In the days of big Sunday comics sections, many strips spread out over a whole page, and included a “topper strip”: a sort of short subject before the feature.  Some cartoonists used them to spin off a character from the main strip (particularly children and cats); some to revive an older idea; some to indulge a wilder brand of fantasy.

For years, Ad Carter drew a rather generic strip called “Just Kids.”  He seemed to be having fun with its topper strip, which carried one of the most exuberant titles I know of.  This one is from November 21, 1937.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Girtie Giggle is featured in the 1935 Russell edition of “Slap Jack.”  The players are instructed to giggle when her portrait appears.  Likewise, Willie Whistle is to be met with whistling, Hi Sing with singing, and Slap Jack with slapping.  Card playing need not be quiet.  And the design, and two-color printing, are pretty snappy.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Under the title “Epitomes,” Elwin Volk and Dennis McCalib produced a series of curious pamphlets.  The ones I have were all published in Los Angeles or Pasadena in 1949 and 1950; I found them in a library sale a few years ago, and have been puzzling over them ever since.  (Please click on the thumbnails for legible scans.)

An internet search, even in these days of abundant information, yields only that the pamphlets can be found in various library collections, and that they continued to be produced into the ’70s.  And that Edmund Wilson once sent one, “Mr. P. Squiggle’s Reward,” to Nabokov, calling it “one of the oddest of many odd things that are sent me by unknown people.”  He also got the title wrong, dubbing it “Mr. P. Squiggle’s Revenge,” which is probably significant.  But that’s it: nothing about Volk or McCalib.

I found eight “Epitomes” at the sale (without Squiggles, unfortunately), all tucked into a folder from the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace.  Elwin Volk wrote intense, often elusive, lyrical poetry, urging “Free Living — Free Loving — Free Thinking — Free Dying”; Dennis McCalib contributed lush pen and brush drawings, of Surrealist orientation, flowing between biomorphic abstraction, calligraphy, and figuration.  The pamphlets are from one to eight pages, sometimes illuminated by hand, and folded in unusual ways.

Here, for example, are a few samples from a six-pager, “The Heavenly Bridge of the Asses.”

And here are some pages from McCalib’s “Shadows of Voices,” which includes his poetry and piano music.

Finally, here’s “Love and Fecundity” in its entirety: a single sheet, which, judging by the creases, was once folded much like a paper airplane.

The other pamphlets are two broadsides, “Octopus Sky” and “Little Clay Roses”; a longhand narrative, “Mince Pies and Maypoles” (“Fragments of a Letter Dropped to Earth From the Interstellar Spaces”); and two prose poems about Jesus, “Pieta” and “Raise the Stone, Rive the Wood.”  I can’t help but wonder who Volk and McCalib were, and what the story was behind the “Epitomes.”

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

William Dean Howells was admitted into the canon for the Parker Brothers 1897 edition of “Authors.”  He wasn’t in some of the later versions; tastes change.  His fellow authors this time around were James Russell Lowell, Robert Burns, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Shakespeare, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Victor Hugo, Sir Walter Scott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Alfred Tennyson.  Hugo’s inclusion is surprising: all other “Authors” I’ve seen have been strictly English only.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Welcome to 2012.  According to the prophecies, this year will be the end of the Mayan Empire.  All things must end.

Anthony Matt and I have recently restored some home movies by John Keel.  For updates on this project, check the tribute site that I maintain at www.johnkeel.com.

I will be doing a show on my birthday, Saturday, January 7.  I’ll sing my songs, aided by David Gold on the viola.  We’ll also do a couple of pieces for viola and piano.  It’s at Jalopy Theater, 315 Columbia St., Red Hook, Brooklyn; directions are on the Jalopy site.  Opening for us will be the Whiskey Spitters.  They’re at 9:00; we’re at 10:30; it’s $10.  Many of you have already received an e-mailing; but here it is again.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

This isolated card is from an early “Authors” deck.  Most later versions were less generous with the engraving; and Cooper didn’t always survive revisions to the canon.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

December 25 is the birthday of Robert Ripley, the creator of “Believe It or Not,” and an inspirational figure to us here.  To mark the occasion, here’s a photo of him at the dinner table.  He was rather flamboyant.

It’s also the birthday of Isaac Newton.  American readers, it occurs to me, may be unaware that he was the favorite character of the French cartoonist Marcel Gotlib.  As Gotlib explained, “Why Isaac Newton?  For a very simple reason: this inspired genius revolutionized the science of his time, basing his immortal theory of universal gravitation, mark you well, ON NOTHING MORE THAN RECEIVING AN APPLE ON HIS HEAD!…  That is the most gigantic gag there is, and, for this alone, its author deserves to pass into posterity as the patron saint of the humorous comic strip.”  Newton often strolls through Gotlib’s strips, always at the right moment to get hit on the head with something.  And nobody could draw Newton like Gotlib.

Happy birthday, Ripley and Newton.

(P.S.: You may want to see the animated Newton.)

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

We’ll have a few examples of “Authors,” that curious game about collecting writers.  This one has no indication of date or publisher.  The canon is conventional: Scott, Longfellow, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Whittier, Poe, Tennyson, Dickens, Stevenson, Irving, and Emerson.  Shakespeare is rather plump and peevish in this version, and his hair is curlier than I remember.  All of the backgrounds are this cheery pink.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Théophile Gautier’s 1865 novel, La Belle-Jenny, is a boisterous, Romantic tale of conspiracy and intrigue, all of which fails.  Couples are parted; lives are ruined.  Near the end, Arthur Sidney, the character most to blame for all of this, sums up what he’s learned:

Aimez quelqu’un ou quelque chose, un homme, un enfant, un chien, une espèce de fleurs, mais jamais une idée, c’est trop dangereux.

Love someone or something, a man, a child, a dog, a kind of flower, but never an idea, it’s too dangerous.

We have another specimen of “Old Maid”; this undated and anonymous deck has a holiday theme.  In addition to the elf, there are a wreath, a gingerbread man, a smiling tree, and various animals with Santa hats.  All are in this plain, rather clumsy style.

And here’s the Old Maid.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)