Comic strips Star Hawks, Bringing Up Father, Garth, and Sergeant Joe; with a detour to the Fleischer Studio.
From World of Monsters:
STAR HAWKS employed an unconventional format for a newspaper comic strip by using a two-tier layout as opposed to the conventional single-tier strips that were considered the standard. This enabled Kane to expand the dimensions of the image for a greater dynamic.
STAR HAWKS has been reprinted several times by publishers such as Ace/Tempo paperbacks, Blackthorne Comics and Hermes Press [and The Menomonee Falls Gazette and The Comics Reader and…].
Shown today is the first story-arc of this very exciting and imaginative adventure strip.
The World of Monsters presents the best reproduction of Star Hawks by Ron Goulart and Gil Kane.
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Comics historian Rick Marschall has reopened the Yesterday’s Papers blog, after founder John Adcock’s passing, with regular posting about comics history. A recent post was about the popular Bringing Up Father.
Before its run ended in 2000, Bringing Up Father had achieved notable success as an American comic strip. Some “obituary” writers called it the longest-running comic strip, which was not true — The Katzenjammer Kids had commenced in 1897; Bringing Up Father began in 1913 — but for a long time it was the jewel in the crown of King Features Syndicate.
I recently have come across an item that can answer the question that, I would guess, not one in a thousand comics fans can answer. What was the last name of Jiggs and Maggie? Or Was Jiggs his first names or last name? There were different hints through the years, and changing suggestions, but nothing definitive. It is not unusual for fans — even creators! — to be ambiguous or even clueless about such things. After all, whether Krazy Kat was male or female… depended on the gag or its exigencies of the day. And John Dirks claimed to me that he did not know which was Hans and who was Fritz. (It takes a detective to discern the answer from his father’s years of work.)
Among the Maggie and Jiggs trivia Rick reveals the couple’s last name.
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Garth was the brainchild of strip cartoonist and writer Steve Dowling and BBC producer Gordon Boshell. Both were working on the British national newspaper the Daily Mirror and were asked to create a new strip by its editor.
The pair came up with the concept of a “strong man” strip, and the first daily strip appeared in the Mirror on Saturday 24th July 1943.
In the opening story, a small child who would become Garth is washed ashore in the Shetlands in a tiny coracle. Pulled out of the sea by an elderly couple who then adopted him, Garth grew up to be incredibly strong.
Downthetubes has a checklist of the British time-traveling hero Garth whose comic strip ran in The Daily Mirror from July 24, 1943 to March 22, 1997. People that worked on the strip included Steve Dowling, Don Freeman, John Allard, Peter O’Donnell, Frank Bellamy, Martin Asbury, and others.
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… Max Fleischer, was “consumed” by animation. Indeed, the cartoon pioneer who gave the world Popeye the Sailor Man, Betty Boop, and the most iconic animated version of Superman ever put to screen had animation in his very soul. His influence can still be felt in the worlds of animation, comic books, and film to this day.
Born Majer Fleischer in Kraków, Poland, in 1883, Fleischer’s family had settled in Brooklyn, New York, by 1887. He studied art at Cooper Union before landing an unusual apprenticeship at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle – an apprenticeship he had to pay for. He told the paper’s bosses that he would pay them two dollars per day if he could sit beside their cartoonist and learn the trade from him. He soon became the paper’s sole cartoonist.
Michael Gordon for Far Out magazine briefly profiles Max Fleischer.
By the way… Deadline’s Matthew Carey reports:
A multi-part film about the Fleischer Brothers, creators of a pioneering animation studio that launched Betty Boop, Popeye The Sailor, and Superman cartoons, has won the richest prize in documentary.
Today, the Library of Congress, The Better Angels Society, Ken Burns, and the Crimson Lion/Lavine Family Foundation today announced Cartooning America as the winner of the sixth annual Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film. The $200,000 award will go to director Asaf Galay.
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Long before there were Black superheroes like the Black Panther in comic books, Black newspapers had their own superheroes in comic strips. Nat Gertler does and show-and-tell about a long forgotten, very early hero from 1944. Sgt. Joe was a World War II superhero character patterned after a famous boxer.
Nat Gertler has discovered the earliest Black superhero, and Sergeant Joe is by Black cartoonist Owen Middleton.