Yesterday's Papers

Colonel Thomas Hoyer Monstery (1824-1901)

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Thename of Colonel Thomas Hoyer Monstery “Champion-At-Arms of the Two Americas,” appearedin ten (see list at bottom of post) mostly sword and cape dime novels publishedin Beadle’s Dime Library between 1879and 1882. There is the possibility that Monstery’s name was merelywindow-dressing, a celebrity ‘house-name’ that hid the identity of one or moreghost authors.

Themost likely ghost would be Captain Frederick Whittaker who had some obviousconnections to Monstery. Whittaker’s name appears as author to the sequel toMonstery’s novel California Joe’s FirstTrail (1884) and Whittaker authored TheSword Prince, the Romantic Life of Colonel Monstery in 1889. In additionWhittaker’s Ernest Darcourt, from TheYoung Folks Weekly Budget, Vol. 29, July 3 1886, published in London byJames Henderson, and Monstery’s Mouradthe Mameluke, from Beadle’s Dime NewYork Library, Oct 26 1881, share the same historical Mameluke background. Whittakerwrote The Russian spy: or, the Brothersof the Starry Cross in 1878 -- Monstery penned The Czar’s Spy; or, the Nihilist Leaguefor the same publisher in 1881.

The hero of Iron Wrist, the Swordmasterwas Danish Swordsman Olaf Swenson. He is eighteen in this story which takesplace in St. Petersburg. Swenson reappears in El Rubio Bravo, a bit older, hacking and thrusting his way throughHonduras, and in The Czar’s Spy he is56 years old and back in St. Petersburg. You might call this a trilogy. InWhittaker’s Romantic Life of Colonel Monsteryit is claimed that Monstery himself was “El Rubio Bravo” (the brave blonde.)

Inmost dime novel’s violence is depicted in a flat and unconvincing way, whilethe violence in Monstery is shocking and realistic. From Mourad, the Mameluke;

“Thebelated one drew his sword and aimed a blow at the Mameluke, who took it on hisleft arm with a clang that told he wore armour under his rich garments, andretaliated with a slash across the other’s face, made apparently with littleeffort. Lafangere, who had turned at the gate, uttered a cry of horror.

TheMameluke’s saber, with the sharp sickle edge, hadsliced off the Frenchman’s head at the mouth as if it had been a carrot.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs mentions Monstery in his swashbuckler The Mad King (1926) and one could speculate thatBurroughs took a lot from the sword and cape dime novels of Colonel Monstery(or Frederick Whittaker) from the beginning of his career, starting with Under the Moons of Mars, serialized in All-Story in 1912. By merging theswashbuckler with the scientific romance he came up with something entirelyoriginal. All Burroughs greatest heroes used blades: John Carter, CarsonNapier, and Tarzan. Burroughs was born 1Sept 1875 which made him the right age (and right place: Chicago, whereMonstery was a huge celebrity) to have been reading the Monstery sword and capedime novels.

Probably a lot of Whittaker’s “Romantic Life” is exaggerated but there is some truth to his tales. Both his obituary in the Chicago Tribune, Col. Monstery is Dead, 2 Jan 1902 and A Famous Swordsman, Romantic Career of a visitor to the City of Mexico[From the Mexican Herald] Washington Times, 29 Jan 1901, tell someof the same story as appears on the Wikipedia entry on Monstery.

According to the newspaper accounts (which mayalso be exaggerated) Colonel Thomas Hoyer Monstery, “soldier of fortune, expertswordsman, and hero of hundreds of skirmishes and battlefields” was born inBaltimore, Maryland on 21 April 1824. In his early days his name was TomMunster. Newspaper accounts say he was of Danish and Irish parentage. HisWikipedia entry claims otherwise -- both parents are Danish -- his mother wasthe daughter of the cousin of the assassin of King Gustav III of Sweden.

At twelve his parents took him to Copenhagenwhere he was enrolled in the Royal Academy. A series of duels brought him tothe attention of the authorities and he fled to Russia where he was a fencinginstructor in the Czar’s household. More dueling troubles followed and he fledagain, back to America and San Francisco. He fought with the Walker expeditionin Nicaragua and in the Cuban insurrection of 1851. He then went to Spain,Honduras, and service in the Mexican Army under Juarez.

The WashingtonTimes wrote:

He bears the honorof being the champion swordsman of the continent, and wears a medal awarded bythe Mexican government on the first of March 1858, for having defeated thefamous French captain Poupard, who was at that time instructor in fencing andfoiling in the army of Mexico. On the same day he won laurels by defeating allthe champions of the army with sabres, knives, knives against sabres andbayonets, that at the time were shining lights in the handling of the aboveweapons.

Captain Monsteryentertained General Diaz at the Palmer House some sixteen years ago in Chicago,the only visit paid by the President of this Republic to the United States…

In 1871 Monstery opened a fencing school in NewYork and a few years later moved operations to Chicago. He trained Junius BrutusBooth, the actor, (at Frank Wheeler’s San Francisco Gymnasium), Edwin Booth(for a staged “Hamlet”), and the actress and swordswoman Jaguarina.

Jaguarina was Ella M. Hattan, born in 1864, achild actress and comedienne in John A. Ellsler’s Cleveland stock company. Shestarted fencing at a young age and afterward studied under Monstery. Herswashbuckling career was summed up by the SanFrancisco Call 13 Aug 1905:

Under hisinstruction she became the greatest fencer in America, especially with thebroadsword, both in foot or mounted contests. To-day she has the record offorty two broadsword contests with noted male fencers on foot and horseback,winning every contest.

In 1886 shechallenged Duncan Ross in San Francisco to meet her with broadswords onhorseback. Ross declined to accept her challenge and left the coast.Subsequently she defeated Sergeant Owen Davis of the Second Calvary, championof the United States army, in Mechanic’s Pavilion, San Francisco, in a mountedcontest, by a score of eleven pints to seven. Davis knocked her off her horsein the second attack, but, undaunted, she remounted and defeated him.Subsequently she defeated Captain E. C. Jennings, master-at-arms of the OlympicAthletic Club of San Francisco, in a mounted contest by a score of eleven toten points. Both Davis and Jennings had previously defeated Ross, which showsshe was not presumptuous in her belief that she could defeat the giant Scotchathlete.

Notwithstanding herhard training in athletics, Jaguarina is a splendidly preserved woman ofstriking beauty.

Monstery died impoverished at the PresbyterianHospital in Chicago on 31 Dec 1901. He was “practically without resources, butin Alexander B. Scully, President of the Scully Iron and Steel Company, andThomas Moran, the liquor dealer, he found stanch and helpful friends.”

Colonel Thomas Hoyer MonsteryDime Novels:

Iron Wrist, the Sword-master; a Tale of Courtand Camp,New York: Beadle & Adams, Dime Library No.82, 3 Dec 1879. Originally published under title: Iron Wrist, the Swordmaster of Copenhagen in either the Saturday Journal or Banner Weekly Beadle storypapers. Reprinted 1897 in Dime Library No. 986.

The Demon Duelist; or, the League of Steel, aStory of German Student Life, Dime Library No. 126, 23 Mar 1881.

The Czar’s Spy; or, the Nihilist League, a sequel to “Iron Wrist theSwordmastter, Dime Library No. 143, 20 July 1881

El Rubio Bravo, King of theSwordsmen; or, the Terrible Brothers of Tabasco, a Story of Tropical Love and Adventure, DimeLibrary No. 150, 7 Sep 1881.

Mourad, the Mameluke: or, the Three Swordmasters,a Tale of the Grand Army Dime Library No. 157 26 Oct 1881

Corporal Cannon, the Man of Forty Duels, a TrueStory of the African Chasseurs, Dime Library No. 169, 18 Jan 1882

Champion Sam; or, The Monarchs of the Show, aRomance of the Circus and Prize-rings, Dime Library No. 236, 2 May 1883.

FightingTom, the Terror of the Toughs, a story of a very deceiving young man, DimeLibrary No. 262, 31 Oct 1883.

CaliforniaJoe’s First Trail, a story of the destroying angels,Half-Dime Library No. 376, 7 Oct 1884.

Spring-HeelJack; or, the Masked Mystery of the Tower, Dime Library No. 332,4 Mar 1885.

***

CaptainFrederick Whittaker titles in The YoungFolks’ Weekly Budget, London: James Henderson:

Covinda, the Tiger Tamer, by Captain Fred Whittaker, Volume 13, No.396, 6 July 1878

WhiteRudolf and Red Ensign, Volume 18, 8 Jan1881.

