[Robb_K]

Good morning or evening, wherever you may be.  This fortnight's Comic Books for review are: The Chicago Tribune Syndicate's "Smitty Comics #2", written and drawn by Walter Berndt, reprinted and adapted to comic book format by Western Publishing/Dell Comics, and St. John's "A Treasury of Comics #3" (Bill Bumlin), written and drawn by United Features Syndicate's prolific comic strip artist, Bernard Dibble. 

(1) "Smitty", which ran from 1922-1973, was a comic strip about a very sharp, intelligent young boy, who, as a reward for doing a good deed, got a job as an "office boy" in a millionaire plutocrat's office as his reward, and soon became the old man's "right-hand-man", because he constantly saved the absent-minded old man from disasters due to his good memory and clear vision.  There were reprints of the earliest Smitty "stories" in Cupples and Leon small hardbound books reprinting the newspaper strips between the later mid 1920s and the late 1930s, and Western published a couple Smitty reprint comic books in their 1939 "Four Color" sand "Four Color Large Feature Series", as well as 5 issues in their 1942 "Four Color Comics" series, before Smitty got his own numbered series, which ran from #1 through 7.  Berndt had started out being an office boy at The New York Journal.  Soon he was submitting one-panel cartoons.  In 1915 got his first regular drawing job with them, drawing sports cartoons.  In 1916, he took over the 1 panel gag-a day cartoon "And The Fun Began", from noneother than Milt Gross. In 1920 he quit to start working on his own strip, and in 1921 he was hired by Joseph Pulitzer's New York World to write and draw "Billy The Office Boy".  But he was fired for insubordination after a few weeks.  He renamed his strip "Smitty" and took it to The Chicago Tribune Syndicate, and it lasted for over 50 years.  Smitty's little brother, Herby grew older, and Berndt drew his strip as a single line strip "topper" for Smitty's Sunday full-page strip.



Smitty 2 can be found here: https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=25472


(2) "Bill Bumlin", from 1947, was a very short-lived comic strip by Dibble, who spent most of his career at United Features, filling in for longer periods of unavailability for other artists' strips, or ghosting for them.  He was a "jack-of-all-trades", who drew in several different genres and styles, including comedy, drama, and action-based strips. Dibble assisted on Rudy Dirk's "Captain and The Kids" strip and Gus Mager's "Hawkshaw The Detective" during the 1920s, and took over "Captain and The Kids" from 1932 through 1938.  He also worked on "Looy Dot Dope" in the late 1930s. He drew "Danny Dingle" during the late 1940s.  He also spent a few years working on Fritzi Ritz Sunday page during the 1950s.  But, starting in the 1950s, his main work was comic book filler short comedy stories and single-page gags for Quality Comics.





Bill Bumlin can be found here:   https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=96302

I look forward to all of your comments about these two examples of old-time comedy, one based on Vaudvillian, coincidental events mistaken, puns, and subtle, and light slapstick humour, and the other wild, zany comedy, with lots of fast slapstick action.  I hope the repetitiveness of the same information being printed again in the "Smitty" book, due to the short, daily horizontal line-strips being adapted to the large page comic book format won't get on your nerves.  I realise it was a bad job of cutting redundant panels.

[Quirky Quokka]

Thanks Robb. Those look like interesting choices. It's good to have a bit of humour now and again.

Cheers

QQ

[The Australian Panther]

Robb wanted to post 'the Gumps' buit we found out it wasn't PD.
The Gumps
https://theslingsandarrows.com/the-gumps/

[crashryan]

Smitty
I'd seen Smitty before, or course, but never paid it much mind. Based on this collection the strip was okay but nothing special. The art is in that generic early 1930s style, not bad but not exciting either. The stories have amusing moments but again are nothing special.

I'm not sure how Smitty managed to last 50 years. But then a lot of successful early strips survived long past their prime. I've seen that attributed to inertia. A strip was popular in the 20s and 30s; readers didn't complain, so local newspaper editors kept renewing their subscriptions through the 40s and 50s. The strip became a fixture, and if a local editor tried to drop it older readers would object: "I've been reading The Captain and the Kids for forty years and you ain't gonna take it from me!" Finally either the syndicate gave up on it (perhaps after its creator's demise) or the Great Newspaper Shrinkage of the 1960s forced a pruning of the comic page.

