First up is a newspaper strip by John Dirks, the son of Rudolph Dirks, creator of the famous strip, The Katzenjammer Kids, which according to Wikipedia “debuted December 12, 1897 in the American Humorist, the Sunday supplement of William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal.” The strip we now own isn’t a Katzenjammer Kids strip but rather is a Sunday instalment, dated 20 April 1969, of The Captain and the Kids, a strip that Rudolph Dirks created for the rival Pulizer newspapers after he had a falling out with the Hearst newspaper syndicate in 1914 over his desire to take some time off; the legal settlement allowed Dirks to continue to use the characters he created in the Katzenjammer Kids, but since it also allowed the Katzenjammer Kids to continue at Hearst without him, Dirks was forced to come up with a new name for his version of the strip. At first, he settled on the title Hans und Fritz, in deference to the ethnicity of the main characters, but when the United States entered World War I, the German moniker was quickly replaced with an English one, The Captain and the Kids. The final auction price for the artwork was US$27.00 plus shipping, and here it is:

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Currently, the cheapest “Captain and the Kids” strips available from Lewis Wayne Gallery outside of the recently concluded penny-start auctions can be had for the “Buy It Now!” price US$89.95 plus shipping; meanwhile, the most expensive are US$295.00 plus shipping. So, I definitely feel like we got a deal.

The second newspaper strip that we have just added to our collection is a terrific Archie daily by Bob Montana from 29 July 1969:

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I love Bob Montana’s artwork here; I love the contrast between Jughead’s old-fashioned suit and tie and slicked-down hair and the trendy ’60s clothing and hairstyles of the other characters (although Archie is stuck with his usual do); and I love the gag! The final auction price for the strip was a mere US$58.57 plus shipping. And I love that, too! Because out of the pair of strips I had decided to bid on, the “Archie” strip was the one I wanted the most to win, and if the price had soared too high — my final bid was significantly higher than what I actually ended up paying — I would’ve had to allow the “Captain and the Kids” strip to slip through my fingers. How fortunate for me, then, that the auction for the “Archie” strip ended first!

Funny thing is, even though we bought the above strip from a different seller than the other two, and we had to outbid another person to get it — it wasn’t a “Buy It Now” listing — the final price, shipping included, came to US$55.00 even, almost exactly what we paid for each of the other two strips.

Not sure we’ll buy many more “Miss Peach” dailies after this, but I’d sure love to own a Sunday strip or two.

BONUS CONTENT:

Mell “The Ladies’ Man” Lazarus visits the Sun-Times public service lounge on 09 April 1962:

8 paperback books with Jeffrey Jones cover paintings

The Planet Wizard by John Jakes
Day of Beasts by John Muller
The Dirdir by Jack Vance
Swords in the Mist by Fritz Leiber
Dark Planet by Hunter
Uncharted Stars by Andre Norton
Sargasso of Space by Andre Norton
Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny

The paperbacks vary in condition. Most are decent. Some have surface wear, and corner bumps. [....]

The two tabloid issues of ART SHOW from 1977 and 1978. #1 has Jones art inside and #2 has the DARK MANSION OF FORBIDDEN LOVE cover printed from the original art. This is what the painting actually looks like. The color was added photographically for the printed comic book.

Jeff Jones postcard from a privately printed set from around 1974 which included Frank Frazetta, STEVE HARPER, Mike Nally, and Norman Lindsay.

COLOUR YOUR DREAMS — with Jones covers and one image inside. Also inside are drawings by Kaluta, Wrightson (a very early Frankenstein piece), Barry Smith, Fujitake, Dave Cochrum, Roy Krenkel, and others. Nice portfolio — 32 pages. Published in 1972.

YOU NEED NOT BOTHER CLICKING THE IMAGES BELOW;
THEY’RE ALREADY DISPLAYED AT FULL SIZE.
WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET.