PhilD’Arcy, Volume 19, 2 July 1881

Round the World, Volume 20, 7 Jan 1882

JoeManley’s Rise in Life, Volume 24, 5 Jan 1884

Gentle Deeds; or, from Serfdom to Knighthood, Vol. 28, No. 783, 2 Jan 1886

Ernest Darcourt, Vol. 29, 3 July 1886

The Maid of Domrency, Vol. 32, No. 873, 7 Jan 1888

*Thanksto Welton Jones for the ChicagoTribune Obituary

Phonograph Funnies

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Punch 26 July 1889
Punch 6 April 1878
Judy 15 may 1878
Funny Folks 8 April 1882
Moonshine 6 Oct 1888
Funny Folks 24 Nov 1888
Punch 8 Dec 1888

Captain Frederick Whittaker Part II

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See Part I HERE

Captain Frederick Whittaker

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CAPTAINFREDERICK WHITTAKER, “PRINCE OF NOVELISTS”

ByE.M. Sanchez-Saavedra

WHITTAKER, thou rare raconteur, WhenI take my summer saunter  To the mountains,  Lo! I hunger not, andnever  Amathirst, for thou are ever  Living fountains!

(A.W. Crowell, 1895)

Oneof the more complex popular novelists of the mid-Nineteenth Century wasFrederick Whittaker (1838-1889), cavalryman, biographer, spiritualist and laborcrusader.

Albert Johannsen recorded the followingbiographical sketch in The House of Beadle and Adams (University ofOklahoma Press, 1950):

Frederick Whittaker, son of Henry Whittaker andhis wife Catharine Maitland, was born in London December 12, 1838. His fatherwas a solicitor, but, having endorsed some papers for a noble client who defaulted,he was obliged to flee to the Continent to escape being imprisoned for debt. Helived with his family for several years in various towns and in 1850 came toNew York City, where he obtained a position as managing clerk in a law office.Frederick's education was limited to six months in a private school inBrooklyn, conducted by a Mr. Walker. His father wished him to become a lawyer,and at the age of sixteen he was entered in the law office of N. DaneEllingwood, as office boy. He was, however, not interested in law and severalyears later he was working in the office of Henry G. Harrison, an architect,but a defect in his eyesight compelled him to relinquish this work. Just beforethe breaking out of the Civil War he had had an article published in TheGreat Republic Monthly, and hoped to become a writer. When war broke out,he enlisted November 11, 1861, at Camp Scott, Staten Island, as a private inCompany L, 6th New York Cavalry. He was transferred to Company D in the sameregiment February 16, 1863, and was honorably discharged December 15, 1863, asa corporal, to enable him to enlist as a veteran volunteer. He re-entered thesame organization December 16, 1863. In the Battle of the Wilderness, in May,1864, he was shot through the left lung and was promoted to 2nd Lieutenant onFebruary 12, 1865, in Company A. He was mustered out and honorably dischargedAugust 9, 1865, as 2nd Lieutenant, Company A, New York Provisional Cavalry.Nothing has been found of record to show that he ever received the brevet rankof Captain, but there is a letter in the "files of the National Archives,”from James D. McClelland, a member of the New York State Senate, dated October10, 1911, in which he stated that Frederick Whittaker "was made BrevetCaptain after the War for bravery in action."

(The Sixth New York Cavalry was engaged in over150 actions during the Civil War, from small skirmishes and picket duty to someof the bloodiest major engagements, including the Seven Days’ battles,Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Brandy Station, the Wilderness campaign,the Petersburg siege and the final battles around Appomattox.)

After the war he worked as a book agent for awhile, and then taught school. When Mayne Reid established his magazine Onwardin 1869, Whittaker wrote for it, the first item published being a little songentitled "Starlighted Midnight." This was followed by several otherpoems and a sketch, "Shot by a Sweetheart," but when Reid's magazineended in February, 1870, Whittaker began to write for Frank Leslie. Afterinheriting some money from English relatives, he married and bought a house inMount Vernon, New York, where he lived the remainder of his life. He nowsettled down to steady literary work and wrote for various journals. In the Armyand Navy Journal for January 21 and June 3, 1871, he had a series ofarticles: "Volunteer Cavalry, the Lessons of the Decade, by a VolunteerCavalryman," in which he gave personal experiences during the war. He alsowrote for the Galaxy, the Fireside Companion and for Beadle's YoungNew Yorker, Saturday Journal, and Banner Weekly, and turned out agreat many dime and nickel novels, mostly stirring stories of adventure of theswashbuckling type. They were well written, without padding, and were about thebest of the kind.

In 1874 he was made National Guard editor andlater assistant editor of the Army and Navy Journal. He resigned for theyear 1876 to write his "Complete Life of General George A. Custer,"but in 1877 he was back with the Journal and remained connected with ituntil his death.

About two years before he died he becameinterested in spiritualism and was an enthusiastic worker in the cause. He wasalmost insane on the subject and "of late had frequently commanded thatevery member of his family should think as he did. His argument was that thereshould be harmony between his wife and children and himself in order to haveclose communication with the spirits." He was always of an excitabledisposition, irascible, and at times became extremely violent. He wasinterested in the International language Volapuk, and shortly before his deathhad asked those interested to meet at his home.

(Volapuk, one of dozens of attempts at a“universal” language, was created by Johann Martin Schleyer (1831-1912), a RomanCatholic priest from Baden, during 1879 and 1880. Schleyer believed that Godhad instructed him in a dream to usher in a new era of peace. A secondaryuniversal language could help to overcome intercultural misunderstandings andend human strife. Although Volapuk was eclipsed by the simpler Esperanto around1890, there are still quite a few diehard Volapuk adherents.) Captain Whittakerwas a follower of several “New Age” ideas and fads, long before they formed apart of mainstream American consciousness. “Spiritualism,” first popularized bythe table-rapping Fox sisters in the 1850s, attracted many intellectuals and afair sprinkling of celebrities, including Mary Todd Lincoln and Sir ArthurConan Doyle, to “mediums” and seances. Although his prodigious literary outputbrought in a comfortable income, he seems to have run into debt.

His untimely death was described by Johannsen:

Onthe thirteenth of May 1889, returning home from the office of the MountVernon Record, for which he wrote, he met his wife at the door, said a fewpleasant words to her, then ran up stairs. He always carried a revolver in hispocket and, apparently taking it out to put it away as was his custom onreturning home, when he reached the head of the stairs his cane seems to have caughtin the banisters, tripped him, and he fell, breaking the rail. His pistolexploded and he was shot in the head, dying in half an hour without regainingconsciousness. His wife, three daughters, and a stepson survived him.

Heand his wife are buried in St. Paul’s Church Cemetery, Mt. Vernon, WestchesterCounty, New York.

Custer’swidow Libbie (Elizabeth Bacon Custer, 1842-1933) encouraged Whittaker’s CompleteLife of General George A. Custer and probably supplied him with privatedocuments. It appeared a scant six months after the cavalry commander’s death.The biography amounts to a heroic whitewashing of Custer’s glaring faults as aleader and strategist and placed a large share of the blame for the Little BigHorn catastrophe on the shoulders of Major Marcus A. Reno and Captain FrederickBenteen. Whittaker’s status as a veteran cavalry officer and author of arespected study of volunteer cavalry doctrine lent considerable weight to hisopinions. In January 1879, Reno requested a full inquiry before a militarytribunal. During the inquiry in Chicago, Whitttaker’s book became a pivotalpiece of evidence used by both sides. After 26 days of testimony, the tribunalfailed to prove Whittaker’s allegations and cleared Reno. The embitteredWhittaker became a strident critic of the military establishment. (Undaunted,Libbie Custer wrote her own books to keep the Custer legend alive: Boots andSaddles, 1885; Following the Guidon, 1890; and Tenting on thePlains, 1893. She also encouraged Buffalo Bill Cody's reenactments ofLittle Big Horn in his Wild West extravaganzas.)

Duringhis long association with the publishing house of Beadle and Adams, Whittakerturned out an astonishing quantity of exciting fiction on a wide variety ofsubject matter. After the great “strike year” of 1877, and the rise of Americanlabor unions, Whittaker became a champion of the downtrodden workingman in suchnovels as Nemo, King of the Tramps, John Armstrong, Mechanic,Norman Case, Printer and Larry Locke, The Man of Iron. Although not afrontier character like other Beadle authors, his western stories have a ringof authenticity, particularly his trilogy about the range wars in Texas: OldCross-Eye, Top-Notch Tom and The Marshal of Satanstown. Otherstories were set in the South American pampas, the Balkans, the South Seas andother exotic locales.

Whittakerwas associated with Thomas Hoyer Monstery (1821-1901): the self-styled“Champion-at-Arms of the Two Americas,” and may have written some of the Beadlenovels credited to him. The sequel to a novel about the scout "CaliforniaJoe" Milner signed by Monstery carried Whittaker's by-line. The writingstyles of the two stories is similar. He wrote a fictionalized biography ofMonstery in 1882 for Beadle’s Boy’s Library of Sport, Story and Adventure.

In1884, he penned a brief defense of dime novels “by a writer of them” for theNew York Daily Tribune.