Turning a daily strip into a readable comic book is harder than it looks. When serialized strips were common, creators offered periodic recaps to keep occasional readers up to date as well as to make it easier for new readers to pick up a tale in mid-story. Some writers were more deft than others in writing recap dialogue. If there's too much of it, adapting a story into comic book form can be a challenge. Here in Smitty we see examples of the editor keeping a certain panel for the story to make sense, but  the dialogue repeats information from an earlier panel. Of course one could have re-lettered the dialogue to eliminate repetition. Other publishers did this in their strip reprints. Dell seems to have preferred leave dialogue as-is.

This reminds me of a rule of thumb I heard when working on daily strips in the early 80s. It went like this: Monday's strip recaps last week's action. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday advance the story. Friday sets up a cliff-hanger. Nobody reads the papers on Saturday so Saturday's episode is a throwaway that doesn't affect the story. Comparatively few papers run a Sunday episode, so Sunday is also a throwaway. Result: only three or four days' worth of story. Everything else is padding.

Stan Lee must have memorized this formula when Marvel launched the Spider-Man strip. His early stories had so much recap it was laughable. This rule was the exact opposite of the formula used during the heyday of story strips, the 1930s and 1940s. Milton Caniff described how he figured daily strips were read mostly by adults and Sundays by the kids. So for Terry and the Pirates he put the soap opera in the dailies and saved the slam-bang action for the Sunday funnies. Dick Tracy followed the same scheme. During the 70s nostalgia boom publishers issued collections of old adventure strips. Limited by budgets to black-and-white reproduction, some collections included only the dailies...which meant that every half-dozen strips a Monday caption described all sorts of important action that we never saw.

Forgive me, I've rambled far from Smitty. The thing that most surprised me about this comic was its abrupt ending. I had to check to make sure a page wasn't missing. The editor could have done a better job winding down the story so it didn't seem "to be continued." Especially since the next issue doesn't pick up the same storyline.

[SuperScrounge]

Smitty #2

First short
I wonder if that soda jerk became so grumpy because of kids like him?


Main story
Can you imagine a writer pitching this story today? "It's a story about a man taking a young, unrelated boy with him into the woods... Why are you calling the cops?"

Not only did they do a bad job of cutting the redundant panels, Robb, they placed some in spots that didn't flow naturally.

Was a page from the middle of the story printed on the back cover in the actual book, or was it stuck in the wrong place by the scanner?
According to the GCD the third short was the back cover.

Other than that, okay, but not great, story.


Second short
Cute gag.


Third short
Amusing.

[crashryan]

Bill Bumlin

I liked this better than Smitty. It produced a goodly number of smiles, which Smitty didn't. Dibble's cartooning is lively and he comes up with fresh ideas. I don't understand some of them. The on-again, off-again angel wings are distracting. And why do the psychiatrists all wear skirts?

After suffering through the repetitive editing in Smitty, I was surprised by the pacing of the Bumlin stories. They don't read like collected daily strips. They seem more like original short stories. Were these produced especially for the comic book?

[Robb_K]

Bill Bumlin

I liked this better than Smitty. It produced a goodly number of smiles, which Smitty didn't. Dibble's cartooning is lively and he comes up with fresh ideas. I don't understand some of them. The on-again, off-again angel wings are distracting. And why do the psychiatrists all wear skirts?

After suffering through the repetitive editing in Smitty, I was surprised by the pacing of the Bumlin stories. They don't read like collected daily strips. They seem more like original short stories. Were these produced especially for the comic book?

I seem to remember that I read that Dibble was working for United Features when he wrote and drew The Bill Bumlin stories.  I haven't been able to find ANYTHING about a "Bill Bumlin" newspaper comic strip.  I'm pretty sure they were originally drawn to be placed in comic books.  And I think I remember reading that these stories first appeared in one of United Features' monthly comic book series (Tip Top, Sparkler, or Sparkle?), and were collected into this one-shot St. John-produced book (with the leased stories).  Unfortunately, I couldn't find cross references to the stories in this book to their original printings.  But I think they probably appeared one at a time in several 1946 issues of "Tip Top Comics".  Dibble worked on Fritzi Ritz and several minor "filler stories" and gags for "Tip Top" and "Sparkle" during the mid through late 1940s.  In any case, your guess seems to be correct, as nothing is listed on a "Bill Bumlin" newspaper strip.  I'm pretty sure the short ( 5 to 6 page) non continued, intact, Fritzi Ritz, Nancy, The Captain & The Kids, and other stories were produced especially for United features comic books, to be fillers to fill out books containing reformatted newspaper strip "episodes" of "Abbie & Slats, Curly Kayoe, etc. and other strips.  Dibble's "Bill Bumlin" appeared monthly in "Tip Top" from 1945-1946.

