Prepare yourself to enter the world of the strange and unusual. I marvel at the truly unique sensibilities of some of the pioneers of the artform, the comics pages of the past hold such a fun sense of excitement and wonder. That these artists would take their craft to some dark or bizarre places isn’t so surprising. Here we look at ten of the weirdest, oddest, craziest series archived on Barnacle Press. Some of the artists you may recognize from other features, others may be completely new.  It is my hope that no matter what your familiarity might be, at least one of these titles will cause you stop in your tracks and ask aloud “how do they think this stuff up?!”

Enjoy.

Betsy Bouncer and Her Doll
Tom Tucker’s Betsy Bouncer is an otherwise ordinary girl but for the fact that her closest companion is a grotesque almost-human-but-not-quite living doll. The relationship between girl and doll is a nightmarish one as the plaything is constantly plotting oh-so-funny ways to injure her owner.

Billy Bounce
W. W. Denslow was the original artist on Billy Bounce, and while his work is a little out there, the feature under his watch concerns funny, kid-friendly characters at a circus. It’s when C. W. Kahles takes over that things begin to get a bit crazy. Especially once Billy departs the planet to spend some time with the King of the Pollywogs.

Dolby’s Double
Dolby suffers from a unique problem in Ed Carey’s strip, he is plagued by the underhanded doings of a man who is his exact double! This evil twin appears to have no life of his own, he exists solely to torment our man Dolby. And Dolby is such a jerk that his Double has no problem convincing people that Dolby himself is committing his foul deeds.

Goops!
Gelett Burgess’s whimsical Sunday page features the childlike Goops whose appearance, in contrast with the more realistically drawn adults of the feature, cannot help but give one a case of the creeps. This title could have easily been at home on Holmes’s list of Kid Features as the characters were spun onto the newspaper page from a popular series of children’s books.

The Handy Man from Timbuctoo
The titular, hirsute Handy Man and his fascinating tiger appear one day after swimming across the ocean, apparently intent on entertaining children and sticking up for those in need. That the tiger dresses in drag in one episode is just icing on the cake. Charles Edward Schultze of Foxy Grandpa fame is the likely perpetrator of this odd strip.

Home Wanted By a Baby!
I suppose this strip from Clare Victor Dwiggins could have qualified for the Lesser-Known Works list, but it truly belongs here. Here we have the daily adventures of an orphaned baby who: 1) shows up on a doorstep 2) is taken in by a household he ultimately deems unfit 3) escapes by any means necessary, be it by chimney, coal chute, window, etc. 4) stops to ask a random animal or insect about any good homes in the area and 5) moves on to the next doorstep. Repeat as necessary.

Naps of Polly Sleepyhead
Peter Newell’s Sunday page is filled with hauntingly beautiful illustrations. Polly is a girl known to nod off rather suddenly, and when she does the fun begins. Her dreams are informed by the nature of whatever she was involved in before dozing, so we see her world transformed in the blink of an eye, often frighteningly so. Later strips see the premise overhauled, leaving it more in the vein of a mischievous kids strip, but the early outings are simply brilliant.

The Onion Sisters
An artist by the name of Nixon provides us with this visually arresting page. The Onion Sisters are, appropriately enough, a couple of anthropomorphic onions who live in a village full of other bizarre vegetable characters. The fact that they hunt and eat animals takes this one to a whole other level.

Terrors of the Tiny Tads
Holmes snatched my favorite Gustave Verbeek creation for his list, but that’s okay as Terrors of the Tiny Tads may actually be the weirder of the strips we have here. Get ready to travel to a landscape filled with wild, nightmarish creatures…if you’ve never seen the likes of a Horseshoenicorn or a Hippopautomobile or some Butterflima-beans, you’ll want to check out this strip right away.

The Woo Woo Bird
There are a few works by H. C. Greening that could have made the list, but I’m going with The Woo Woo Bird. The fact that he’s a talking bird should be enough to raise people’s suspicions, never mind the fact that he’s always talking them into following a path of mischief. The Woo Woo Bird delights in stirring it up, but never sticks around to see it all hit the fan…I can just imagine him off somewhere, high atop a tree, chuckling to himself over a job well done.

Make sure to tune in tomorrow as Holmes and I present our personal top ten lists.