BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE:COMICS &COMIC STRIPS

Nelson Breen, Emmy Award Winning Film-maker & COMIC STRIPS

I was a religious reader of every comic in both The Daily News and The Daily Mirror throughout high school. So much so that when I went off to the University of Virginia, my mother would cut out the strips every day, put them in order along with the complete Sunday comic sections and mail them to me every Monday for all of my college years. I didn't detoxify from my comic addiction until I began my film career, in Greece of all places.
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LOIS LANE & LOIS AMSTER
 
An October 29, 1975, article in The Washington Star by John Sherwood claims that Lois Lane was named after Lois Amster, a Cleveland girl whom Joe [Shuster] had a crush on. She was not even aware of his existence. 'She's a grandmother now in Cleveland, ' says Joe, 'but I don't think she has any idea that she was the inspiration for Lois Lane.'

DELANCY PLACE COM. (APRIL 11, 2024)
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ZASU PITTS & OLIVE OYL

"When the comic strip "Thimble Theatre" became the animated series "Popeye", the producers used Pitts' hand-wringing and nervous speech pattern to characterize the on-screen persona of Olive Oyl."

iMDb TRIVIA
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E.C. SEGAR'S POPEYE & THE WORD GOON

"Practically everyone read Popeye the Sailor frequently enough to feel almost as though friends of the sailor man were next-door neighbors. That was the case with a lumpy look hulk whom Segar called 'Alice the Goon' -- first drawn in 1919. 
       "It took only a few frames of sketches to learn that the Goon was tough as well as rough. Borrowing from the funny paper in the roaring Twenties, its devotees persuaded the world to call any hired thug a goon."

Webb Garrison. Why You Say It (New York: MJM Books, 1992)
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TARZAN DURING WORLD WAR II

The Ape-Man has also been involved in international political chaos that includes fighting in World War I….
   “ The Ape-Man battled the Axis in another time, as Tarzan in another media – motion pictures. In the 1943 film Tarzan Triumphs, Nazis invade the jungle and Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan, after uttering that immortal line, ‘ Now, Tarzan make war!’ goes out and thrashes them.”

from Tarzan, Jungle King of Popular Culture by David Lemmo | 2016
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SATIRISTS IN AFRICA

"...all over Africa, where satirists are often the boldest commentators on politics and vice. 'Cartoonists use visual imagery as a kind of mask, to conceal in order to reveal,' says Ganiyu Jimoh, a Nigerian cartoonist and scholar. He compares the wit and allusions in cartoons to the traditional masquerades in Yoruba culture, in which masked performers would ridicule the powerful. As an adage has it, 'Oba kii mu onkorin': the king does not arrest a satirist."

"Political Cartoons in Africa: the king does not arrest a satirist." in The Economist (June 17th-23rd 2023)

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BRENDA STARR

Brenda Starr was originally created as a “girl bandit” character, but creator Dale Messick was encouraged to make the Rita Hayworth-esque Starr a reporter instead so that the Chicago/New York syndicate would pick it up. Not only that, but the creator was using a pen name: Knowing that the publisher had sworn off “women cartoonists,” Dalia Messick switched to the more male-sounding name Dale Messick professionally. But even after it was accepted, Brenda Starr, Reporter still got second-class treatment, at least initially — when it first published in 1940, Brenda was relegated to the Sunday comic book supplement rather than the daily paper. Luckily, Brenda was a star, and the strip was a success long after Messick stopped writing it in 1982.

From INTERESTING FACTS website  (September 29,2022)

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THE EISNER AWARDS

The Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, commonly shortened to the Eisner Awards, are awards for creative achievement in American comic books. They are regarded as the most prestigious and significant awards in the comic industry and often referred to as the industry's equivalent of the Academy Awards.[1][2]
The first Eisners were conferred in 1988, for works published in 1987. The Eisner Awards ceremony has been held at San Diego Comic-Con every year since 1991.[3] The awards are named in honor of pioneering cartoonist and writer Will Eisner, who was a regular participant in the ceremony until his death in 2005.[4

WIKIPEDIA

"'Terry and the pirates '  showed both the full-scale Japanese invasion of China and the Japanese  attack on
the United States well in advance of their actual occurrence. 'Long before German-Japanese collaboration in the Far East was a known fact, stiff monocled German officers appeared as confederates of 'the invader.'"Several of Caniff's fiction weapons  have turned out to be sober military fact; of one torpedo raft  he portrayed, the Navy Department wrote Caniff an official letter asking him to let them know before putting such ideas in the funny papers."
...

super-ace Flip Corki (is) a faithful portrayal of Caniff's even more incredible college friend Philip Cochran.