[SuperScrounge]

A Treasury of Comics #3

Strange as it Seems (all of them)
Interesting tidbits.

Of all the Ripley's Believe It Or Not knockoffs, this series seems to come closest to the original.


Bill Bumlin
Why do various people in this story have tiny wings?

Some nice comic moments and nice beginnings to stories, but they seem to fall a bit flat in the endings.


The Young Idea
Kind of hard to judge this series on just four cartoons. Not great gags, but not terrible. Seems like the kind of comic that I might have read if it was in my daily paper, but wouldn't have missed if it was dropped.

[Robb_K]

Bill Bumlin

I liked this better than Smitty. It produced a goodly number of smiles, which Smitty didn't. Dibble's cartooning is lively and he comes up with fresh ideas. I don't understand some of them. (1)  The on-again, off-again angel wings are distracting.   

(2)  And why do the psychiatrists all wear skirts?

After suffering through the repetitive editing in Smitty, I was surprised by the pacing of the Bumlin stories. They don't read like collected daily strips. They seem more like original short stories. Were these produced especially for the comic book?

(1) We know that Bumlin isn't dead (a ghost/Angel like MLJ's "Gloomy Gus"(Gus Gloompuss, The Homeless Ghost) who also had little wings), as all the other characters react to him and engage in physical action together with him.  I wonder if whenever a character in the stories decides to do a good deed, the "Angel Wings" pop up on their shoulders?  But, actually, after looking at when the wings pop up, and when they are not shown, it appears that they might rather represent when the characters are inspired with a new idea, and determined to carry out action related to it.  And they disappear during the time when they are NOT inspired.

(2)  The Psychiatrists all are wearing skirts (which I think are meant to represent ballerina tutus), to make fun of them as cracked pots (crackpots) - loonies, insane persons, which makers it very ironic that THEY are the doctors that people go to to help them be able to contend with their life's problems.  The whacko, zany, flipped out psychiatrist was a meme for irony, especially during the 1920s through 1940s.  The Looney psychiatrist dancing around in a tutu, like a little girl, represented the epitome of madness, back then.  That may have been inspired from the situation when British Knighted,World-famous archaeologist, Sir William Flinders-Petrie, danced around in a ballerina's tutu in Egypt, during the early 1900s, after making a great discovery.  Apparently, he went stark-raving mad from being exposed to the blazing Egyptian Sun for 45 years.

[Morgus]

‘Crash, I’m thinking just turning out a strip is harder than it looks to a lot of people. There is a certain genius to making that deadline day after day, year after year. In that regard alone, Charles Schultz is a genius. You get that level of craftsmanship for decades? Amazing.
We had SMITTY in our paper right up to the end. I cannot remember a single comic from it. Doesn’t seem to be any current hardcover or paperback collections of the strip. Wikipedia mentions a tin toy worth a grand, and that’s about it.
But that last page, with the dad and the kid heading home impressed me. I read it as the two of them heading home in the winter when I first saw it. You know, low red sunset light, lots of white. Changed my mind with the trees in later panels. But the supper time conclusion reminded me of Robert Crumbs’ endings when it wasn’t exactly funny but just sort of suddenly ends without a real punch line like life sometimes does.
BILL BUMLIN Now, my initial theory about the wings and the tutu’s on the psychiatrists was that it was a way of saying they were ‘fairies'...homosexuals. Expressing your emotions or taking your problems to someone was seen as weakness back then for most people. Men kept it inside. It would not be manly to not be able to handle them yourself.  The popular media knew about Freud and that most psychiatrists were German and probably heard rumours about ‘repression’. Take it from there.
But then I looked back and saw the wings on Bumblin and other people before and after the doctors caught up with him, so i don’t know what the artist meant.
Oh, the first doctor to see him makes a joke about 'dementia peacox', a play on the old time diagnosis of ‘dementia praecox'. You know it today as schizophrenia . That’s a phrenology map to the right, a discredited German science at the time that thought you could judge intelligence and personality by the size and bumps on a head. By ’47, it was seen as quackery, so it’s probably a dig to psychiatry in general again.

