If success on the comics page is measured in how well an artist conveys a strip’s premise by title alone, then Tad’s A Picture Story With Just One Word is due high marks. If success is measured in how funny a strip is, well, I’ll let you be the judge…
OK, so there’s no Ziggy; adorable as he is, his timeframe falls out of the purview of this site… But we’ve got Skygack!
Start with the strip below and continue through the end of August, 1908!
This time around we have the all too brief tale of Bessie’s Vacation and the just plain odd Summer Pirates (more or less a return of The Summer Girl with a pirate twist), plus a few one-offs like the one above. To make things easy, I’ve placed them all in an Eleanor Schorer directory, just for you. I was looking to add a little background info on Schorer, but our pals over at the Stripper’s Guide have already done such a fine job that I’ll just point you here and here and call it a day.
Click through from the strip below through to the end of September 1909 to see Ev take on slobs, animal abusers, garden-tramplers, and (to my great dismay) evolutionists!
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Today’s addition to the comic supplement is an old-fashioned feature, even considering the vintage of its neighboring material here on Barnacle Press.
There was a short window, early in the infancy of the comics medium, where narrated strips, essentially a series of illustrated captions, were commonplace. But it didn’t take long for the “word balloon” to take its ascendant position, a place it’s retained ever since. Still and all, there were holdouts through the years–most notably Prince Valiant, a strip which retains the anachronistic format until today.
George H. Blair’s Percy and the Hoobley Family is another strip which utilized the format past its popular expiration date, and it uses the format to wonderful effect. While the illustrations show a ragtag bunch of kids and their dog (the titular Percy) as they wreak havoc upon one another, the captions are steeped in a genteel formality which produces a a pleasant comic juxtaposition.
While most of the Hoobley strips revolve around pedestrian domestic situtaions, the example below takes things in a fantastic Little Nemo-esque direction. You’d be well-served to start there and then check out the rest of the strips in the archive, as they’re all new to the site.
A special thank-you to Allan Holtz is due, for his assistance in identifying the name and creator of this strip. I confess that I would never have pulled “GHB” from the artist’s hieroglyphic!