CAPTAIN FREDERICK WHITTAKER, “PRINCE OF NOVELISTS” Part II HERE

American Comic Weeklies

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Daily Graphic 4 Sept 1873, Daily Graphic 5 Aug 1873, Daily Graphic Triple Sheet 28 Jun 1873, Frank Leslie's Budget of Fun Jan 1875, The Free Lance 12 Jun 1875, Illustrated Weekly 18 Mar 1876 cover and large comic sheet, Comic Weekly 3 July 1886, Tousey's Comic Monthly Jun 1882, Under the Gaslight 21 Dec 1878, Wild Fire 1 Feb 1878, Wild Fire cover, Wild Oats, 29 Feb 1872, Wild Oats 10 Oct 1872, Bricktop 'comic books', 1848 Crockett Almanac, and Comic Almanac 1892. All images courtesy Joe Rainone.

Days with Celebrities 1888-1890

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Comic Illustrations by Alfred Bryan (and others)

for Moonshine.

Tom Browne Plate

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The Boy’s Own Paper (price One Penny) began Saturday, 18 Jan1879. The publisher was the Religious Tract Society. BOP found an Americanpublisher, A. D. F. Randolph and Company beginning in 1879. Hundred pagemonthly parts were sold to Americans for a quarter. The 1905 volume colour plate of GuyFawkes Day by Tom Browne (courtesy E. M. Sanchez-Saavedra) was printed byBrowne’s own colour printing company.

Tom Browne and his Pictures

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Tom Browne and his Pictures

From The Captain,Volume I, April-September, 1899

Thomas Worth, Forgotten Comic Artist

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THOMAS WORTH, FORGOTTENCOMIC ARTIST

By E.M. Sanchez-Saavedra

One of America’s mostprolific nineteenth-century comic illustrators, whose drawings once adorned thewalls of homes, apartments, saloons and the covers of magazines and dimenovels, is nearly forgotten today. The career of Thomas Worth (1834-1917)spanned the period from the elaborate hand-pulled lithographs of Currier andIves to the mass-produced magazines of the twentieth century. Despite his longlife, very little biographical information has survived beyond the huge corpusof his illustrations.

According to Harry T.Peters in Currier and Ives -- Printmakers to the American People (NewYork: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1942), Thomas Worth was born in GreenwichVillage, NYC and began to draw when he was a child. When he was in his late‘teens, he submitted a sketch to the lithographers Currier and Ives. NathanielCurrier looked at the humorous scene of two boys driving an ash wagon and said,“This is a clever thing. We’ll give you five dollars for it just as it is.”Although never a regular staff member, Currier and Ives considered him one oftheir major contributors. Over the years hundreds of his drawings were redrawnon stone and published as individual lithographs and sets. An avid sportsmanand fisherman, Worth produced many prints of trotting horses and outdoorscenes. He is best known for several long series of comics: “RailwayIncidents,” the “Howling Swell” series and seventy-five “Darktown” prints.These last represent what Stephen J. Gertz has termed “the dark side of Currierand Ives” (pun obviously intended).

Unlike the often-saccharinemush and wallowing nostalgic subjects now associated with the lithographers,the Darktown prints were a celebration of the worst racial stereotypes currentin the nineteenth century. They were also among the firm’s largest sellers –one print sold 73,000 copies! Worth’s drawings were augmented by those of JamesCameron (1829-1862) a young Scottish immigrant.

Although most Americansafter about 1860 got their dose of “the funnies” from comic magazines,newspapers and almanacs, Currier and Ives’ huge output of political and social“comics” drew upon a much older tradition of elaborate satirical cartoons andcaricatures, dating back to the late seventeenth century. Prints by thebrilliant English artists William Hogarth, James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson,the Cruikshank brothers and others represent the finest works of this class –meticulously hand colored large copperplate prints. The technique oflithography, involving drawing on flat stone blocks with crayons, rather thanhand-incising millions of minute lines into a copper plate or woodblock,reduced the expense and time required to turn an artist’s drawing into afinished print. Currier and Ives employed the process to mass-produceaffordable art for anyone who wanted to brighten up a drab room. The ephemeralpolitical cartoons were meant to be purchased, examined, discussed -- andultimately discarded.

Thomas Worth bridged thetwo traditions and contributed to a wide variety of venues. Shortly afterselling his first drawing to Mr. Currier, he took a bundle of sketches toHarper and Brothers. Charles Parsons, head of Harper’s art department, likedwhat he saw and Worth’s work would appear in the firm’s many publications fordecades. The iconic masthead of Harper’s Weekly A Journal of Civilizationis signed with the monogram “TW,” and might possibly be a Worth design.

In the 1880s and ‘90s,Thomas Worth’s signed drawings began to appear in the Frank Tousey story papersand later nickel weeklies. Older designs made the transition fromblack-and-white formats to the new colored covers after 1898, when Tousey“modernized” the appearance of his weeklies. Many engravings in Tousey paperswere anonymous, but Worth’s stature was a definite asset and his full signatureor initials appear on his illustrations.

According to Harry Peters,who knew Worth personally, “He liked good company and had an impressivecapacity for liquor.” He and his wife Louise S. Worth are buried in East Islip,New York.

Vampires of Paris

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You might think that vampire characters would have been numerous in penny dreadfuls of the nineteenth century but there are only four titles known to scholars. The most famous title would be James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood a romance [109 pts, 1845-47] illustrated by Bourne/Pickering, London: E.Lloyd, 1847.

The next title is problematic: The Vampire Demon; or, the Martyred Virgins, [60 pts with coloured plates] London: Newsagents’ Publishing Company, c.1849. This title is untraced but is listed in Montague Summers Gothic Bibliography, where he calls it ‘in some sort a sequel to Varney.’ Summers personal knowledge of penny bloods seems to have been negligible. One source he used in the Gothic Bibliography was probablyMichael Sadleir (mentioned in the Preface) and much was probably drawn from private pd collectors like Waite and Ono. TheVampire Demon might have been one of the spurious titles invented by the Australian practical joker and bookseller J. P. Quaine. Other titles manufactured by Quaine such as The Skeleton Clutch; or,the Goblet of Gore appear in the Bibliography. No such title exists in any institution or private collection.

The third title is Dashing Duval; or, The Ladies’ Highwayman a StirringTale of The Olden Time, illustrated by “R. P.”, London: “Best for Boys” Publishing Co., 1888. Claude Duval is the hero, his companions are Paul Clifford and Captain Blood, and the villain is Van Vaughan the Vampyre. “Best forBoys” was publisher of E. Harcourt Burrage ‘formulated and produced’ Ching-Ching’s Own series begun on 14 Jun1888.

Another problematic title is The Skeleton Count; or, theVampire Mistress, purportedly written by Elizabeth Caroline Grey for The Casket in 1825. The story is available in The Vampire Omnibus [1995] by Peter Haining but has yet to be found in the original by any other researcher. Haining, a prolific anthologist, has a dodgy reputation as a fabricator. He may have written this account himself.

A new find was Heroes Three; or, the Vampires of Paris, [31 Mar 1899] from Boys of England and Jack Harkaway's Journal of Fun, Travel and Instruction, Vol. LXVI, No. 1689. This certainly looked like a vampire on the cover of the first installment but it wasn’t. The Vampires of Paris were a group of cracksmen and jewel thieves under the influence of a Moriarty-like figure named Monsieur, but the creature with a “parrot-like beak” and tentacles was not a vampire, but a hissing monster known as “Black Death,” that guarded the lair of the ‘Vampires.’

Jack Vandelour was the name of the English boy hero. Monsieur had a daughter, Lucille. Lucille was not a vampire either but she did have odd fanged teeth and decidedly strange desires.

“This worry and anxiety about the handsome lad is bringing on one of my old frenzies,” she almost gasped. “I feel inclined to hiss and bite. A greenish tinge is slowly but surely overspreading my face, and I can see minute scales forcing their way through the skin, transforming me into a veritable serpent! Even my hair is becoming agitated. What a heritage my mother the serpent woman has bequeathed me! As beautiful as an angel, but shunned for her terrible affliction, my father married her for her wealth.

“The curse that marred her life has fallen upon me, and now, to add to my terrible burden of woe, my father, after losing nearly all his money, has taken to evil ways, and is dragging me down to deeper depths of infamy with him!”

Suddenly a faint hiss escaped her lips, when, rushing to a couch, she buried her face in a cushion, gnawing and biting at it furiously, and raising her head at intervals to hiss loudly.

When she attacks the boy Jacques (one of the Vampires of Paris who is madly in love with her) Monsieur chokes her with a leather belt and “throwing her over his shoulder, he bore her screaming and hissing, to a padded room, and left her there a prisoner.”

Heroes Three; or, the Vampires of Paris is a wonderful serial but unfortunately (considering the promise given in the cover illustration) the only ‘vampires’ in the story are the safecrackers and thieves that make up the“Brotherhood of the Vampires of Paris.” As far as I know the story was never issued in penny parts, a pity since it was well-written for a penny dreadful, full of enjoyable suspense, skullduggery and absurdity, and probably would have had excellent sales on the cover illustration alone.

