Friday, April 13, 2012

MAN THE BEAST by Virgil VIP Partch


Here's a 1953 Dell paperback, reprinting two books in one: MAN THE BEAST AND THE WILD, WILD WOMEN by Virgil VIP Partch. It's copyright 1951, 1953 by Virgil Franklin Partch, II, "the funniest cartoonist in the world."

Dell marketing department hyperbole may have not exaggerated. It's a half century later, and lovers of Partch are all over the place.

Partch, like Booth or Addams, created a whole comic world of blue collar bars, desperate passion-driven cavemen, absurd visual puns, scheming libidinous suitors, and a good helping of desert and desert island gags.

This is a thick paperback of his 1950s gag cartoons. It looks to be published from his actual cartoons with NO typeset caption, just his hand-written gag line. My guess is that these are all cartoons that TRUE Magazine (and his other major markets) did not buy.

These scans are from MAN THE BEAST:

2 comments:

Ger Apeldoorn said...

Amazing!

RoB said...

The last comic, in the boxing ring, I remember seeing in one of the huge books of comics I' d pick up at garage sales and flea markets as a child. I'll have to see if I can find it to see if the caption was ever type set. I think it was the New Yorker.