Thanks for the books, Robb, they were interesting and a fun read.

[Robb_K]

A Treasury of Comics - Bill Bumlin
Dibble uses a standard 1930s/1940s zany comedy art and writing style, reminiscent of that of Bill Holman's "Smokey Stover", Jimmy Hatlo's "They'll Do it Every Time" and "Little Iodine", Ving Fuller's "Doc Syke",  Milt Gross' "Count Screwloose", and Rube Goldberg's "Boob McNutt".  It reminds me of first having the newspaper comics read to me in the late 1940s, and my reading them into the 1950s.  The humour seems a bit stilted and dull based on today's standards.   

Bill Bumlin 1 - The Professor's Anti-Gravity Juice
The premise as a story idea is very good, with several good possibilities for development, with people and objects becoming lighter than air, sand floating away.  A cow-minder is a funny concept, and he and the cow floating up into the air, and "flying (jumpin) over the moon, is a funny idea.  But Dibble seems to take the good idea nowhere after Bumlin uses the anti-gravity juice to pretend to lift heavy things several times, to scare the town bully into becoming his slave.  So, the story stalls, is repetitive, and thus, boring.

Bill Bumlin 2 - Bill Bumlin Goes Into Show Business
Bill puts adverts in the newspapers that he can lift anything, hoping to join a circus  The president of the local Psychoanalysis Club decides to study him and write a paper about his case.  Dibble has Bumlin kick The Professor up to the top of a tree, and he thinks he's a bird (an old cliche for the crazy Psychiatrist who gravitated to Psychology and Psychoanalysis to find out what is wrong with himself.  Bumlin's wife, thinking the "juice" was booze, empties the bottle, and refills it with water.  So, the reader knows Bumlin will use it to lessen the weight of something big he plans to lift, and he will be denounced as a fraud, and probably tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail!  No suspense possible.  And a boring ending to a story that had some good possibilities.  I'd probably had an ever impressive upgrading of heavy things lifted, with Bumlin becoming more and more famous, until his last exhibition, in which he lifts something (like the City Hall),  but have an unexpected event be his downfall - the anti - gravity effect has a time limit to where it wears out.  And he chooses to hold up the giant building (with people (including The Mayor) yelling out the windows for him set the edifice back down on the ground) for a very long time, so the press photographers can take photos of his master achievement - so he can become World-famous.  The anti-gravity wears off, - the building comes crashing down, and Bumlin is buried 100 feet below, yelling for people to dig him out, while the disappointed crowd leaves in disgust, and The Mayor and City Council argues over which department should rescue him, and how they'll be able to get all the money to pay for the building's damages from that now bankrupt man.  In the last panel, they walk away still arguing, as Bumlin is still yelling for someone to dig him out.  His dialogue balloon comes out of a narrow crack in the ground (made by the building falling back down.

Instead of my building his fame and ending in disaster idea, Dibble has Bumlin, never getting anywhere with his fame, by having him meet a rich old woman he hopes to get to finance his climb to fame and fortune, but, instead, offers to lift her above a mud puddle, but his "juice" now just being water doesn't lift her, and she ends up chasing him in the last panel.  An easy copout, and a very unsatisfying ending for the reader.  I've come to the conclusion that Dibble should have stuck to just drawing, and teamed up with a good comedy writer.

Bill Bumlin 3 - Bill Bumlin's Ghoulfriend

The atmosphere on this opening page is terrific.  A dark, Gothic night scene, perfect for a horror tale.  Already, Dibble commits the Cardinal Sin of disrespecting his readers by thinking they can't comprehend what they see, and not only leading them to the water, but flushing it down their throats with a firehose!  He has Bumlin Saying to himself (not even thinking it) that he is so scared chills are running down his spine.  He's the artist.  He should be showing the fear in the man's eyes, and showing him shiver with body movements and action lines, and, perhaps very light touch on inking the outer lines of his body to indicate blurriness of motion.  I like the imposing tower shot, and the dark background and only seeing the 2 eyes of his greeter.  I do like Bumlin's terrified and shocked look and the sweat off his brow when looking at the eyes.  Also, it's a great panel for suspense at the end of Page 1. 