Summing up: there are only two verifiable penny dreadful serials of the Victorian era featuring vampires out of the five titles; Varney the Vampire and Dashing Duval.

U.S. and C.S. Periodicals Part II

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U.S. AND C.S. PERIODICALS – HISTORY’S ROUGH DRAFT, By E.M. Sanchez-Saavedra. Part I HERE

U.S. and C. S. Periodicals

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U.S. AND C.S. PERIODICALS – HISTORY’S ROUGH DRAFT

By E.M. Sanchez-Saavedra

Until the mid-Nineteenth century, most newspapers in theEnglish-speaking world were a hodgepodge of advertisements, space-fillers,editorial rants, poetry and occasional timely news items. Overseas dispatchesappeared weeks and months after the event, due to the long transoceanic voyagesrequired by sailing ships. Poor roads and unpredictable weather conditions madeoverland communications equally slow.

Thanks to the telegraph, the steam railroad, the clippership, the steamboat and advances in road and canal building, news reportingtook off in the 1840s and soon began to approach a modern level of globaljournalism. Steam-powered rotary printing presses and mass-produced paperreduced production costs and enabled many big city papers to convert fromweeklies to dailies. Successful experiments with Transatlantic telegraph cablesin 1858 and 1866 held the promise of (almost) instantaneous communication betweenEurope and the Americas.

Although the old weekly papers occasionally featured awoodcut cartoon or map to illustrate an editorial or news item, the averagepaper was a monolithic mass of unrelieved dense type in four to six columns.Tiny icons of ships, horses, houses and runaway slaves distinguished classes ofadvertisements. A wealthier advertiser might spring for a custom cut to attractthe reader’s eye, but otherwise all papers looked about the same. Only themasthead enabled a purchaser to tell one from the others.

When in 1842 the IllustratedLondon News burst onto the scene, it turned journalism on its ear forever.Despite critics who bemoaned the demise of literacy, the ILN soon became a widely imitated institution that is still goingstrong as a slick magazine. Taking advantage of rapid transport andcommunication, the new paper was soon sending correspondents and artists aroundthe globe to report on wars, natural disasters, scenic locations andhuman-interest stories. Dozens of artists roamed the U.K. to record marvels ofarchitecture, royal pageantry and rural landscapes. Augmenting the sketchartists were pioneer photographers, including Roger Fenton, who lugged hisbulky equipment through the battlefields of the Crimean War of 1854-1856 in acustom wagon.

In the U.S., several eastern papers established telegraphlinks to New Orleans to receive dispatches from the Mexican War of 1846-1848.The New York Herald and the New York Tribune began to include woodcutsregularly with their war news. The tabloid New York Sun began to issue illustrated supplements during the war thatdemonstrated an eager audience for pictorial newspapers. In 1853, showmanPhineas Taylor Barnum and two of the sons of Moses Beach, proprietor of the Sun, founded a short-lived papermodeled on the ILN, called the NewYork Illustrated News. Its chiefartist was a young English immigrant named Henry Carter, a veteran of the ILN, who went by the alias of “FrankLeslie.” Barnum’s chief competitor was Boston’s Frederick Gleason who hadestablished Gleason’s PictorialDrawing-Room Companion in 1851. This contained some current events, but wasprimarily a family miscellany of serial fiction, space-fillers and prettypictures. When Barnum’s paper failed after a year, Gleason bought it, beganreusing the woodblock illustrations and adding more news items to his Bostonpaper.

Frank Leslie soon founded his own magazine, a journal offashion for women. In 1855 he started FrankLeslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. This journal combined the format of thehighly respectable ILN with Leslie’s flair for the sensational. His artists andreporters became the forerunners of today’s paparazzi,“investigative journalists” and “muckrakers.” With a corrupt city governmentlike New York’s Tammany Hall, Leslie’s staff was spoiled for choice when itcame to uncovering scandals. Leslie exposed the nauseating details of theadulterated “swill” milk industry in words and pictures and forced legislativeaction to protect public health.

Leslie’s success inspired the established publishing firm ofHarper and Brothers to follow suit. Since 1850, Harpers had published Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, adigest-sized miscellany of fiction, travel articles, history and essays, with agenerous sprinkling of high-quality wood engravings. In 1857 they launched Harper’s Weekly as a more genteelalternative to Leslie’s. At first thenew paper had only a few woodcuts, but within a year, its pictorial layoutrivaled that of the competition. In 1859, the New-York Illustrated News, (later Demorest’s) became the third major pictorial weekly on the eve ofcivil war.

Increasing sectional tensions between the industrialnorthern states and the agricultural southern states marked the years1859-1860. The causes were a complex brew of economic, political, philosophicand personal stresses, underpinned by the divisive issue of human slavery. Ascompromise failed and hotheaded radicals gained ascendancy, the new illustratedweeklies and their daily counterparts split along party lines and became evermore strident. John Brown’s botched antislavery raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859polarized the adversaries further, with Brown portrayed as either a saint or aterrorist. Even a cursory browse of antebellum southern papers will shock themodern reader by the sheer volume of advertisements of slave auctions,runaways, and harsh statutes printed in the most matter-of-fact way.

Nineteenth century newspapermen rejected the notion of“impartial journalism” and made no pretense at camouflaging their partisanviews. Many local papers proclaimedtheir affiliations on their mastheads: “the YorkRepublican,” the “Richmond Whig,”William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist “TheLiberator,” and a host of “WeeklyDemocrats” and similar titles.

The crucial election year of 1860 provided abonanza for editors as the relatively new Republican party overcame internalconflicts and nominated Abraham Lincoln to oppose a hopelessly split Democraticticket and an incompetent incumbent. Lincoln’s nomination crystallized a strongsecessionist movement in the slaveholding states and his election in Novemberwas the final spark in the national powder keg. South Carolina formally leftthe Union in December, closely followed by ten other states. They formed “TheConfederate States of America” complete with a constitution, a government and acapital in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1861 the new breakaway states transferredtheir capital to Richmond, Virginia.

Throughout the Spring of 1861 a prolonged crisis rivetedAmericans' attention. Although efforts at resupply had been thwarted, anisolated Federal garrison in Charleston harbor refused to surrender Fort Sumterto the “Rebels.” After negotiations failed in April, Confederate forces poundedthe ill-equipped fort to rubble within a day and the tiny garrison surrendered.The United States’ most traumatic war until Vietnam began with this bloodlessand lopsided Confederate victory. Four years later, over half a millionsoldiers would lay dead, another million would be maimed, cities would be reducedto charred wastelands and the entire South would be ruined economically fordecades.

From the outset, the mass media sensed that the Civil Warwas a golden opportunity. Photographer Mathew B. Brady, a society cameraman andentrepreneur, assembled a photographic corps and sent them to all theaters ofwar during the next four years. The New York illustrated weeklies dispatchedartists and correspondents to follow the Union armies, while the London paperscovered the “Southrons.” (Because of England’s dependence on cotton, close tiesexisted with the cotton-producing states.)

All reading matter was welcomed eagerly to providerecreation in the crowded army camps. Northern and southern papers were tradedacross the lines during informal truces between opposing pickets, so enemy newsremained available throughout much of the war. English periodicals crossed theAtlantic in the holds of northern merchant ships and southern blockade-runners.In 1863 Harper’s Weekly was able topublish a recent image of Rebel general Robert E. Lee by pirating it from the ILN. Much of what is now considered“classified” information found its way into the daily press, including plannedtroop movements. Incensed by this, Federal General William T. Shermanconsidered all newspaper reporters as so many traitors and often refused togive interviews.

Despite a shortage of skilled printers, engravers andmechanics, paper, ink and presses, several national magazines and a fair numberof books were produced within the Confederacy, in addition to dozens of localdaily and weekly newspapers. The “IllustratedSouthern News” attempted to rival Harper’sand Leslie’s, but a lack of peopleand materiel doomed it to a second-rate status and a short lifespan. The old Southern Literary Messenger, once editedby Edgar Allan Poe, soldiered on until the Confederacy fell in 1865. There wasa Magnolia Weekly, whose format apedBoston’s Waverly Magazine, and thepre-war De Bow’s Review, plus severalagricultural and religious magazines, but these too were hampered by shortages.By war’s end, many of the surviving papers were printed on recycled wallpaperand butcher’s wrapping paper with homemade ink.

