Some Vintage Paper

 

I was at the Arundel, Maine flea market on Sunday and bought a few old postcards and a business card. All are from the turn of the last century and all feature some comic art. Above is a postcard of Alphonse and Gaston by Frederic Burr Opper. It's copyright 1906 by the American Journal Examiner. 

The two terribly polite Frenchmen Alphonse and Gaston began five years earlier, in Hearst's New York Journal. 

Wikipedia:

"Their 'After you, Alphonse.', 'No, you first, my dear Gaston!' routine ran for more than a decade. Alphonse is short; Gaston is tall. The premise is that both are extremely polite, constantly bowing and deferring to each other. Neither can ever do anything or go anywhere because each insists on letting the other precede him.

Though never a daily or even weekly feature, Alphonse and Gaston appeared on Sundays for several years. In addition to Hearst collections and licensed products, it was adapted into a stage play and several comedy shorts. In 1909, not-yet-famous director D.W. Griffith made a short (two-shot) split reel comedy for the Biograph company, featuring the characters, titled 'The French Duel.'"

Norway, Maine is a town I go to every now and then. There's a good framing/art supply shop there, the 100 Aker Wood, and I wonder if maybe W.C. Pierce was the guy who started it. What the fellow (Mr. Pierce?) is doing up a tree is kinda lost on me, but I liked the drawing a lot. 

 

Mr. Jack by James Swinnerton was a long-running (1903 - 1935) strip about an always-on-the-make tiger who always sported fine clothes and a cigarette in a holder. He's a cad and enjoys life. See him winking at you? It's credited as the first newspaper strip to feature an anthropomorphic leading character. Jack was criticized as a bad moral example for children and was moved off the funny pages into the sports section after 1904. It appeared sporadically after that as Swinnerton was focusing on his other comic strip Little Jimmy. Fantagraphics reprinted Little Jimmy in a beautiful over-sized volume this year. Go get it before it goes out of print.

Here's just something else that I have no idea what the context is. The joke being that it's not the swear word, but it sure sounds like it when you read it or say it out loud. It's a post card, but there's no description of what it is or who drew it.