Again, Dibble is trying to make the readers scared by telling them things that should scare them, instead of showing them in visuals and people's reactions.  Leading them by the hand like he thinks they have the brains of 5 year olds.  Instead of Dibble's having the should-be ghoulish scientist say that he has done things that would make leading scientists' hair stand on end, he should have shown the fear in Bumlin's eyes after getting a view of a diseased brain in a glass jar, and seeing the bottom half of the Monster's large body strapped ton the operating table, have HIM screaming in terror at Wolfbane, that HE has gone where no man should, and risks letting it wreak vengeance upon Mankind.  After all, it IS a comedy series.  Dibble should be exaggerating everything to accentuate the irony and absurdity of the situation.  At least the last panel on Page 3, with Wolfbane telling Bumlin that any minute the thing he saw lying on the table will be the fruit of all his labour and he's lucky to be there to see it.  It makes a good, suspenseful page-turner.  But it would have been better with him starting to open the door.  Then, on Page 4, Dibble wastes too many panels trying to build upn suspense, but we see nothing to make us fear for Bumlin.  No painful screeches, no plaster falling off the walls accompanying the clanks and thuds of The Monster's heavy footsteps.  I don't see terror in Bumlin's eyes.  Dibble did not do a decent job in this part.  The 3 visions Bumlin has of what he thinks the Monster could be are too tame.  They should all show the more scary versions of The Monster doing terrible things to Bumlin.  They look too funny.  There should be more difference from the comedic way he really looks, making the joke that he's just a big"Teddy Bear type" all the more unexpected and funny.  TERRIBLE that Dibble uses the entire last page of a wayyyyyy-too-short 5-page story for its epilogue.  It shouldn't be more than about the last 4 panels, or so, in which Wolfbane (1st) shows his disgust at how his Monster turned out, and (2nd) is angry at Bumlin for bringing bad luck, (3rd) Kicks them out from his castle door, and (4th) same last panel as in the comic book, showing us that the "Monster" is scared and Bumlin tells him he'll guide and protect him.  He used too many panels to show that The "Monster" is a harmless flower-child, and the opposite of what Wolfbane wanted.  We can see that the story will continue in the next episode of "Tip Top Comics".

Bill Bumlin 4 - The Fighting Champ of Bugaboo Bend

The pacifist would-be Monster encounters the bully terror of the town, and offends him, by taking his lapel flower.  The Bully hits him hard, but breaks every bone in his hand in doing so.  The town elects him their protector, until he is scared away by a toy mechanical monkey.  So ends the Gothic Monster Saga.  A slight bit funny, but toon common a plot for a long time comics reader, who's seen it used hundreds of times.

Bill Bumlin 5 - Fighting Graft in Bumlinville (OR "The Pied Piper of Bumlinville")

This story starts out with a really good setting, character development and premise to craft a solid plot with lots of good possibilities.  For the first time, the first 3 pages have a really good pacing.  Unfortunately, they are paced well for a story of, at the very least, 10 pages (and would be better at probably 15).  This story (like all the others), is only 5 pages long.  So, it is chopped off, just where the main plot action starts.  Bill, agreeing with his fellow townspeople that he will fight The evil Mayor and banker brother, and their graft and their cruel treatment of The Townsfolk, immediately meets The Pied Piper of Hamelin's 20th Great Grandson, who just happens to have the famous fellow's magic flute.  We can guess the rest of the story.  As we should have guessed, the flute's music makes the cruel, greedy, crooks act in the opposite way, giving everything of monetary value and privileges back to The Townsfolk.  The story ends abruptly with The Piper asking Bumlin to provide sanctuary for him in his house, because the psychiatric hospital's "men in white suits" are chasing him with big nets because they think he's insane, believing in a magic flute.  Clearly, this story continued in the next issue of United Features' "Tip Top Comics".  But, unfortunately for us, the follow-up episode was NOT reprinted in this book.  We are getting more and more Tip Top Comics uploaded here on CB+ lately, so I'll check the 1946 issues to see if we have it.

Bill Bumlin 5 - Bill's Orphaned Nephew arrives

Bill rises to the occasion when his orphaned nephew is scheduled to arrive in Bumlinville to stay for good, as Bill and his wife plan to adopt him.  Bill tries to prepare by reading a book on child psychology, but has several mishaps before finding him at the train station, and the more responsible boy has to take his battered and bruised uncle to his house.  Clearly, this was a new addition to the series to help revive it.  Unfortunately we don't get to read the following episode unless I can find it in our "Tip Top Comics" section.