If newspapers are “the rough draft of history,” Civil Warpapers fulfilled that role admirably. They provide the same sense of immediacyand humanity as viewing stereoscopic images of the period. With the benefit ofhindsight we can chuckle ruefully over some fire-eating editorial claiming that“one Southern boy can whip a dozen Yankee mudsills,” or that “it will all beover by Christmas.” Because many news items were contributed by volunteercorrespondents from all walks of life, it is possible to get a sense of theattitudes and aspirations, as well as the concerns and fears of ordinarycitizens caught up in that great drama. Laid out before us is a panorama offact, opinion and outright lies, embellished with advertisements for quackremedies, worthless bullet-proof vests, collectible carte-de-visite photos of celebrities, patriotic nick-nacks,crackpot gadgets, lottery schemes, Paris fashions, new books and thousands ofother products. Here also are the bathetic poems that made people weep and thecorny gags and cartoons that made them laugh.

Editorial cartoons and “the funnies” seem so much a part ofmodern daily papers that it is difficult to imagine a time when they were notfeatured. There was no lack of cartoons and humorous sketches during the CivilWar, however -- they tended to appear in separate comic publications apart fromthe daily press. Northern readers could purchase Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun, Street and Smith’s Phunny Phellow, Punch, or the LondonCharivari, Vanity Fair and adozen comic almanacs and joke books. In the C.S.A. a Southern Punch flourished briefly in 1863-1865 and the Illustrated Southern News ran cartoonsfairly often. Printmakers like Currier and Ives issued hundreds of comiclithographs during the war years as separate sheets, suitable for framing.Weekly illustrated papers generally featured a “humors of the day” column andtwo or more editorial cartoons on the last page, above the advertisements. Thelarge-format story papers of the 1850s remained popular throughout the waryears as well and military hospitals provided them for convalescing servicemen.

In addition to the regular daily and weekly papers publishedin cities and towns, the Civil War produced several news sheets printed andedited by and for the armies in the field, particularly by garrison troops inoccupied territory. (This would become a tradition in the two world wars of thefollowing century, embodied in The Starsand Stripes.) Many Union soldiers had been printers in civilian life andturned their talents to publishing on captured Confederate equipment in NewOrleans, Georgia and the Carolinas, or else on the portable job presses whichnormally produced orders, forms and military documents. Their papers ran thegamut from crude to professional, complete with mastheads and advertisements.Two principal papers were The Free Southand The Palmetto Herald.

Reading contemporary wartime newspapers has never beeneasier. As part of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, many Federal, stateand local agencies have begun digitizing files of these ephemeral treasures andmaking them available online. An excellent anthology of pieces from Union andConfederate papers is Fighting Words, anIllustrated History of Newspaper Accounts of the Civil War by Andrew S.Coopersmith (New York: The New Press, 2004). Many key political cartoons havebeen reproduced in Gary L. Bunker’s FromRail-Splitter to Icon: Lincoln’s Image in Illustrated Periodicals, 1860-1865(The Kent State University Press, 2001). Although now ascribed a position justbelow sainthood by many latter-day Americans, Lincoln was one of the mostlampooned and vilified people on the globe during his presidency, thanks to thenineteenth-century revolution in mass publishing.

Continue to Part II HERE

Cham 1840s Sketch Book

2012-01-15T17:31:00.000-08:00

The whole of Angoulême comic strip buildings (see HERE) isnow called La Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image. Theirmuseum is now just called: le musée de la bande dessinée. The first decades itused to be called (and is still known by diehards) as the CNBDI or Centrenational de la bande dessinée et de l’image.

At Angouleme in January 2011 Paul Karasik made a photographof an exciting find. He wrote HERE:

The object that Jean-Pierre Mercier is most excited aboutthese days is a new acquisition, a small hand-made journal by one of the mostprolific of all French cartoonists; Cham (he completed over 18,000 pages in hislifetime). This booklet is the mythical travel journal of a mythical explorer.It is a beautiful object and it fits in the palm of one’s hand… I know.

Thierry Smolderen had more to say at 21.01.2011 on the Platinumlist:

Jean-Pierre Mercier from the CBDI gave us a shortillustrated presentation of a great acquisition recently made by the CIBDICentre de documentation : an original sketchbook by Cham containing an(unfinished) picture story and many other drawings (costumes for sometheatrical production etc). The unpublished story presents the adventures andtravels of a Mr Trouillard, It is dated 1846-47, and I wonder (this is pureconjecture) if Cham didn't mean it to be published in serial form after hisversion of Mr Cryptogamme's adventures was published in L'Illustration. Moreresearch needs to be done about it, obviously (it is a recent acquisition), butJean-Pierre gave us a taste of the historical research that completely convincedhim that this un-signed sketch book was really drawn by Cham's hand.

*And a rare lost DINO page HERE

A Cartoon Puzzler

2012-01-15T09:41:00.000-08:00

Here is a puzzle in need of solving. Ruta Snikeris hasemailed these images of an original (approx. 16 by 20) unsigned 19c. Indian ink cartoon foridentification. The image was purchased in the Boston area. I’m stumped -- don’trecognize the cartoonist, although the style is similar to that of Elmira NYcartoonists Zim and C. E. Toles (mutual influences on each other). Nor do Irecognize the historical circumstances behind the cartoon. The caption isprovocative -- “Children! There are no Flies on your Mother!! 1841 -- the WORLDIS MINE. -- 1891 AND you are “not in it.” The cartoon seems to have something todo with taxes and matrimony. The man with the tiny head (extreme left) is labeled “G. A. Crocker's boy”. The gambler (?) has collapsed with a copy of TheSun in hand -- a clue? And who is the Mother, who dominates the composition?

Remembering Dime Novels

2012-01-15T08:51:00.000-08:00

REMEMBERING DIME NOVELS

By Edward J. Smeltzer

Mr. Edward J. Smeltzer grew up at the turn of the twentieth century in Pennsylvania, and later became a pioneer dime novel collector. He and another enthusiast, Baltimorean Robert Burns, conducted a short-lived “fanzine” called the Novel-Mart during the late 1930s and early ‘40s. Under the by-line of “J.E. Fisher,” Smeltzer penned the following little essay in the May-June, 1941 issue. Its erratic spelling, folksy grammar and odd punctuation have been preserved:

About 1907 I read my first novel, it was a Tip Top, cost me a penny. Novels were scarce, so I bought Novels that had been read and exchanged. A fellow who’s father owned a saloon, or a fellow who’s father had the will power to pass a Saloon, with it’s inviting swinging doors, free lunch ect and could give his Son a nickel was an exception. My Dad was neither of the two, so I got my penny by running errands for Ma and charging an extra penny on some article purchased. A brand new TipTop sold for 5 cents, some boys read ‘em before they went home, sat on some handy door step and in two hours returned the New novel for either 3 cents cash or took 3 older Novels in exchange. The 3 older Novels after being read were exchanged for 1/2 cent each.

The new Novel was sold, exchanged & resold, finally the bookstore man socked it with a big rubberName stamp on the picture, inside on the first page of reading ect, if he felt playful he gave it a couple more stamps for good luck. Every boy in our neighborhood read Novels swapped and sold ‘em to each other, so I too got to be a Novel reader. No one gave a thought about saving them, they could be seen all over on display atNewstands Railroad Stations, Book Stores, candy Stores ect.

Cash registers were very rare in them days and when you forked over your Indian head for a book the storekeeper dropped it thru a hole in the counter, it fell into a wooden drawer underneath, you could tell by the sound when it dropped there wasn’t many others inside to keep it company.

One thing that excited my curiousity [sic] was when some young maiden came in the bookstore, whispered in the prop’s ear, blushed all over, seemed nervous, then quickly handing him the few greasy coppers, snatched, yes snatched the book and literally ran out with it. The proprietor told me she wanted a sexy love story, that the gals were nerts over ‘em and he sold ‘em like hot cakes.

Of course all the barber shops had the Police Gazette every week and a fellow who got his lunch hooks on one of ‘em did not mind whether he was next or not, as the pictures of the gals in tights did then what Murine does for the eyes today.

The photo depicts an open-air newsstand in New York City, Dec 1902, located under one of the midtown Manhattan platforms of the infamous "Third Avenue El." The elevated railroad was built in 1878, and torn down in 1955. Similar newsstands endured until the El's demolition. This photo shows the great variety of illustrated papers and apparent nickel weeklies available at the time. Over on the right is a Nick Carter Weekly, a Bowery Boy Weekly, a Secret Service Weekly and possibly a Liberty Boys of 76. The photo is copyright 1903, but was probably taken in December 1902, based on the magazine issues clearly visible. The same photo, large size, is HERE

Below are two stereos of the Third Avenue El, a thirties print by Australian artist Martin Lewis, a boy and his mother on the spot at 64^th St. NYC in 1951 with “El” in the background, and a scavenger’s horse cart photographed circa 1961.

The Preparatory School

2012-01-14T16:09:00.000-08:00

George Cruikshank strip above from The Comic Almanack For 1849, George Cruikshank, Second Series, 1844-1853. Folding plate. From a reprint by Chatto & Windus, 1912.

Jacob Green, Esq.

