King of the Comics!

IDW PUBLISHING

San Diego

CONTENTS

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Introduction by BRENDAN BURFORD / 9 CHAPTER ONE: William Randolph Hearst and the Founding of an Empire by BRIAN WALKER / 11 CHAPTER TWO: GAGS, Situation comedies, and the birth of King Features by BRUCE CANWELL / 39 CHAPTER THREE: Developing a Sophisticated language of comics by JARED GARDNER / 71 CHAPTER FOUR: THE Glory days: or, Believe it or not!

by RON GOULART / 105 CHAPTER Five: Comics at War by RON GOULART / 199 CHAPTER SIX: THE TIMES ARE A’CHANGIN’

by BRUCE CANWELL / 233 CHAPTER Seven: Unlimited new horizons

by BRUCE CANWELL / 253 CHAPTER EIGHT: Adapting to a new age

by BRIAN WALKER / 273 WITH SIDEBARS BY LUCY SHELTON CASWELL, CARL LINICH, PAUL TUMEY, GERMUND VON WOWERN, AND BRIAN WALKER

INDEX / 306

both images courtesy San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

ABOVE: The Yellow Kid's New Phonograph Clock by Richard Felton Outcault, New York Journal, February 14, 1897.

RIGHT: New York Sunday Journal poster by Richard Felton Outcault, 1897.

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courtesy Paul Tumey

licensed products. Hearst expanded his newspaper empire when he launched the Chicago American in 1900, the Los Angeles Examiner in 1903, and the Boston American in 1904.

Newspapers provided a daily diversion for the harried city worker. In addition to news, the metropolitan press offered sports pages, advice columns, human-interest stories, women’s features, and comics. Both Pulitzer’s World and Hearst’s Journal passed the one million mark in circulation after the 1898 sinking of the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana harbor created an unprecedented demand for news delivered in the daily papers. The total circulation of daily newspapers throughout America doubled between 1892 and 1914.

The success of the Sunday newspaper was even more dramatic. Editor & Publisher reported on April 5, 1902, “Year by year it has grown, until today its size is formidable.

The regular issues contain from thirty-two to eighty-six pages and the specials, such as those of Christmas and Easter, from one hundred to one hundred thirty pages.” The comic supplement had “caught the fancy of the public, and now every illustrated Sunday newspaper has one printed in

ABOVE: The seventh episode of Happy Hooligan, New York Journal, April 22,1900. Opper’s creation was the first Hearst strip to regularly feature speech balloons and sequential panels.

BELOW: Pieces from a Happy Hooligan game produced by the Milton Bradley Company, c. 1925.

courtesy Hakes Americana and Collectibles

Kid as the star attraction. Hearst sold three hundred seventy-five thousand copies of this edition, in spite of an increase in price. The public clearly believed the arrival of color comics was worth the two-penny increase, from three to five cents.

At the peak of his popularity in 1896 and 1897, the Yellow Kid’s toothy grin showed up on hundreds of products such as buttons, crackers, cigars, and fans.

Numerous songs were published in sheet music form including, “The Dugan Kid Who Lives in Hogan’s Alley” (the fictional home of the Kid and his pals). The Hogan’s Alley gang appeared on stage at Weber and Fields’ Broadway Music Hall in 1896; a Yellow Kid magazine was launched in 1897.

In New York City the competition between newspapers raged on, while papers in other large metropolitan areas soon began publishing their own Sunday comic sections. Seeing further opportunity, Hearst began selling and shipping The American Humorist to other cities across the country. As a result, the Yellow Kid and other comic characters became national celebrities; entrepreneurs reaped huge profits from

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courtesy San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

ABOVE: In the early days of comics the rules were still being written. It was not uncommon for characters to appear in each other’s strips, as in this spectacular “jam session” page from the Chicago American, May 5, 1901.

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courtesy International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

ABOVE: Original artwork for Dimples by Grace Drayton, 1915. She wrote and drew the strip, with slight variation in titles, from 1913-1918 and 1925-1933.

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ABOVE: Another Sherlocko, joined by Henpecko and Rhymo, all from June 15, 1912. The bottom strip featuring Typewrito is from December 24th of the same year.

Mager’s strips were very popular and became the inspiration for the Marx Brothers nicknames: Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Zeppo, and Gummo.

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courtesy the International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

ABOVE: Original hand-colored artwork by Harold Knerr for the December 28, 1919 Sunday strip. It was typical for an artist to color only parts of a strip, as a guide to the printer.

Knerr—who took over The Katzenjammer Kids when its creator, Rudolph Dirks, left—briefly retitled the strip The Shenanigan Kid during the First World War due to anti-German sentiment.

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courtesy Harry Hershfield Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

courtesy Hakes Americana and Collectibles

ABOVE: Box and interior of a 1923 Barney Google and Spark Plug game by the Milton Bradley Company.

