Monday, July 22, 2013

EXCUSE IT, PLEASE! by George Swanson



The Stripper's Guide shows us some panels from King Features' EXCUSE IT, PLEASE! by the screwball cartoonist George Swanson. 

I'm starting my day with this and although the jokes are tired, I agree that there's a mystery here. Allan Holtz fills us in:

The great screwball cartoonist George Swanson, who signed himself 'Swan', managed to turn wild success into abject failure. I say that because for a full decade (1927-37) he produced the 1-column panel Nonsense, which ran in a huge number of papers. But then either he or King Features decided to scrap Nonsense and replace it with this 2-column panel with the ungainly title Excuse It, Please. It did give Swanson a little more elbow room to draw, but the new panel, which used stand-alone gags without a unifying theme, pointed out that Swanson's gift for slapstick and silliness didn't necessarily make him a good single-panel gag-man. Swanson could produce a few good cartoons per week in this format, but the rest were right out of Joe Miller's jokebook.Excuse It, Please debuted on October 23 1937 and the last its been seen was April 2 1938.
The rest is here.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hello there, I read you blog I read you blog and very much impressed by your write up. I also write a blog on cartoonists, it is my pleasure to invite you to comment on my blog.
Here is the link
http://cartoondaddies.blogspot.in/
Regards,
Ninad kharkar