2012-01-14T15:45:00.000-08:00

"What Befel Jacob Green, Esq., on Christmas Eve; or, thePerils of Carving a Goose." Reynolds'sMiscellany, Vol. 34, No. 863, 24 December 1864. “Our Christmas Number”. Theserial was “The Golden Heart, a Domestic Story for Christmas” by Malcolm J.Errym. There was also a poem, “Old Dog Tray” by Wayward Willie. This cartoon,by an unknown artist, is spread over two pages.

A. C. Corbould II

2012-01-14T09:47:00.000-08:00

“Red Shirt and Broncho Bill invited in Hertfordshire”, A.C. Corbould, The Graphic, 11/12/1887. Right click and open in new window for large-size image. There were four Corbould's in the wood engraving business: Aster Chantrey, Edward Henry, Henry and Richard.

A.C. Corbould

2012-01-14T09:31:00.000-08:00

“A Midnight trip to Brighton”, A.C. Corbould, The Graphic 12/31/1887. Right click and open in new window for large-size image. There were four Corbould's in the wood engraving business: Aster Chantrey, Edward Henry, Henry and Richard.

Cuthbert Bede (1827-1889)

2012-01-13T13:53:00.000-08:00

One of the first ever attempts at a newspaper comic stripcontinuity was “The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, An Oxford Freshman,” byCuthbert Bede in the Illustrated London News. There were only two installments,one in December 1851, and one in January 1852. “The Adventures of VerdantGreen” was published in hardcover in 1853 by Nathaniel Cooke and can be readHERE. ‘Cuthbert Bede’ was the pseudonym of the Rev. Edward Bradley (1827-1889),who contributed articles and cartoons to the Illustrated London News. Christmassupplements were edited by Mark Lemon from Punch. Bradley/Bede contributed to the London Figaro,Bentley's, Sharpe's, Cruikshank's magazines, Punch, The Graphic, and The IllustratedLondon News.

Image: “The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, An Oxford Freshman Part I” courtesy Thierry Smolderen

Image: “The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, An Oxford FreshmanPart II” courtesy E. M. Sanchez-Saavedra

Portrait: Obituary, The Graphic, 28 Dec 1889 (Bradley died 12 Dec 1889)

See also The comic strips of The Graphic and The Illustrated London News HERE

W. Ralston

2012-01-13T08:47:00.000-08:00

“Tommy Atkins, first interview with an Octopus”, W. Ralston, The Graphic, 06/16/1894. Right click and open in new window for large-size image.

A.S. Boyd and Arthur M. Horwood

2012-01-12T08:34:00.000-08:00

“An Eastern Imbroglio”, A.S. Boyd and Arthur M. Horwood, The Graphic, Xmas supplement, 1896. Right click and open in new window for large-size image.

Reginald Cleaver

2012-01-12T08:32:00.000-08:00

“An Unfortunate Huntress”, Reginald Cleaver, The Graphic, Xmas supplement, 1899. Right click and open in new window for large-size image.

The comic strips of The Graphic and The Illustrated London News

2012-01-11T18:52:00.000-08:00

The comic strips of The Graphic and The Illustrated London News: an announcement by Thierry Smolderen, author of Naissances de la bande dessinée.

I've been holding this (more or less) secret for the last six months, but I guess now is the time to announce the big news: hundreds of comic strip stories of the highest artistic quality, published between the 1850s and the first World War, have been completely ignored by historians and scholars despite the fact that they were published in the leading illustrated British weeklies of the second half of the 19th century (1).

I know the claim sounds quite preposterous — indeed, I scarcely believed my own eyes when this material progressively came to light, after a serendipitous find in an antiquarian bookshop in Wales. I now have about 200 tear sheets in my possession.

I'll present the results of my research Saturday the 28th, at 14:00, in the auditorium of the CIBDI, in Angouleme, and in an extensive and fully illustrated article on “Neuvieme Art 2.0” at the end of this month.

Here's a little foretaste of what I've found:

The publication of comic strips started early in the Christmas supplements of the Illustrated London News (the first example I was able to find appears in the Christmas supplement of the Illustrated London News in December 1852).

Two major illustrators, Frederick Barnard (known for his illustrations of Dickens' works) and Harry Furniss (known for his illustration of Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno), started publishing magnificent large format pages in the Christmas supplements of the Illustrated London News in the late 1860s.

The ILN's big rival -- The Graphic -- started publishing great stories in colour in their own seasonal supplements from the 1870s on: Randolph Caldecott, William Ralston, J.C. Dollman, Reginald Cleaver, A.S. Boyd,H.M. Brock, Tom Browne, are amongst the best of the artists who published comic strip stories in colour in these supplements.

But that's only the least surprising part of the discovery, because during the 1870s, the two large periodicals also started publishing more and more regularly, in their standard issues, some extraordinary pieces of “comic strip journalism” that shed a completely new light on the role of the comic strip form in the emergence of modern visual mass media.

Their regular contributors (Harry Furniss, A.C. Corbould, Joseph Nash, William Ralston, Reginald Cleaver, George Durand, Robert Barnes, A.S. Boyd, Mabel Ince, and many others) combined the light humoristic tone and the flexible graphic imagination of the comic strip artist with the reportorial skill of the visual journalist, to produce sophisticated news stories (in true comic strip format) about sporting, military, or other special events that they personally witnessed (snowstorms, balloon races, naval manoeuvres, exhibitions etc.). Dozens and dozens of news stories of the kind appeared in the pages of the two weeklies.

But the reportorial output of the Graphic took a whole new dimension when the periodical started accepting, from all corners of the British Empire, sketches describing “interesting incidents” (as the editors put it), sent by readers and special correspondents. From the sketches and short description sent by the readers, the artists of the Graphic produced mind boggling comic strips, in one or two pages, reporting (always with a smile) all kind of traveling incidents, some at home (excursions, hunt, etc.) but most of them reflecting the civilian and military life in foreign countries, expeditions in Africa, pleasure cruises on the Mediterranean, transcontinental passages on military ships etc.

Sometimes surprisingly realistic but most often comedic -- and always inventive and surprising -- these forgotten comic strips are bound to change our view on the historical evolution and artistic range of the comic strip form.

(1) The Illustrated London News and The Graphic were clearly the most interesting in terms of circulation and quality, but The Illustrated Times also published comic strips in their supplements in the 1850s, and comic strips were also frequent in a fourth London illustrated weekly, The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News.)

ILLUSTRATIONS:

1) “An Unfortunate Huntress”, Reginald Cleaver, The Graphic, Xmas supplement, 1899

2) “An Eastern Imbroglio”, A.S. Boyd and Arthur M. Horwood, The Graphic, Xmas supplement, 1896

3) “Tommy Atkins, first interview with an Octopus”, W. Ralston, The Graphic, 06/16/1894

4) “Red Shirt and Broncho Bill invited in Hertfordshire”, A.C. Corbould, The Graphic, 11/12/1887

5) “A Midnight trip to Brighton”, A.C. Corbould, The Graphic 12/31/1887

Col. Prentiss Ingraham (1843-1904) Part II

2012-01-10T18:36:00.000-08:00

See Part I by E. M. Sanchez-Saavedra HERE

Col. Prentiss Ingraham (1843-1904)

2012-01-10T09:38:00.000-08:00

COL. PRENTISSINGRAHAM, ADVENTURER, NOVELIST AND BUFFALO BILL’S PUBLICITY MAN

by E. M.Sanchez-Saavedra

PrentissIngraham, the only son of the clergyman and novelist Joseph Holt Ingraham(1809-1860) and his wife Mary Brooks, was born December 28, 1843, near Natchez,Mississippi. First educated by private tutors, he later attended St. Timothy'sMilitary Academy, Maryland, and was a classmate of John Wilkes Booth. Heenrolled first at Jefferson College, Mississippi, and later studied at MobileMedical College, but left to enter the Confederate Army. He enlisted as aprivate in Co. D, Withers' First Mississippi Light Artillery, April 1861,attaining the rank of Ordnance Sergeant by 1863. (Mississippi Confederategraves registration records also list him as a member of Co. K.) He was woundedin the foot and taken prisoner during the siege of Port Hudson, Louisiana, andwas sent north. Although he later recounted how he escaped with the aid of afriend in the Union army, he seems to have been regularly paroled andexchanged. He also claimed to have served as commander of scouts in LawrenceSullivan Ross' Brigade, Texas Cavalry. Brigade muster rolls of theWhitfield/Ross Texas Cavalry Brigade list him as Ordnance Sergeant and laterstaff officer in the 9th Texas Cavalry. The unit participated in the Vicksburgsiege, the battles around Atlanta and the Tennessee campaigns. All we know withcertainty is that Ingraham was on “detached duty” from his MississippiArtillery regiment during 1864-5.