ABOVE RIGHT: Barney’s maestro Bill DeBeck inscribed this photo to Harry Hershfield with a delightful drawing of Barney and Abie the Agent.

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was to work there) but he did leave the strip in 1930 to start Blondie, a new strip about a beautiful flapper and her bumbling beau that would go on to define the family strip for decades to come.

Despite the title, Young’s Dora was far from dumb, as was clear from the expert ways in which she managed her ever-increasing roster of beaus and admirers. But compared to Russ Westover’s Tillie the Toiler, Dora and her fellow flappers were veritable slackers. Tillie could dance the Charleston with the best of them while also managing a full-time job as a secretary (with some occasional modeling and acting on the side). Along with Martin Branner’s Winnie Winkle at the Tribune Syndicate, Tillie was one of the first comics about working women. The working-girl strips of the 1920s explored and celebrated the rising role of women in the workforce in the 1920s, as economic growth and technological change opened up new opportunities. These strips would ultimately have a

longevity that the flapper strips would not, as the Great Depression and the Second World War made women’s continued movement into the workplace an economic necessity for both individual families and the nation as a whole. While Tillie the Toiler would run until 1959 (and Winnie Winkle until 1996), of King Features’s fancy-free flappers only Polly would survive the 1930s, enjoying a long run until Sterrett’s retirement in 1958.

Of course, as is evidenced by the fact that all of these women-centered comics were drawn by men, newspaper comics was not one of the arenas where new employment opportunities were opening up for women. But one pioneering cartoonist, Nell Brinkley, was already in the door, and she had been curating the images of young women since the early years of the new century. The “Brinkley Girl” was a fixture in American life by the end of the first decade of the 20th Century, as epitomized by a number in her honor at the 1908 Ziegfeld Follies.

Nell Brinkley’s women graced Hearst’s American Weekly Sunday magazine supplement beginning in 1913.

Her romantic, flowing beauties underwent a sea change in the 1920s, developing sharper silhouettes and cleaner lines more in accord with the fast-changing fashions of the decade. For the first time Brinkley found herself adapting to changing fashions instead of crafting them as she had earlier in her career, but she managed to maintain her own style through the changes. Further, unlike her male colleagues, Brinkley understood her young heroines and the role fashion played in their lives. In her collaborations with the poet Carolyn Wells during the early years of the 1920s,76 and especially in her solo work towards the end of the decade, Brinkley’s young women became

courtesy Paul Tumey

ABOVE: Barney and Spark Plug give readers a dubious history lesson. Barney Google by Billy DeBeck, May 25 1924.

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courtesy Heritage Auctions all except Sinbad poster courtesy Hakes Americana and Collectibles

ABOVE: Popeye quickly became—and continues to be—one of the most enduring characters in popular culture. Clockwise from top left: A standee for Wheatena ceral, c. 1929-1930; a 1937 coloring book; the 1936 poster for one of the most famous Popeye cartoons from Max Fleischer; a 1930s set of Christmas lamp decorations; a 1934 collection of Sundays published by Saalfield; and the playing board for a 1933 board game from the Einson-Freeman Company.

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courtesy Heritage Auctions

TOP: Original art for the Henry daily, October 6, 1938. MIDDLE AND BOTTOM: Sundays from November 25, 1945 and January 20, 1946.

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courtesy Paul Tumey

ABOVE: Needlenose Noonan and Discontinued Stories by Walter Hoban, December 9, 1934. Hoban's screwball cop comedy ran for two years, with its topper that had what may have contained the most bizarre endings of any comic of the period.

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TOP: An August 7, 1937 ad in Editor & Publisher announcing that the long-running strip was moving to King Features. Created by Edwina Dumm in 1918, Tippie remained a favorite of newspaper editors until Dumm retired in 1966. BOTTOM: Original artwork for her February 23, 1941 Sunday.

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ABOVE: In these Sunday pages, Will Gould also used film noirish shadows and bold colors to dynamic effect. Red Barry, January 3, 1937 and February 7, 1937.

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Cuties images courtesy Heritage Auctions

TOP AND ABOVE LEFT: Three exquisite examples of E. Simms Campbell’s original hand-colored artwork for his Cuties panel. January 2, 1949; February 2, 1952; and August 3, 1952. Campbell was one of the few black cartoonists in mainstream media. ABOVE RIGHT: In his contribution to a birthday book presented to William Randolph Hearst, Campbell offered a heartfelt appreciation to the “grand gentleman” who ignored the prevalent Jim Crow sentiment—even the U.S. armed forces remained segregated during the war—and hired a black man to work “for your papers every day.”

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courtesy Heritage Auctions

ABOVE: It’s Papa Who Pays, the topper to Toots and Casper, November 15, 1942. Although credited to the strip’s creator, Jimmy Murphy, Paul Fung Jr. (whose father had also been a staffer at King Features) was ghosting the strip at the time.

