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dr_hermes (dr_hermes) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-03-07 21:20:00

Entry tags:

era: golden age

Napoleon's free lunch and today's mystery photo

So much great stuff has faded into obscurity. NAPOLEON by Clifford McBride started in papers in 1929 (as UNCLE ELBY) and ran for more than twenty years. (The strip was reprinted for years in FAMOUS FUNNIES, often with a new illustration for the cover.) Napoleon never had a thought balloon or did anything a dog couldn't do. That was part of the strip's gentle charm. This page from 1935 is a good example of wordless storytelling. Well, trusting a dog (even a good dog) with a whole chicken strikes me as asking for disappointment. (As an aside, it seems far-fetched today, but not that long ago parents often sent preteens into stores with a few dollars to come back with a pack of cigarettes or a six-pack, and no one thought twice about it. Today the story would be on the 6:00 news and charges would be pressed.)

This respectable-looking old chap created a long-running and immensely popular strip that even heathens who don't like comics recognize.

(Post a new comment)

	kamino_neko 2009-03-07 08:24 pm UTC (link)
	Contrast isn't great, but it looks at least mostly like the older Charles Schulz, and the clue definitely fits him. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	dr_hermes 2009-03-07 08:34 pm UTC (link)
	I'm sorry, it's not the PEANUTS creator. This guy's strip started out as very hard-hitting and violent, but later become just plain weird and whacky. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	kamino_neko 2009-03-07 08:41 pm UTC (link)
	Hmmm...If not Sparky, and with that expanded clue, it could be Chester Gould, though I'm not quite familiar enough with Dick Tracy to be sure that describes its evolution. (If it's not, I'm pretty much stumped. Nobody else I can think of that I know generally what they look like look particularly like the pic.) (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	jlroberson 2009-03-07 09:32 pm UTC (link)
	I'm thinking Gould as well. I know that face. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	kamino_neko 2009-03-07 09:42 pm UTC (link)
	I have my vengeance for you beating me to Joe Orlando, now! (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	jlroberson 2009-03-08 12:08 am UTC (link)
	Savor it for five minutes. ;) (Reply to this) (Parent)

dr_hermes
2009-03-07 09:32 pm UTC (link)

Yes, it is Chester Gould. DICK TRACY started in 1931 as an angry, crime-busting strip that reminds one of the Charles Bronson DEATH WISH and Clint Eastwood DIRTY HARRY movies. The bad guys were mean and heartless and grotesque (Flattop and the Brow and Pruneface, ick) and they got what they deserved when Tracy plugged them.

By the late 1960s, though, the strip had gone all weird. It was about trips to the Moon (which was inhabited) in magnetic garbage cans. "The nation that controls magnetism will rule the world!" we were told. Then there were characters like B.O. Plenty (the name standing for Body Odor), Gravel Gertie and more. Odd strip.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	kamino_neko 2009-03-07 09:41 pm UTC (link)
	Dick Tracy on the moon. ... Weird. Someone should definitely post some of that... (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

jlroberson
2009-03-08 12:11 am UTC (link)

It is the craziest shit in a time when DICK TRACY was all about the crazy shit. But one could take that in a way then as a relief, because when Tracy did deal with crime and so forth, he was more fascist than he ever had been before. He and Al Capp both turned pretty calcified and Nixonian law-and-order around the same time. You see a lot of references in Gould's case in how Gilbert Shelton satirized him.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	kamino_neko 2009-03-08 12:17 am UTC (link)
	I was aware of Capp's hard swerve right. Pretty crazy - not as crazy, I grant, as Ham Fisher's turn at the end of his life, but pretty crazy, nonetheless... (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	jlroberson 2009-03-08 12:57 am UTC (link)
	Then consider that Gould already was kind of there to begin with and had a character allowed and encouraged to kill. Then this character meets hippies, see, and well... Though the funniest stuff was when, under Collins and Fletcher, Dick Tracy fought a "punk." Granted, it was slightly better than the punk rock episode of QUINCY, but... (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	kamino_neko 2009-03-08 01:27 am UTC (link)
	Though the funniest stuff was when, under Collins and Fletcher, Dick Tracy fought a "punk." I can imagine - Punk is one of the most hilarious subcultures to see in mainstream pop-culture. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	PS jlroberson 2009-03-08 12:13 am UTC (link)
	And later Max Allan Collins got rid of Moon Maid, a blonde alien from the moon with antennae who married and had a kid with Junior(no, I am not making this up), by blowing her up in a car. That and the story with Flattop's kids were the beginning of his tenure, I think. He did much better by that strip than he did Batman and Jason Todd. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	heat16 2009-03-08 05:05 am UTC (link)
	Even the Spirit went to the moon once. And that wasnt another Frank Miller crack fantasy, that was an actual Will Eisner story. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

kamino_neko
2009-03-08 05:22 am UTC (link)

The Spirit on the moon was awesome - Spirit was just silly enough, in general, to pull off a science fiction story in an otherwise earthbound series, and adding Wally Wood's art to Eisner's writing and art would raise it to that level even if there were more residual 'wtf'?

I'm not convinced Dick Tracy could pull it off nearly as well (two-way wrist radio notwithstanding)...at least not without seeing it.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	jlroberson 2009-03-07 09:33 pm UTC (link)
	PS--Yes, that very much describes its evolution. Maybe someone here can post some of the WTF "Moon Maid" storyline to illustrate. (Reply to this) (Parent)