[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.