BELOW: Bunky’s recurring nemesis, Fagin, returns in this episode of the topper to Barney Google and Snuffy Smith by Billy DeBeck, April 4, 1940.

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all images Courtesy Heritage Auctions

ABOVE: Frank Miller’s impressive panel composition, humor, and unique inking style in Barney Baxter. From top to bottom: October 10, 1940; August 26, 1941; November 16, 1942; and March 9-10, 1942.

OPPOSITE: Sunday page from January 25, 1942 and the cover to the 1938 David McKay Feature Book collection.

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THIS PAGE: Drawings made for two books presented to William Randolph Hearst, one on his birthday in 1942 and another for Christmas 1943. Clockwise from top left: Hilda Terry (Teena), George Swanson (The Flop Family), Fanny Y. Cory (Little Miss Muffet), Syd Hoff (Tuffy), Ruth Carroll (The Pussycat Princess), and James McCardle (Dr. Bobbs).

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to attach a kinder label to a high schooler who out of pure spite vamps her teacher, who also happens to be her sister’s boyfriend). Fortunately for those who became a devoted audience, Juliet Jones’s creators quickly got their two female leads onto a more convivial footing.

Those creators were Elliot Caplin—who wrote Juliet Jones in addition to his work on Big Ben Bolt—and artist Stan Drake. With a background in advertising art, Drake brought to new heights the photorealistic school of cartooning Alex Raymond made popular in Rip Kirby.

Unlike the cool, collected world of Kirby, Devon’s populace displayed a full range of emotions: tears flowed, fists

BELOW: Hi and Lois creators Mort Walker and Dik Browne in 1954. The strip debuted on October 18, 1954. According to a King Features promotional kit, Walker and Browne wanted it to be different from other family strips, avoiding the familiar cliches of nagging and bickering husbands and wives. They instead wanted Hi and Lois to reflect changing times and the happier side of married life.

BOTTOM: Detail from a 1962 syndicate sales brochure.

courtesy Diamond International Galleries

of public favor. Today the Walker family continues to produce Beetle Bailey, now in its seventh decade.

With additions to its adventure and comedy stables, King Features brightened the year 1953 with a major new entry in the soap opera sweepstakes.

Though continuing fiction had been published since the 1800s, it was radio, not magazines or books, that first gave life to the “soaps” concept. Painted Dreams, airing on Chicago-based WGN beginning in 1930, is viewed by many as the progenitor of the form; The Guiding Light (which debuted on radio in 1937, transferred to television in 1952, and ended in 2009) enjoyed a remarkable run of seventy-two years that speaks to the soap opera’s appeal.

King Features was not oblivious to the genre’s charm, as their syndication of series such as Dr. Bobbs demonstrated. The early ’50s audience was hungry for a contemporary soap opera strip with a look and attitude all its own. On March 9, 1953 King Features satisfied the public’s appetite by debuting what many consider the greatest soap opera strip of all, a feature that took the nation's comics pages by storm.

The Heart of Juliet Jones revolved around the title character (“the perfect girl for any man,” as early publicity labeled her); her impetuous younger sister, Eve; their father, Howard Jones; and the many and varied citizens of the small town of Devon. While the Jones clan occupied archetypal genre roles, their earliest escapades—based on an original thirty-page treatment created by Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind—featured a more put-upon Julie, a conniving and trampy Eve (it is difficult

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courtesy Diamond International Galleries courtesy Heritage Auctions

TOP: Mid-1960s sales brochure page for the adapation of the popular TV show starring Richard Chamberlain. BOTTOM: Ken Bald’s original artwork for the July 5, 1964 Sunday.

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courtesy Diamond International Galleries

ABOVE: By 1970, when Quincy by Ted Shearer debuted, strips by cartoonists of color about characters of color were few and far between.

Shearer’s drawing style, full of movement and dynamic composition, made his likeable characters even more identifiable.

ABOVE (LEFT TO RIGHT): Two King Features sales brochures from the 1960s—Redeye by Gordon Bess from 1967 and Trudy by Jerry Marcus from 1968.

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ABOVE AND RIGHT: Pages from the 1997 Zits promotional brochure used to sell the strip to newspaper editors.

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ABOVE: Four Mutts Sundays included in the 1994 launch sales kit.

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all images couresty King Features Syndicate

ABOVE (TOP TO BOTTOM): Curtis by Ray Billingsley, Sunday, January 25, 2015 and dailies for January 14, 2014 and January 23, 2015.

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ABOVE (TOP TO BOTTOM): Baby Blues by Rick Kirman and Jerry Scott, Sunday, August 21, 2005 and dailies for May 29, 2004; November 19, 2004; and October 13, 2005.

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all images couresty King Features Syndicate

ABOVE (TOP TO BOTTOM): The Pajama Diaries by Terri Libenson, April 21, 2013; December 4, 2009; March 9, 2012; and December 12, 2014.

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