Overall Assessment

Dibble should have stuck to drawing only and allowed United Features to find a good comedy writer to team up with him.  He came up with some good ideas, but didn't know how to properly pace them or end them, and used mainly slapstick cliche gags, with no subtle, clever, high-brow style humour, and only very basic characterization. 

I, myself, would have liked the assignment of writing and storyboarding this series.  I'm sure I could have made the stories more appealing structurally, and also made them funnier.  I could have taken his basic ideas and made them into stories that would feel like stories than just a bunch of gags strung together, with truncated endings.  And the endings would not be so telegraphed, they would almost always have a funny surprise attached in some way.  There would also be more individual character-based humour.  I would have introduced more regular-appearing characters with different strengths and weaknesses, and attitudes on life.
The basic outline of the series and premise is a decent structure to have made it a memorable one, but it had a quite competent artist, who was clearly not an eager storywriter, only doing the writing for convenience, using a general slapstick comedy structure and well-known cliches to get by.  He had several good ideas, but didn't really know how to carry them out with a mere 5- pages with which to work.  Of course, I'd rather have had at least 8-10 pages to produce such stories.  It makes the job a lot easier, and would be much more enjoyable for the reader, too.

[Robb_K]

‘Crash, I’m thinking just turning out a strip is harder than it looks to a lot of people. There is a certain genius to making that deadline day after day, year after year. In that regard alone, Charles Schultz is a genius. You get that level of craftsmanship for decades? Amazing.
We had SMITTY in our paper right up to the end. (1) I cannot remember a single comic from it. Doesn’t seem to be any current hardcover or paperback collections of the strip. Wikipedia mentions a tin toy worth a grand, and that’s about it.
But that last page, with the dad and the kid heading home impressed me. I read it as the two of them heading home in the winter when I first saw it. You know, low red sunset light, lots of white. Changed my mind with the trees in later panels. But the supper time conclusion reminded me of Robert Crumbs’ endings when it wasn’t exactly funny but just sort of suddenly ends without a real punch line like life sometimes does.

BILL BUMLIN Now, (2) my initial theory about the wings and the tutu’s on the psychiatrists was that it was a way of saying they were ‘fairies'...homosexuals. Expressing your emotions or taking your problems to someone was seen as weakness back then for most people. Men kept it inside. It would not be manly to not be able to handle them yourself.  The popular media knew about Freud and that most psychiatrists were German and probably heard rumours about ‘repression’. Take it from there.
But then I looked back and saw the wings on Bumblin and other people before and after the doctors caught up with him, so I don’t know what the artist meant.
Oh, the first doctor to see him makes a joke about 'Dementia Peacox', a play on the old time diagnosis of ‘dementia praecox'. You know it today as schizophrenia . That’s a phrenology map to the right, a discredited German science at the time that thought you could judge intelligence and personality by the size and bumps on a head. By ’47, it was seen as quackery, so it’s probably a dig to psychiatry in general again.

Thanks for the books, Robb, they were interesting and a fun read.

Thanks, Morgus.
(1) There are probably no hardbound collections of "Smitty" because its humour was always very old-fashioned, and its very hard for people today to relate to it, and it's just not funny enough, even by 1920s standards, to have been "timeless humour). Almost no one alive today was around during its heyday of the 1920s-1930s.  Berndt conceived it in 1922, based on his own experiences as an "office Boy" during the first decade of The 1900s. I find it hard to believe it lasted in some newspapers until Berndt retired  in 1973.  I can't imagine how he kept it relevant past the early 1950s or so.

But, we DO have a fair amount (14) of "Smitty" comic books here on CB+ including:

Dell/Western Publishing:

Four Color 1939 Series # 11

Large Feature Comics # 26 (1939)

Four Color 1942 Series #s:  6, 32, 65, 99, 138

Own Numbered Series #s: 1 - 7

(2)  As you surmise, The little wings on the shoulders are NOT related at all, to the psychiatrists wearing ballerina's tutus.  As I stated above, the wings are not related to people behaving like Angels, but seem to always being connected to the characters being inspired with a great idea, or being VERY determined to get action done related to such inspiration.  That' very confusing, because, during the same general period of the 1940s, a few different comic book series (like MLJ's "Gloomy Gus" - who died without having a home, and travels The Earth as a Ghost, looking for a Human body to be his "new home").  He wears his Angel's wings on his shoulders ALL the time, probably to enhance his appearance with more differentiation from the living characters.  His colouring is much lighter,- a faint light blue-grayish across his skin and clothing).

