The March of Time (Wayback Wednesday)

Ten years ago erstwhile Flash Gordon cartoonist Jim Keefe begins drawing Sally Forth.

© King Features Syndicate

Okay so we’re a couple weeks late marking the anniversary,

but we blame Jim himself who didn’t remind us of the occasion until today.

How quaint it seems that 75 years ago the concern was comic books endangering our schoolchildren.

© Crowell-Collier Publishing Company

Judith Crist, for the Collier’s magazine dated March 27, 1948, details the findings of Dr. Frederic Wertham how comic books are leading the way to juvenile delinquency. Comics Commentary re-presents the article.

Recent scholarship has given us a more balanced view of Dr. Wertham, suggesting that his research wasn’t as shoddy as most fans believe, and that there were strong reasons for regulating the horror and crime comics cranked out by opportunistic publishers.

The article below is still mildly sensationalistic at times…

It was 50 years ago that famed illustrator/cartoonist Gerry Gersten

© Rolling Stone

… made the cover of the Rolling Stone caricaturing somebody-or-other for the March 29, 1973 issue.

A Conservative Look at a Liberal Comic Strip.

© OGPI

On cracking open the first volume of Fantagraphics’ beautiful hardcover editions of Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips, I was immediately enchanted by the art. The real question, though, was this: would I come to appreciate the characters, stories, and idiosyncratic dialogue? To answer briefly: yes, and in spades.

Felix James Miller reviews Pogo by Walt Kelly and the Fantagraphics collections for European Conservative.

When a person of any political stripe picks up a book of Pogo comics, he encounters the work of a man who cared about his craft. The art is stellar, characters are fleshed-out, and the wordplay is ingenious.

Stylishly Animating the Weird.

© Zagreb

Zagreb Film produced some of the wildest, most eclectic animated shorts of the 20th century, but their work has been exceptionally difficult to view — until now.

Amid Amidi, at Cartoon Brew, presents some Zagreb animated shorts and directs us to more.

The Zagreb films took risks, with both content and form, beyond what most American studios dared to do after the 1940s. In many ways, Zagreb is a continuation of the American studio United Productions of America, which bowed to commercial pressure in the mid-1950s and abandoned its earlier ambitions to experiment with the medium. Zagreb Film emerged around the same time as UPA’s prestige faded, and the upstart European studio had a glory period that lasted well into the 1970s. The company remains in existence to this day.

Blasts from the past for those with Kindle Unlimited.

© Twin Rivers Press

Dik Browne of HAGAR THE HORRIBLE and HI AND LOIS, Brian Crane of PICKLES, Ace Backwords of TWISTED IMAGE, Fred Lasswell of SNUFFY SMITH, Gahan Wilson, Oliver Gaspirtz, Tom Roberts and Jim SIergey of CULTURAL JET LAG and the title characters from DINOSAURS FOR HIRE

A free read from Amazon to Kindle Unlimited readers.

2 thoughts on “The March of Time (Wayback Wednesday)

  1. That’s Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show “smilin’ face
    On the cover of the Rolling Stone”

    1. Yes, and the magazine later reported that the guys in the band stopped in to pick up copies for their mothers, as promised in the song.

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