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I love these comic pages. Pages of humorous drawings, doggerel, and illustrated captions, they hearken back to the heyday of humor weeklies like Puck, Punch, and Life. I get the feeling that newspapers ran them as a bulwark against the encroaching dawn of the comic strip, a format that many felt was vulgar and classless. These comic pages, on the other hand, were familiar and possessed of some kind of patina of respectability, owing to their provenance in magazine publishing. There was clearly a popular demand for comics in newspapers, but editors were loathe to sully their pages with mere strips; these pages, one imagines they hoped, would satiate this public that didn’t know what was good for it.

Well, we know how that turned out! And while my first love will always be the comic strip as it would come to be, I really get a kick out of these old pages from a transitional time. I hope you will enjoy them, too!

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There are three character archetypes that dominated the comic strips of a hundred years ago: bad little kids, ethnic and racial stereotypes, and tramps. Brainy Bowers is most clearly a member of that maligned third class, a hobo forever locked in a struggle against cops and polite society. But he’s also an ethnic stereotype; though modern eyes might not pick up on it, his caricature and speech patterns (“de odder” for “the other”) would have read as clearly Jewish to its turn-of-the-(last)-century audience.

It’s another feature from Ed Carey, whose Simon Simple was recently posted here at Barnacle Press. But where Simon succeeds through pluck, luck, and blithe cluelessness, Bowers is thoroughly clever. One wonders why he wouldn’t use his prodigious wit and industriousness in a job of work, but perhaps he’s too clever for that…

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Poor Sammy Small! He’s no worse than any other kid in comics, and really he’s a lot better than many. He’s boisterous, and it’s true that he causes some minor mischief, but the poor kid gets laid over a lap and spanked at the end of every strip! Especially egregious is the time that he gets beaten up soundly by several tough kids on the street, and then goes home and gets spanked by his old man for messing up his new clothes! This kid can’t catch a break…

But as bad as you might feel for the li’l guy’s predicaments, I think you’ll be well pleased with the craft of the strip. Dink Shannon has a terrific style, rounded and full, and his design for Sammy is pleasingly grotesque. So laugh a bit, feel for the kid a bit, but be sure to drink in the terrific cartooning.

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A short and sweet run about a fellow who’s gifted an elephant named “Mohamet” from a stranger he meets in the desert. But The Man With an Elephant on His Hands quickly realizes that some gifts are more trouble than they’re worth!

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Hold on to your hats, Billy Bounce fanatics!

There are Billy Bounce fanatics, right? Well, there should be! And if you haven’t been converted yet by Thrillmer’s previous postings, now’s the perfect time to join the Billy Bounce parade, following the fantastic adventures of our rotund explorer and his wonderful friends. We’ve added forty new installments, and each one is a bona-fide peach of a strip.

His best friend is a POLAR BEAR, people! Get on the stick!