Napoleon and Uncle Elby and Little Mary Big Little Book by Clifford McBride

 

The wonderful pen lines of Clifford McBride, who drew the Napoleon and Uncle Elby comic strip (1932 - 1961).

My grandmother and grandfather knew Clifford and Margot McBride. The two couples and would meet up at a Los Angeles restaurant back in the day (1940s I think) from time to time. My grandmother was highly amused that Clifford would routinely pause and gaze around to see if people recognized him. As if people knew what a cartoonist looks like!

Clifford McBride's assistant was Disney artist Roger Armstrong, who would continue the feature after McBride's death in 1951, with Margot McBride writing. It's more than likely we are looking at Armstrong's work for this Big Little Book.

Thanks to George Topham Hayes for these scans!

 

 

IT'S BETTER WITH YOUR SHOES OFF by Anne Cleveland PART TWO

Continuing a look at the book IT'S BETTER WITH YOUR SHOES OFF by Anne Cleveland. Part one is here. This book shows us what it was like for well-to-do Westerners living in Japan in the 1950s.






Above: one of my favorite gatefold illustrations. The reason I bought the book.



 

-- This has been an edited version of a blog entry that originally appeared way back in November 13, 2007.

IT'S BETTER WITH YOUR SHOES OFF by Anne Cleveland PART ONE

Ready? Let's go visit pre-anime, pre-Naruto Japan ...!


So, the year before Raymond Burr played "Steve Martin" in GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS, this book of playful cartoons, IT'S BETTER WITH YOUR SHOES OFF, written and illustrated by Anne Cleveland, was published in 1955 by the Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc. of Rutland, Vermont & Tokyo Japan.

"Here's a clever book filed with cartoons and punchy captions which recount the hilarious adventures of an American family during their semi-permanent residence in Japan," said the Honolulu Star Bulletin in its review.


Hanako-San is always laughing at "The Wests." Mrs West sports a flippy hairdo ala Catharine O'Hara in WAITING FOR GUFFMAN.

 

Above is our cast of characters. Hubby looks like a grown up frat boy Tintin.

 

I saw this book in an antique store near the Manchester, NH environs. I liked Cleveland's clean brush style. And I had never heard of her or the book, despite my copy being a 20th printing (!!!) from 1970.

 

The above paragraph sums up the whole POV of the book. This is the Baby Boomer generation's Japan.

 

Some lovely layout, lettering and detail here. Easy to make fun of the content, but the form is solid.

Ooh! Lower right hand corner of page 11: is that some manga the bespectacled teen is engrossed in?





Hanako-San: always laughing at us silly Americans!

Little information on Ms. Cleveland today. The Comics Reporter has more bio information on her, a list of known books, here. And Mike Rhode mentions her in a response to Tom's essay.

There' s some more of this book to scan, and, if there's an interest, I will.

 

 

-- This has been an edited version of a blog entry of November 8, 2007.

Comic Culture "JewCE: The Jewish Comics Experience" Documentary Roundtable

Via Terence Dollard's Comic Culture series: Roy Schwartz, Danny Fingeroth, Tony Kim, and Dr. Miriam Mora discuss the new documentary JewCE: The Jewish Comics Experience.

 

We Miss Sam Gross

Shannon Wheeler, over at his Facebook page, posted this Sam Gross cartoon, adding, "I miss Sam Gross."

 

Sam was one of a kind. He really was the kindest fellow and he would call me occasionally when I moved out of NYC in 2007. He was, I think, the first person to call me in New Hampshire. He called to inform me that I now lived “in the land of cheap booze,” since NH has no sales tax. He was always a great guy and, hey, he got me work from time to time. So glad I knew him. I miss him as well.

 

 

Barry Blitt, Jack Ohman, and Jen Sorensen: "'I won the Pulitzer Prize and I'm busing on a corner,' 3 top artists on the uncertain future of political cartooning

[Images (from left): Barry Blitt, Jack Ohman, Jen Sorensen]

 

Zachary Petit interviews three political cartoonists about their work and the current climate for political parody in this Fast Company piece.

"Editorial cartoons and illustration are fairly niche topics—or so I once thought. On Jan. 3, cartoonist Ann Telnaes published Why I’m quitting the Washington Post on her Substack. It detailed how the paper—owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, who attended Donald Trump’s second inauguration—rejected her cartoon of Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Los Angeles Times publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong and Mickey Mouse worshipping at the president-elect’s feet with bags of money. The next day, the story was international news.

"Paradoxically, in the year 2025, editorial cartooning was back on the front page. Washington Post Opinion editor David Shipley released a statement that the paper had killed Telnaes’s cartoon to avoid redundancy because they had just published a column on the same topic and had another in the hopper. But ultimately, in rejecting the piece, the Post seemingly underscored the point at the heart of it—and brought it to more eyes than the paper ever could have reached on its own. It immediately became a stand-in for much bigger conversations around media ownership, American oligarchs, objectivity and myriad subjects beyond—including, of course, the role of the editorial cartoon in 2025.

"To probe just that, we arranged a Zoom roundtable with a trio of some of the best political artists and illustrators working today: Pulitzer Prize winner Barry Blitt, Pulitzer Prize winner Jack Ohman, and Pulitzer finalist and Herblock Prize winner Jen Sorensen.

"Our conversation proved to be insightful, stirring and at times depressing, but ultimately honest. Collectively, not unlike the best editorial cartoons."

 

The rest is here.

THE CARTOONIST! Fall 1953

 In its entirety: THE CARTOONIST!, the in-house publication of the National Cartoonists Society. This is the Annual Photo Issue Fall 1953.


The Cartoonist: a quarterly published by the National Cartoonists Society, 140 West 57th Street, New York 19, N. Y.

If you Google Map this address, you get:

.. a bus zooming in front to the frikkin' Google camera!

Oh well, back to the mag:


Mort Walker edited THE CARTOONIST, with Bill Yates as Assistant Editor.


The 1953 NCS Board:

BOARD OF GOVERNORS: Rube Goldberg, Honorary President; Otto Soglow, President; Bob Dunn, First Vice President; Willard Mullin, Second Vice President; John Pierotti, Treasurer; McGowan Miller, Secretary; Carl Rose, General Membership Representative; EXECUTIVE COUNCIL: Martin Banner, Ernie Bushmiller, E. Simms Campbell, Milton Caniff, Past Pres., Fred Cooper, Walt Disney, Albert Dorne, Ham Fisher, Hal Foster, Harold Gray, Jimmy Hatlo, Harry Hershfeld, Bill Holman, Walt Kelly, Frank King, Bill Mauldin, George MacManus, Willard Mullin, Russell Patterson, Past Pres., Alex Raymond, Past Pres., Mischa Richter, C.D. Russell, Frank Willard, George Wunder, Chic Young.


Fred Waring was a great fan and friend of cartoonists.

Above: Fred Waring reads the Sunday funnies in a photo nicked from the Fred Waring's America site.
He had a huge place in Pennsylvania and he would send a bus to Times Square for all the NCSers to get aboard. The bus would then drive thru NJ to PA, and all the cartoonists would hang out at his place -- usually for a couple of days. Mel Casson helped start the annual visit to Waring's Shawnee Golf Resort. More here, at the Penn State Fred Waring's America site.

Back to the magazine:



Evert cartoonist should wear a hat and smoke a pipe ala Ed Dodd and Walt Kelly!

-- This has been an edited version of a blog entry that originally appeared May 26, 2009.