Also, as I stated above, the Psychiatrists wearing ballerina's tutu's is a cliche of making fun of that profession, especially the Psychoanalysts, who have their patients (AND themselves) wading too much in their mental baggage, instead of facing life head on.  It seems to be partly related to the 19th Century view that Homosexuality was a mental disease (against nature) and a form of insanity (thus the denigratory term  "Fruits", meaning "Nutty as a Fruitcake", and many psychologists and psychiatrist took up those careers in an attempt to find out what is wrong with themselves and to cure it.  But, I also am well aware that the image of  Psychiatrists wearing ballerinas' tutus, dancing ballets is not only making fun of them, but also became a cliche for falling into madness, which likely came from when World Renowned archaeologist, Sir William Flinders-Petrie, unexpectedly, danced madly while wearing a ballerina's tutu after making a great new discovery in Egypt during the early 1900s.  I suspect that his unexpected "fall into madness" spurred on that cliche.  I've seen hundreds of examples from the 1910s through 1950s of a group of Psychiatrists (usually Psychoanalysts - Thanks to Freud) wearing ballerina tutus, dancing madly with ballet moves, in newspaper or magazine cartoons, silent and talkie films and other forms of media as a cliche for a funny way to express insanity.  Even Carl Barks used that cliche, and also Phrenology "head Maps" , several times when Scrooge  or Donald went to a Psychiatrist's office.

[Quirky Quokka]

Hi all

Sorry I'm a bit late getting to it this fortnight.

Smitty #2 1948

I always try to remember that comics were a product of their times and we can't expect the political correctedness we see today. As soon as I looked at the cover, though, I immediately wondered how first nations people would be represented. Having read the comic, I'm still not entirely sure. Trapper George was represented  fairly favourably (from my white Australian perspective). Little Moose was used more as comic relief. Nothing was terrible, though a few things made me cringe. For example, when Smitty tells his boss that the tracks are almost human. Then in the next frame, they see a tepee and the boss says, 'Almost human is correct. It's Little Moose!'

As others have pointed out, there was a lot of repetition, especially in the scenes where they were travelling to the mine. We heard over and over that Little Joe was afraid of the other Indians and had to be careful. Thanks Crashryan for the explanation of how continuity worked in comic strips. But as you've mentioned, this wasn't a great example.

The story has a lot of problems. For example, Ligttle Moose is doing everything he can to hide from his former tribe who want to kill him. But as long as he dresses like a little white boy, no one seems to notice his face looks like a much older man with a whopping great nose.

Also, it seems to just stop without much of a conclusion. As it's a strip, I though maybe it was continued in the next issue, but that one starts with a new story.

The humour is of course old-fashioned, though that's to be expected. Still, I'm not sure there would have been big belly laughs back in the day either.

The one-page gags weren't bad, but not great. Re the first one with the glass over a paper napkin, I had a similar one I did a couple of times. I must have seen it on TV or something. You fill two glasses with water (I used plastic cups because I'm nice). Then you tell someone you're going to do a magic trick and ask them to put both hands out with palms down. Then you carefully put one glass on the back of each hand. When it's all balanced and it looks like you're going to do your trick, you just leave the room. Gold! Though the last time I did it, I felt guilty and took the glasses off my friend's hands before disaster struck.

Always interesting to see comics from different eras and see how humour has changed, but I'm not a big fan of this one.

Cheers

QQ

[Robb_K]

Smitty #2 1948 - Smitty In The North Woods

After reading this book again for this exercise, I realise that it probably isn't the best choice of the Smitty books to entertain The Reading Club's readers (although the average humour in the comedy newspaper comic strips of The 1920s, and '30s would seem very dull and stilted to modern readers, in any case.   Unfortunately, even the "cleverest and funniest " of the Smitty stories wouldn't be better enough to change the general impression.  I probably should have chosen "Bringing up Father", instead, represented here at CB+, in one of the early Dell or Ned Pines' Standard Comics "Jiggs and Maggie" issues.  Berndt's artwork is decent, but not good enough to carry the old-fashioned humour.  And, the Western Tradition's success story, of "the clever young boy outwitting the experienced old man" theme is too old and too often used to interest new readers.

