Thank you, lyons, for making this incredible book available!
By crashryan
Beautifully drawn, cleverly observed, a real treat. Gene Carr seems to have been fascinated by kid-built vehicles. I don't recall seeing the theme in other urban-kid cartoons of the time. A brief bio of Carr from Wikipedia:
"Gene Carr (January 7, 1881 – December 9, 1959) was an American cartoonist. He was one of the most active early New York City artists in the young field of comic strips. He was doing newspaper cartoons by age 15 and two years later was working for the William Randolph Hearst papers. Carr is considered a pioneer of the use of sequential panels. He did cartoons for the New York Herald, New York World and the New York Evening Journal.
His comic strip Lady Bountiful debuted in Heart's newspapers in 1902 as a Sunday-comics filler, and the following year jumped to publisher Joseph Pulitzer's The New York World, appearing as the cover feature of May 3, 1903. The strip's star, notes comics scholar Don Markstein, 'has been cited by many comics historians and commentators as the very first' female protagonist of a comic strip, cautioning, 'Maybe she is. It's certainly difficult to think of any that were in print before her 1902 debut.'"
By Robb_K
Super drawings. Lots of personality in the characters. If Damon Runyan would have had a lot of illustrations in his books, I would have like them to have been drawn by an artist in THIS style. Even in the relatively prosperous 1910s and twenties, the teeming immigrant-laden neighbourhoods of New York City were filled with not-so-well-to-do people. Interesting to see that kids have always been the same. Art Linkletter (our famous Saskatchewan boy) would have had a field day taping quotable comments from kids like this!
By The Australian Panther
To my mind, the over-arching theme of the work is the
distance between the limits of the world these children inhabit and the unlimited and hopeful world of their imagination. Today these cartoons wouldn't be published, they are not negative and judgmental enough.
Wonderful stuff!
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