Craig Yoe Comic Strip Sirocco - Unca Jeffy's Toy Box!

Continuing from last weeks peek at the nifty Craig Yoe Studios sirocco figurines of classic comic strip characters that were distibuted by the smart folks at Dark Horse Comics and continuing pimping the new "All Color Sunday Funnies" right here inside my head, here's a look at a few more!

From George Herriman's "Krazy Kat", everyone knows Krazy loves Ignatz Mouse who does NOT love her back, but Offica Pup does. Here he's got his standard "Move along mouse, and stay out of Kelly's Brick Yard look. See 'em every Sunday right here.


"Hully Gee!" Here's he very first newspaper comic strip star ever, Richard Felton Outcault's Mickey Dugan from right outen Hogan's Alley, "The Yellow Kid"!


Everyone what has any sense already knows, my blogger buddy Thomas Haller Buchanan celebrates the wonderfully talented Walt Kelly regularly in his blog "Whirled of Kelly" which covers all of Kelly's work, including the land of Pogo Possum in the Okefenokee Swamp. Here's Pogo's pal, "Albert Alligator"!

The king of fantasy art in the comics, master of design and perspetive, innovator in animation Winsor McCay is represented on my library shelf with "Little Nemo in Slumberland"! You can check out all of his adventures in high-res scans at this h'yar web page "The Comic Strip Library"!

And finally for today's batch. Everyone knows my love for the epic work of Harold Gray and his famous little redhead, "Little Orphan Annie".

More next week.

Talk to you soon.

"Little Nemo in Slumberland" - Nemo #30 part 1

Nemo: the Classic Comics Library #30 devotes half of itself to it's namesake, landmark "Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay. Master of draftsmanship and perspective, Little Nemo has long been a strip I love to get lost in.


An ironic editorial from Richard Marschall announcing the addition to the editorial staff of the magazine. Ironic because, while they were looking forward to a long future, this was the second to the last issue.

In fact, the last issue didn't come for a looooooooooong time. #30 was cover dated "April 1989" and #31 is dated "January 1992". It's a shame. It was a great labor of love.

Fantagraphics announces it's full color reprints of the entire run of "Little Nemo in Slumberland" and this piece was used to promote it. Some great glimpses on the pages that follow.

As the text laments, it is in black and white. The reprint books are in gorgeous full color and I was smart enough to get them all. Unfortunately their far too large to fit on my pityable scanner. Read on though, there's lots to learn here, and if you want to feat your eyes on high resolution scans of the entire run of full color strips, take a gander at this sweet web-site I recently stumbled across. http://www.comicstriplibrary.org/ beautiful!

Talk to you soon. Sweet dreams.

Nemo number 3: Winsor McCay on EVERYTHING and Gluyas Williams

The concluding articles from "Nemo: the Classic Comics Library" issue 3 from October 1983.

First some unearthed opinions by the comic strip and animation pioneer Winsor McCay...

...and the continuing feature on "Penmen of the Past" this time spotlighting the wonderful black and white line art of Gluyas Williams. All hail those forgotten pen-men! Some wonderful stuff was learned by me from these back-of-the-issue articles.

Finally a quick sneak peek at the upcoming issue #4.

Glorious stuff all and always in-depth and intelligently presented. I miss "Nemo".

Winsor McCay: One Talented Hard-Working Sum-Bitch!

Winsor McCay lived from September 26, 1867-July 26, 1934. An artistic innovator who changed the face of both the newspaper comics page and the animated movie screen.

Appealingly stylized and detailed with a talent for perspective and page layout, Winsor's comic strips looked like none other at the time. See, how even early on he was toying with the new format, treating the panel borders as props.

He had a number of comic strips in the 1900's and 1910's, above is an example of "Little Sammy Sneeze". A Sunday strip which revolved around the simple premise of a child who sneezes and the resulting destruction. Hey it was early on in the days of newspaper strips...no one was sure of the depth of story that would be acceptable to the public...but man did he draw good!

Below are two examples of another recurring theme strip, "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend". This centered around different characters each episode, but all afflicted with the same penchant for Welsh Rarebit (a melted cheese sauce with porter that's served over toast) before bedtime, which would then result in nightmares. This gave McCay the boundless world of fantasy to create whatever reality he felt like.

Keeping with his "dream" idea, his true masterpiece in the comics field was "Little Nemo in Slumberland". The continuing adventures of a young boy named Nemo who visits a fantastic surreal world in his slumbers. Beautifully rendered and engrossing to view. It's amazing to think that this is what used to arrive every week in the Sunday Funnies when you compare it to things like "Garfield" today. Makes me want to dry heave.

Winsor McCay was also interested in the fledgling film arts, most specifically animation of drawings. These films are extraordinary if you stop and think that, this is the era before cel animation...every drawing was completely redrawn for every frame...24 frames per second. And McCay did them single-handedly.

Amazing.

Here's an early one, even dramatizing his pledge to take on this herculean task and showing the work in progress. Animation sequence features Little Nemo and cast. This version is black and white, the original was hand colored, also by McCay.

The guy must never have slept!

McCay was also a showman and traveled the vaudeville circuit displaying his cartoons.

Another amazing innovation was employed for his tour with his ground-breaking cartoon, "Gertie the Dinosaur".

Watch this with your imagination running. McCay would actually appear on stage while this was projected on the screen and he would interact with Gertie as she performed tricks. The pumpkin you see her catch was matched by one thrown by McCay. Now THAT's Show Bidness!



A Great combination of creativity, artistic talent, mechanical talent and patience. We won't see another like him.

Thanks Winsor!