Current Biography 1944
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THE KATZENJAMMER KIDS

The Katzenjammer Kids isn’t widely known anymore, but it holds a few Sunday Funnies distinctions. Cartoonist Rudolph Dirks was 20 years old when his comic following the mischievous duo of Hans and Fritz, two young troublemakers who get into tiffs with their parents and school officials, first ran. Dirks created the series for William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal in 1897, but when he took a job at New York World, Hearst kept the name of the comic. This led to a lawsuit and Dirks’ creation of a competing, near-identical strip called The Captain and the Kids, which ran from 1914-1979. The Katzenjammer Kids was drawn by a number of other cartoonists until it ceased syndication in 2006 — an amazing 109-year streak. Dirks, most notably, is credited as the first cartoonist to use speech balloons to express character dialogue, a practice that is still very much used today."
INTERESTING FACTS (June 29, 2024)
https://www.interestingfacts.com/sunday-comic-longestrunning/Yx_TpEKJ8wAItd7t?liu=a28bbdc7f2e0154569dc36b4f43a3c0e&utm_
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from the philosopher and mathematician Ricardo Nirenberg

Dear Louis: My childhood, indeed, was inundated with comics of diverse origins.  Walt Disney to start with.  When I arrived in the US I went on buying Disney's comics so as to learn the colloquial lingo.  I had a big pile of 
Disney comic books, which my kids and their buddies proceeded to wear down to shreds.  But my childhood was enriched by other comics of local Argentine origin, like Patoruzú and Patoruzito, of some historical importance because they inspired the French comics (bandes dessinnées) Astérix et Obelisc.  Then I discovered the Belgian adventures of Tintin et Milou, and Capitain Haddoc, that I still read on occasion.  One of my daughters in law, the Spanish one, is a fan of Tintin, and she has given me undershirts and other clothes adorned with drawings of Tintin.  Oh, do I have stories to tell about my favorite comics!
Shazam!

“
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WORDSMITH on the wordv GRAWLIKS
(GRAW-liks)  

MEANING:
noun: The characters, such as @#%$*!, used to convey profanity in a comic.
ETYMOLOGY:
Coined by the cartoonist Mort Walker (1923-2018). Earliest documented use: 1964.
USAGE:
“This title contains ... negligible cursing (sometimes represented as a grawlix).”
Adult Books 4 Teens; School Library Journal (New York); Mar 2019.
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DICK TRACY CAST OUT OF PARADISE

How wonderful 
With your 3 way wrist radio,
& battery-powered TV camera,
To be (like this poem)

Decades ahead of your time,
Nabbing dead beats
Burdened with  B.B. eyes,
Or The Blank, his face 

Covered by porous cloth,
Before toothy Evil
Clamp down upon us
For good. "Notify 

The FBI  that Piggy Butcher
Is wanted for murder!"
Cities rarely sleep,
Citizens snapped awake

By sirens wolfing,
Gun shots in alleys,
Red lights blasting
From  tops of police cars.

Because Tracy has eaten
Fruit from the gnarled Tree,
Knowledge of Good & Evil,
He snaps bracelets on wrists


Of creeps who have 
More aliases than eyes,
Burdened with monikers
Such as  Oily and Mole,

The Brow, Pruneface,
Gravel Gertie, & 88 Keyes,
Upper case lost souls
Smeared across police blotters.

Flattop  warbles "I'll kill 
Every copper in town,"
But he won't because Tracy
 
Is much too smart for him.
The Mumbles Quartet,
Sings "I've got you 
Under My Skin." But what

We have under our skin
Is  rage for order,
Hope that some hero
Can keep chaos at bay.

"It's a nice place, Pat,
We'll have to come back."


Louis Phillips