After the war,he became a wandering soldier of fortune. (Nowadays he would be called a"contractor.") Like other Confederate veterans, he went to Mexico andfought with Juarez against the French. He next turns up in Europe, serving onGeneral Leopold Hofmann's staff in the costly Austrian defeat at Sadowa(Koniggratz), Bohemia, in 1866, during the brief Austro-Prussian War. In Crete,he fought with the Greek army against the Turks during the Cretan uprisings of1866-1868. Switching sides, he allegedly served in the Khedive's army in Egypt.(The "Khedive," or "Viceroy" was first authorized by theOttoman Empire in 1867, although an unofficial khedive had ruled de factosince 1805. The Khedivate lasted until 1914.)

In 1869 he wentto London, supporting himself as a writer for several periodicals, but sooncame back to the United States. Ever restless, he joined the Cuban rebelsagainst Spain in the "Ten Years' War," running the blockade in the"Hornet" several times before it was surrendered to the U. S. Navy.He was a colonel in the Cuban revolutionary army as well as a captain in theirnavy, and was captured, tried as a filibuster and condemned to death by theSpaniards, but escaped with the assistance of the British consul. He thusescaped the fate of Capt. Joseph Fry and 52 passengers and crew of the"Virginius" who would be executed for similar activities in 1873. HisCuban rank was the basis of the “Col.” which he invariably attached to hisname. He traveled to the American West and met William Frederick “Buffalo Bill”Cody, with whom his career would forever become entwined.

In 1875 he wasmarried to Rose Langley, an author, artist, and composer in New York City. Theylived in New York and Ingraham began writing for Beadle and Adams. In 1881,with David Adams, he made a trip west and met the three Powell brothers, FrankGeorge and Will. Dr. Frank Powell (aka. "White Beaver, Medicine Chief ofthe Winnebagoes") of LaCrosse, Wisconsin, was an ex-plainsman, physicianand seller of patent medicines. In addition to stories featuring the Powells,Prentiss Ingraham later penned novels under Frank Powell's byline. In 1876, hewrote some or all of a Street and Smith New York Weekly serial aboutBuffalo Bill: The Crimson Trail; or, on Custer's Last Warpath. In 1879he wrote a play for the Buffalo Bill Combination and became a "pard"of William F. Cody. In1884 he worked for a time as advance agent for BuffaloBill's show. In 1893, he "edited" (read "ghostwrote") thememoirs of Cody's old friend and mentor Alexander Majors, founder of the PonyExpress. Cody probably underwrote the publishing costs. Between 1897 and 1902the Ingrahams lived in Easton, Maryland, and from 1902 to 1904 in Chicago. Theyhad a son and two daughters.

Although hisnovels covered many areas of the action/adventure genre: westerns, pirates,detectives and exotic costume pieces, his Buffalo Bill stories were bestsellers for half a century. They were hawked at all performances of the WildWest show and publicized not only Cody, but also his associates, living and dead:Buck Taylor, “King of the Cowboys,” Texas Jack Omohundro, Wild Bill Hickok,Pawnee Bill Lillie and others. “Ned Buntline” (E.Z.C. Judson) may havediscovered Bill Cody and written the first few stories about the scout with thealliterative nickname, but Prentiss Ingraham deepened and expanded the legenduntil “Buffalo Bill” became an internationally recognized brand name. His dimeand half-dime thrillers were translated into half a dozen languages. (A photoon p. 399 of the October 1936 issue of The National Geographic Magazinedepicts a Madrid news stand with a display of Buffalo Bill novels in Spanish.)

Bowling GreenState University, Ohio, has digitized nearly thirty of Prentiss Ingraham'snovels. They are available HERE

Ingraham hadsuffered off and on from the old wound in his foot, but this was not to provefatal, despite his belief that it would. He was diagnosed with Bright’s diseasein 1903 and died August 16, 1904, at the Beauvoir Confederate Home, Biloxi,Mississippi. Beauvoir had been Jefferson Davis' retirement home from 1877 to1889. It grew to include a museum, a presidential library and other buildings.The complex was severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Ingrahamis buried in the Confederate cemetery on the grounds. (His first name ismisspelled on his headstone.)

In The Houseof Beadle and Adams, Albert Johannsen summed up Ingraham’s career as a dimenovelist:

Some of hisfirst work was done for Beadle and Adams, and he remained one of their mostproductive authors until the firm went out of business. He had short stories inthe Saturday Journal as early as November, 1870, and a serial in 1872.His first dime novel, "The Masked Spy," appeared as No. 97, Starr'sAmerican Novels, in 1872, and after that novel after novel flowed from hispen in a ceaseless stream for nearly thirty-four years. Ingraham was unable touse the typewriter and so, in longhand, he turned out a couple of 35,000- or70,000-word novels per month. He once wrote a Half-Dime Library in a dayand a night, and a Dime Library in five days. It has been said that hehad nearly a thousand novels to his credit; he himself claimed over 600 in1900. Most of his stories were written for Beadle and Adams, but he wrote alsofor other publishers. In the late 1870's he wrote serials for the Family StoryPaper and Saturday Night, and also wrote a number of NickelLibraries. In the Saturday Evening Post, Vol. LV, No. 16, November13, 1875, appeared the first installment of "The Boy Wrecker; or, The Waifof the Wave," and in one issue of Vickery's Fireside Visitor, in1882, he had short stories under four different pseudonyms! After Beadle andAdams went out of existence, he became a contributor to Golden Hours, andalso was responsible for a number of cloth-bound books. Among his non-fictionbooks was "Land of Legendary Lore: Sketches of Romance and Reality on theEastern Shore of the Chesapeake," published in Easton, Maryland, in 1898.

Besides writingunder his own name, Ingraham used the pseudonyms Dr. Noel Dunbar, DangerfieldBurr, Major Henry B. Stoddard, Colonel Leon Lafitte, Frank Powell, HarryDennies Perry, Midshipman Tom W. Hall, Lieut. Preston Graham, and several more.Two novels with the byline "Capt. Alfred B. Taylor," were reprintedas by Ingraham.

Ingraham issaid to have written some of the novels credited to Buffalo Bill, after Codyhimself got tired of writing. One novel was written for Beadle over the name ofJ. B. Omohundro, and Ingraham told [Gilbert] Patten that he was the author ofthat story. His innumerable stories about Buffalo Bill, written for Beadle,were often reprinted. Many of them were published by Street & Smith intheir Far West Library (1918 catalogue) as by "Howard W.Erwin," but later (1926 catalogue) they appeared among other Ingrahamtales.

Ingraham was among the few Beadle authors tostar in a dime novel about his adventurous life. In 1883, William R. Eyster’s ARolling Stone: Incidents in the Career on Sea and Land, as Boy and Man, ofColonel Prentiss Ingraham, Soldier, Sailor and Wanderer, appeared as No. 13of Beadle’s Boy’s Library of Sport, Story and Adventure. It is a largelyfictional account, concentrating on his boyhood adventures, that provides onlythe sketchiest of details about his adult life in the last four pages of a15-page narrative. Eyster’s novel may be read HERE:

Prentiss Ingraham’s writing style can bedescribed as “workmanlike,” in contrast to his father’s florid prose. When herevised several of J.H. Ingraham’s novels for Beadle, Prentiss eliminated reamsof unnecessary description and purple passages. Edgar Allan Poe had excoriatedthe elder Ingraham in a review of Lafitte, the Pirate of the Gulf(1835):

We are surfeited with unnecessary detail…[Nota character appears] without eliciting from the author a vos plaudite,with an extended explanation of the character of his personal appearance – ofhis length, depth and breadth – and, more particularly, of the length, depthand breadth of his shirt-collar, shoe-buckles and hat-band.

For modern readers, the chief flaw inPrentiss Ingraham's fiction is the convoluted frontier dialect used by hiswestern characters. Perhaps as a reaction to his father's overblown style, hisstories tend to skip the atmospheric descriptive passages and plungestraightaway into the action, a trait he shares with many of today'sscreenwriters.

Prentiss Ingraham’s account of the pursuitand capture of his old schoolfellow, John Wilkes Booth in the January 1890 CenturyMagazine may be read HERE:

Enraged with Street and Smith after FrancisSmith gave him "a dirty deal" over his first serial, Ingraham hadrefused to deal with the firm for the next twenty years. His friend, GilPatten, author of the Frank Merriwell stories, persuaded him to mend fencesafter Beadle and Adams went out of business in 1898. By this time, FrancisSmith's son Ormond had inherited the publishing house, and pragmaticallyresolved to patch up his father's quarrel and secure a valuable literaryresource at the same time.

In The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill(1960) Don Russell observed that

No author was ever treated more handsomelythan was Colonel Ingraham by Street and Smith. Not only did they give him fullcredit for all the Buffalo Bill stories he had written for rival publishers,but they also put his name on most of those anyone else had written, includingtheir own writers.