(1)Smitty (Herbie(Herby)) 1-Page Gag
Smitty's little brother shows some cleverness in playing a harmless but annoying trick on a mean soda jerk.  I guess it's likely to be dull to most readers.  And probably only a little nostalgic for readers who had previously seen the prank played on someone.

(2)Smitty - "In The North Woods" (Title given for Cupples and Leon's 1932 book reprinting of the newspaper strip)
Unfortunately, Western Publishing's project editor dropped the ball from the start of this book, by not adding a narrative box, with an introduction summary of what occurred in the newspaper strip portion of this "story" before this book's first page.  He chose to eschew that "favour" to the readers, as Smitty's and his Boss,  George Bailey's guide reading the letter that tells him they'll be arriving is a decent place to start the story for a novel, as all the information they need to know to follow the story COULD possibly follow, to establish the main characters' relationship, and why they are taking the trip.  However, as any good comic book editor will tell you, "each comic book needs to stand on its own", as if its purchaser/reader has never before read its series, or seen its characters.  So, by necessity, a basic impression of the character of the series main actors and their motivations and at least a hint of the immediate setting must be shown very early in the story (most often on its first page, especially in stories with a short page count).  And so, for stories of less than 20 pages, it's usually a hard and fast rule that the story's main character MUST appear on its first page (which is why the half-page splash panel containing Smitty and his Boss was made especially for this printing.  However, because that scene used in the first panel occurred much later in the story.  So, by already breaking a cardinal rule of not showing the main characters in "real time" on its first page, the narrative box with a brief synopsis of what's happened before, is needed.

I see now that Smitty and his boss' guide, George, does on Page 2, reveal that he will be their guide on their hunting trip.  This would be very repetitive IF a preliminary narrative were used.  So, not having the main characters on the first page in real time  causes an awkward conundrum that can't be fixed.  Worse yet, Smitty and his Boss appear, out of nowhere, with no narrative.  Their dialogue explains some of what the reader needs to know.  But, at ther VERY LEAST, the editor should have added a narrative box with the word, "Meanwhile....", or "Meanwhile, not far away.... ".  As I and several others commented above, the amount of repetition is ridiculous, and so, very annoying.  The mild "jokes" are very weak, and uncreative.

The story moves slowly, with not a lot happening.  The pacing never moves towards a creschendo and a big climax (showdown).  It just ends.  That implies this is just a "slice of life", as opposed to having an important story to tell that includes some kind of conflict or soul searching.  So, I feel that I chose a fairly uninteresting comic book to review.  I feel that The "Bill Bumlin" book is a better choice, because, although not terribly funny nor well-structured, it provided fodder for constructive criticism, and lerssons in "what NOT to do, and what to aspire to in comic book story writing.

(3) Smitty(Herbie) 2nd 1-Page Gag
This 2nd Herbie gag again  shows him being clever, in tricking his dog into the bathtub, for a bathing that most dogs hate. It's not terribly funny, but brings a smile.

(4) Smitty 1-Page Gag
Lots of buildup of both Smitty and his Boss to have a fun day at the baseball game, cheering for their favourite team.  After all that cheerful anticipation, there's a surprise at the end that they aren't sable t do any cheering because they are afraid that the giant bully-type fan of the out-of town team would not like their cheering for the home team, and might get physical about it, IF they would dare to do so.  Again, not terribly funny, but brings a faint smile.

[The Australian Panther]

Smitty 2
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=25472

The cover wouldn't attract me to buy the comic. You have to buy it and read it to understand the point.
I like the art.
The problem with comics made up of newspaper strips is that the collections often begin in the middle of a narrative, so you have to spend time working out what is going ond unfortunately, you have to care.
This will only happen if you know and understand the characters.
This does not happen here.
The 'little moose' character is like something out of Lil Abner, but without the humour.
The problem is that this is not a story - it has no beginning and no end, which makes it a collection of anecdotes.
There seeem to be two SMITTYs. The cone in the one page gag is considerably younger.
Also, have we got the whole book?
Ends very abruptly on page #36 and that doesn't appear to be the end page.
Very disappointing.
Some of this strip is probably quite good.