tone-perfect mocking of the imponderables/why-things-are[*] style of trivia distribution.
[*] Thompson illustrated Joel Achenbach’s 80s/90s trivia column. Many of his illustrations are in the collected books.
Regarding Richard, hundreds aren’t collected including most of the Poor Almanack pages. We’ve stalled on book production w/ a caricature one planned, and the RPA one pretty much dead in the water.
Currently available are a collection of the Achenbach illos – The Incomplete Art of Why Things Are – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36222586-the-incomplete-art-of-why-things-are
and more material on Cul de Sac – https://www.lulu.com/shop/chris-sparks-and-mike-rhode-and-richard-thompson/compleating-cul-de-sac-2nd-edition/paperback/product-q9j5vk.html
Great post. Hey, if you are going to steal my scan of the Count Screwloose page from my Screwball Comics blog, you could at least plug my book, Screwball! The Cartoonists Who Made the Funnies Funny! But now you don’t haveta, because I just did – hoo hah! Great post – I love that Dan O’Neill book. – Paul C. Tumey
So it’s my fault you’re too screwy to match that Nov Shmov Ka Pop? ear with another one promoting your book on the other side of the Screwball banner? By the way, we here at The Daily Cartoonist highly recommend that book: https://libraryofamericancomics.com/product/screwball/
It never made it to our To Be Read pile, we dove right into it setting aside everything else.
I did get your book, most likely at Daily Cartoonist’s recommendation! Fantastic collection; might be my favorite early-20th-century comic strip collection.