Regular visitors to RCN may recall that I already own and have posted scans of four out of eight of the paperbacks pictured above; the other four, however, will be new to this site, assuming they are in good enough condition to produce a decent scan. But that being said, the main reason I bid on the lot is to get the postcard, the two issues of Art Show, and the Colour Your Dreams portfolio publication.

All of which is to say: Jones fans, you have something to look forward to here at RCN in a couple of weeks!

I recently purchased the strip to go with the daily from 2-20-58, which my wife and I already own. I posted a scan of 2-20-58 previously, but here it is again:

In part because they come one after the other in the ’58 continuity, and in part because of good fortune and careful selection on my part, the two strips read very nicely as a self-contained vignette and will look great matted together in a single frame!

To view all four of the “Toodles” strips in our art collection, and learn a little bit about Rod Ruth, click here.

As I intend to explain in slightly more detail in a later post, it’s not the oddly composed cover of Archie’s Pal Jughead #103 that caused me to buy it — nose meet pocket; pocket, nose — but the interior art. Can you guess why?

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Rod Ruth is by no means a well-known figure in the history of comic strips, but I, for one, find his work terrifically appealing. Ruth’s character designs are distinctive, and the expressions always appropriate to the action: look, for instance, at the way Ann’s expression changes from panel to panel in the first strip as she struggles to stand up for the man she loves in the face of her parents’ stern expressions of disapproval, and then retreats into sullen silence as her mother pointedly puts her father in his place. Ruth’s staging of the action is also first rate: in the first strip, notice how he changes from a three shot in the first panel, with the father on the left, facing right, to a closer two shot of mother and daughter, back out to a three-shot, with the father close on the right, facing left — which, taken together with the first two panels, I read as a sign that the father has been pacing back and forth while the women have been talking — and then ends with a lovely low reverse angle that not only maintains spacial continuity between the three but also places the now visibly weary Ann, both compositionally and symbolically, right in the line of fire between her domineering mother and her stuffed-shirt father; and I especially like the bits of business the artist gives to Ann in the second strip — panel one, she files her nails; panel two, she pumps a bit of moisturizer into her palm; and panel three, she absently rubs the moisturizer into her hands as she wistfully contemplates lost love. Finally, Ruth’s handling of clothing, furniture, props, etc., is always economical and convincing: notice, for instance, the way he uses little dabs and checkmarks of ink to give dimension to the quilting on Ann’s jacket in the second strip, or the way he suggests the folds on the nurse’s overcoat with a few deft strokes of the brush.

To see all three of the “Toodles” strips I’ve posted so far, click here.

BONUS LINKS:

The Haunted Closet: Baleful Beasts and Eerie Creatures (illustrated by Rod Ruth), posted by Brother Bill

The Haunted Closet: Baleful Beasts and Eerie Creatures: The Patchwork Monkey (illustrated by Rod Ruth), posted by Brother Bill

The Haunted Closet: Baleful Beasts and Eerie Creatures: Nightmare in a Box (illustrated by Rod Ruth), posted by Brother Bill

The Haunted Closet: The Rest of Baleful Beasts and Eerie Creatures (illustrated by Rod Ruth), posted by Brother Bill

The Haunted Closet: Album of Dinosaurs (Tod McGowen, Rod Ruth, 1972), posted by Brother Bill

Now, I am fully aware that many academically trained artists hate Mell Lazarus’s style of cartooning in Miss Peach, dismissing it as “childish” or worse, but as for me, well, I’ve always had a soft spot for the big-headed, big-nosed, sharp-tongued kids of the Kelly School. Modelled to a large extent on Charles Schulz’s beloved Peanuts, Lazarus’s Miss Peach combined economical but expressive and amusing drawings with witty and incisive social observation and punch lines that could make you laugh and squirm at the same time. The effectiveness of Lazarus’s visual shorthand is especially evident in his characters’ facial expressions, which in my experience always deliver more relevant and touching emotion than Lazarus’s (and Schulz’s) critics would have you believe possible.

