Industry news for the professional cartoonist
The first For Better or Worse by Tad Dorgan was January 7, 1922. Wait, wait, wait … wrong comic strip. The first For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston was September 9, 1979. Forty years ago today! That strip was a Sunday, the dailies started the following day on September 10, 1979. The…
George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat, died on April 25,1944. Two months later, on June 25, 1944, the last of Herriman’s Krazy Kat strips saw print. Following are the last three Krazy Kat Sunday pages. above: June 11, 1944 above June 18, 1944 above: June 25, 1944 The last Krazy…
Early in his career Harvey Kurtzman displayed his comic sensibilities with a regular page that appeared in various Marvel (Timely) comic books for editor Stan Lee. Kurtzman was basically let loose to create his Hey Look! page for three years, from 1946 to 1949. It was an early indication of Harvey’s comic genius. During…
In 1977 Stan Lee achieved a lifelong goal of writing a hit comic strip. The Amazing Spider-Man comic strip by Lee and Romita, debuting in newspapers on January 3, 1977, was a success from the get-go. This led Marvel Comics and the Register and Tribune Syndicate to quickly develop another comic strip. They decided that…
Sally Forth (and former Flash Gordon) artist Jim Keefe noted the temporary end of new Spider-Man comic strips. With the Amazing Spider-man comic strip going to reprints for the time being, Roy Thomas and Alex Saviuk’s run on the strip has come to an end. March 17 was the last Sunday with March 23…
In June 1940, the same month Will Eisner’s The Spirit debuted his Comic Book Section, Dale Messick‘s Brenda Starr first appeared in the Chicago Tribune Comic Book Magazine, a newspaper insert that had shown up three months earlier. Brenda Starr – Reporter began as a two-part Sunday only strip in the comic book on…
Eighty-five years (and a couple days) ago the daily strip portion of Alex Raymond‘s January 1934 trilogy of newspaper comic strips debuted. But young Raymond wasn’t the *BIG NAME* used to promote the new feature. A bit over two years earlier Dick Tracy had appeared and become a comic strip sensation. King Features reacted…
90 years ago, on January 7, 1929, there debuted two important comic strips. The Tarzan comic strip was covered here, so let’s go back to the future with Buck Rogers. Anthony Rogers first appeared in the science fiction story Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan in the August 1928 cover dated issue of…
Boy’s Life began in 1911. The next year it was bought by, and became the official magazine of, the Boy Scouts of America. Comics had been a part of the magazine from the beginning but a particular energized period was the couple of decades when the comics section was produced by Johnstone and Cushing…
The recent talk of man traveling to Mars and of man-made objects landing on Mars, it is easy to forget that one hundred and fifty years ago John Carter went to Mars. The Civil War veteran, after entering a cave, was mysteriously transported to the red planet. His fantastic adventures there were finally made…
Alfred G. Caplin was riding high with his success on the Joe Palooka comic strip and creating the hillbilly character Big Leviticus (a claim disputed by Ham Fisher) when he decided he could become a big-time cartoonist instead of a low paid assistant. And so he did – with Li’l Abner. above: the first…
Return with us to those thrilling days of yesteryear…specifically the 1950s. The Western was King in the 1950s – books, movies, magazines, TV, store shelves, and comics. The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, Red Ryder, The Cisco Kid, and Gene Autry were all on TV and all had comic strips. And there were dozens…
Frank O’Neal was a successful freelance magazine cartoonist of the 1950s and, like many gag cartoonists before and since, he thought a syndicated comic strip was the ticket to ride. So following the likes of Mort Walker, Hank Ketcham, Johnny Hart and others, O’Neal came up with an idea and signed with the Newspaper Enterprise…
above: the first four Alley Oop comic strips, December 5 – 8, 1932. The Alley Oop comic strip began on December 5, 1932 from the small Bonnet-Brown Syndicate. above: the last Bonnet-Brown strip, April 24, 1933 The strip ended abruptly on April 24, 1933 with the bankruptcy of Bonnet-Brown. The strip disappeared for…
January 7, 1929 saw the debut of the Tarzan daily comic strip featuring Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ Tarzan of the Apes as adapted by R. W. Palmer and Hal Foster. The daily Tarzan comic strip lasted until July 29, 1972, by which time Russ Manning had been doing the strip for almost 5 years. Most…