In the first decade and a half of his career, Lazarus, who was never short on ambition, steadily worked his way up in the newspaper comics world, going from fledgling freelancer/comic-strip artist — his first, moderately successful strips were “Wee Women” and “Li’l One” — to an assistant position with Al Capp and Elliot A. Caplin’s Toby Press, to art director/comics editor at Toby Press, to nationally syndicated cartoonist. Following the success of Miss Peach, Lazarus, restless as ever, went on to create a short-lived humour-adventure strip, Pauline McPeril, with artist Jack Rickard, in 1966 — it was cancelled after three years — and then bounced back with a second comic-strip hit with Momma, in 1970. And for the next 30 years, Lazarus wrote and drew two syndicated strips, Miss Peach and Momma, until health issues caused him to reduce his work load by dropping Miss Peach in 2002. Momma, however, is still going strong!

But Mell Lazarus hasn’t only had success with readers; he’s also received the respect and approbation of his peers, winning the Best in Humour Strip Award from the National Cartoonists Society (NCS) in 1973 and 1979, the Reuben from the NCS for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year in 1982 for his work on Miss Peach, and the Silver T-Square from the NCS “for outstanding dedication or service to the NCS or the profession” in 2000. And as if that wasn’t enough, Lazarus’s fellow cartoonists also elected him President of the National Cartoonists Society for two terms, 1989 to 1991 and 1991 to 1993.

Finally, in addition to cartooning, Mell Lazarus has found time to write television scripts, plays, two novels — The Boss is Crazy, Too and The Neighborhood Watch — and, well, you get the picture. He’s always been a busy guy. But not too busy to answer his own front door:

I also recently won an ebay auction for a “Miss Peach” daily by Mell Lazarus, and let me tell you, that thing is HUGE! I love it, and I intend post a picture soon.

BONUS LINK:

News of Yore: Profile of the Baers

(Click the images to enlarge them, as usual. I don’t own the cover artwork, but I’ve included a JPEG of the original comic, with cover by Stan Goldberg, for fun — and contrast!)

I bought the story on ebay a long time ago. It was in a lot with a complete Betty and Veronica story by Stan Goldberg. As I recall, the cost of the two stories together was less than US$100, shipping included. Maybe I’ll post the Goldberg another time… though I must admit, I’m not really a Goldberg fan…

When I was a youngster, my favourite “Archie” artists — even before I knew their names — were Samm Schwartz and Harry Lucey. In a corner of the comics world dominated by lacklustre DeCarlo clones, Schwartz and Lucey each took the seemingly inflexible “Archie” house style and made it his own. Schwartz’s work was cool, crisp, refined; Lucey’s, affable, energetic, theatrical. Jughead was never so self-assured, so unflappable, as when Schwartz brought him to life; Archie and the gang, never so determined, or so frazzled, as when Lucey fed them through the wringer. With Dan DeCarlo already in the Eisner Hall of Fame, and Bob Montana, the co-creator of Archie who drew the Riverdale gang for more than 30 years, named to the Hall of Fame for 2010, can Samm Schwartz and Harry Lucey be far behind? In my humble opinion, whether it happens sooner or later, it’s inevitable.

BONUS LINKS:

“It’s the Chicago South Side Choir Society! It’s their annual uplift cruise for Meditation Week!” — includes scans of “The Bad Old Days” and “In Search of Sanity,” both drawn by Samm Schwartz.

A Closer Look at Samm Schwartz — includes a scan of the story “Crowning Glory,” with art by you-know-who.

Samm Schwartz Addenda — further thoughts by Jaime J. Weinman, the author of “A Closer Look at Samm Schwartz.”

A Few Words about Samm Schwartz, My Father

Samm Schwartz Photo Album

A Loan and Blue — from 1963, with unusually hyper-kinetic art by Samm Schwartz; in later years, Schwartz’s Jughead never got out of control like this! It’s like watching Bugs Bunny melt down.

Little Archie by Samm Schwartz — wow!

Tippy Teen: “Sure Cure Go-Go” — with art by Samm Schwartz.

Sorry the image is a bit soft, but the painting was too big for our scanner. Also, our digital camera is not the best.