Shortly before his death, the Street andSmith Corporation had acquired the rights to his Buffalo Bill novels for Beadleand began rewriting them as The Buffalo Bill Stories (1901-1912), later TheNew Buffalo Bill Weekly (1912-1919). These were credited to “The Author ofBuffalo Bill,” and included tales penned by William Wallace Cook, W. BertFoster, St.George Rathborne, Eugene T. Sawyer, John H. Whitson, Ernest A. Youngand others. These were gathered into “thick books” in The Far West Library(1907-1916), Buffalo Bill Border Stories (1917-1925) and the GreatWestern Library (1927-1932). The earlier "Far West" seriescredited authorship to “Howard W. Erwin,” but the final reprints placed the“Col. Prentiss Ingraham” byline on all the Buffalo Bill books, including thosewritten by Cook, Foster, et al.

Continue to Part II HERE

My Hero Pt. II

2012-01-08T08:24:00.000-08:00

MY HERO! OR, SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME Part I HERE

My Hero

2012-01-08T07:56:00.000-08:00

MY HERO! OR, SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME

By E. M. Sanchez-Saavedra

A surefire ingredient in any melodrama is theRESCUE scene. From the Perils of Pauline to the latest Hollywoodaction/adventure blockbuster, audiences never tire of the heroine dangling overa crumbly cliff while Our Hero clings to her hand with an iron grip as he drawsher to safety. Obviously, the basic cliffhanger situation easily become staleand couldn’t be used in all situations. Fortunately for novelists, our planetand human ingenuity provide plenty of danger when handy cliffs or tallbuildings are lacking. The heroine could be rescued from a “towering inferno”or from a sinking ship, a mad dog, an anarchist bomb, or falling from a bridge.

As transportation technology advanced beyondhuman walking speed, mishaps with horses, streetcars, railroads, steamboats andautomobiles became commonplace. Pop culture of the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries accurately reflected these new anxieties. Runawaystagecoaches, carriages and locomotives provided novelists with plenty of scopefor putting their characters into harm’s way and staging daring rescues. Theclash between skittish horses and newfangled bicycles or autos became a stapleof popular storytelling. The other principal rescue situation involved theheroine’s abduction by the villain and his minions and Our Hero’s superhumanchase and conflicts with the evildoers.

Clever pen-jockeys could combine andrecombine elements and add new twists. Most early techno-fiction yarns wereessentially rescue melodramas, with the addition of a steam-powered robot,airship, submarine or land rover to enable Our Hero to get the jump on the badguys. If the hero’s auto or bike causes the lady’s horse to bolt, the samevehicle allows him to overtake the “maddened beast” and avert disaster. Bytransporting the cast to an exotic locale, the urban carriage runaway couldmorph into a stagecoach with a wounded driver, or a Russian sledge pursued bywolves.

The array of villains, both human andnon-human (including gorillas, Martians and legendary monsters), was legion, butall of them had the same objective: getting the heroine into their vileclutches. In keeping with prevailing social attitudes, the human no-goodnikswere often the embodiment of equal-opportunity racism. Native Americans,Latinos, Africans and Asians were the most common choices, although South Seacannibals, leering European noblemen and any random group of recent immigrantswould do in a pinch. (When the villain was a white, Anglo-Saxon protestant, hegenerally belonged to the lower social classes and spoke ungrammatically,employing slang.)

The artists who illustrated these melodramasoften chose the rescue scene for its dramatic and artistic possibilities. Storypapers and dime novels featured rescues on their front covers and left a greatlegacy of action-packed images. Tip Top Weekly and its heroic Merriwellbrothers may hold the record for lurid rescue iconography, although Work andWin’s Fred Fearnot ran them a close second.

Submitted for your delectation is a galleryof rescue images at their finest. Enjoy!

Continue to Part II HERE

Winsor McCay: No Victory in Sight (1917)

2012-01-07T15:52:00.000-08:00

Harry Murphy

2011-12-27T10:14:00.000-08:00

Not much is known about Harry Murphy except that he was the first editorial cartoonist for the Morning Oregonian. During WWI he was employed by Hearst's Chicago Examiner on the editorial pages.

Sorrows of Satan

2011-12-26T11:03:00.000-08:00

Frederick B. Opper's Sorrows of Satan editorial cartoons in the Chicago Examiner were based D. W. Griffith's film adaptation of the novel The Sorrows of Satan by Marie Corelli.

Palooka Christmas 1941

2011-12-25T16:06:00.000-08:00

Christmas with the Cartoonists

2011-12-23T14:49:00.000-08:00

Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth (1819-1899)

2011-12-22T14:55:00.000-08:00

I once read Tried for Her Life, by E. D. E. N. Southworth, so low-browed a fiction that it’s Neanderthal writing at its best (or worst). I find it amazing that Southworth’s ridiculous archaic books were popular right through the 1920’s. The copy I read was from Hurst & Company who also published The Tucker Twins Series and Molly Brown Series by Nell Speed, The Motor Maid Series by Katherine Stokes, and The Girl Aviator Series by Margaret Burnham. The Southworth books were being marketed to young girls of the flapper era, who must have shook their heads at the Victorian shenanigans of her harassed heroines.

Tried for Her Life started out with the neatest chapter title of all time; viz.; Sybil’s Subterranean Adventures, then planted the reader right into the middle of the story with the first sentence:

“When Sybil recovered from her death-like swoon, she felt herself being borne slowly on through what seemed a narrow, tortuous underground passage; but the utter darkness, relieved only by a gleaming red taper that moved like a star before her, preventing her from seeing more.”

Sybil Berners, an outlaw, ’hunted throughout the world’ by the police for a supposed murder, was deposited in a spacious cavern under a building called the Haunted Chapel, after being kidnapped away from her husband, Lyon Berners. Her captors were a motley crew that included a woman named Princess, Mother Hecate, Moloch, Belial, and Satan, the leader of this motley band of thieves, highwaymen and counterfeiters. Sybil’s beau Lyon with his faithful negro-servant Joe (who was quite exasperated by his master’s thick-wittedness), and Sybil’s dog, Nelly, a Skye terrier, went to her rescue. The dog found a barred vault leading underground and some fool threw a burning torch within to see if they could see anything, which blew the Haunted Chapel, and the police-officers hunting Sybil to Kingdom Come. Meanwhile Sybil fought off the advances of Moloch and was saved by Satan, who wanted her charms to himself. There were hairbreadth escapes, trials, captures, and more improbable escapes, finally ending happily with Sybil’s name cleared, and the robbers routed.

The real shocker is that Southworth, who was said to have written the first story paper serial in America, was the internationally bestselling author of her day. Her serials in Bonner’s New York Ledger brought her $10,000 per year, and, as she was canny enough to control the copyright on all her work she became fabulously wealthy. One newspaper article, ‘Mrs. Southworth at Home’, described the popular novelists ‘cottage’ in 1886:

“In staid old Georgetown, on a high bluff overlooking the Potomac and with the imposing stone college of the Society of Jesus filling up the background, stands a quaint little cottage, its many peaked gables, its trailing vines and bright flowers, and its roomy verandas suggesting the quiet and repose so dear to the literary worker, writes a Washington correspondent. The view from the veranda is superb. You can see a wide expanse of the river, Fort Myer, the Aqueduct Bridge and a goodly stretch of the “sacred soil,” well wooded and picturesquely broken. The sight on a summer evening is worthy the brush of a Claude. On the river hundreds of craft of every description shoot gaily about -- racing shells, steam launches, and larger vessels pleasantly diversify the scene.”

Mrs. Southworth was “just a girl” when she married Frederick Southworth of Cincinnati, who deserted her after the birth of her second child. Her friends induced congress to pass a bill regulating divorces in the District of Columbia expressly for Mrs. Southworth but she was opposed to divorce on conscientious grounds. Her father had died and her mother remarried so she taught school and wrote short stories to support herself and two young children. She never did divorce her runaway husband.

Her first novel, Retribution, appeared in The National Era, an abolitionist newspaper in Washington edited by Dr. Bailey. After serialization it was published in book form by Harper’s.

“She was asked if she had experienced much difficulty in getting her earlier works published. “No,” she said, “I must say I was singularly fortunate in that respect, encountering none of the trials and tribulations that young authors generally have to undergo. I always managed to get into print very easily.”

Mrs. Southworth moved to London in 1859 where she edited the Young Ladies Journal (until 1862) while contributing serials to the London Journal, the London Herald, the London Reader, and the New York Ledger. Her most famous work was The Hidden Hand which was first serialized in the New York Ledger in 1859, then published in book form by Bonner & Sons in two volumes as The Hidden Hand and Capitola’s Perils. In England it was serialized in the London Herald, edited by Percy B. St. John. The heroine, Capitola, set off a merchandising mania in London for ‘Capitola’ hats, suits, bags and umbrellas. Sailors named their yachts after her. Here’s how the gay lady Capitola handled wicked Black Donald in The Hidden Hand:

“Black Donald, will you leave my room?” cried Capitola in an agony of prayer.

“No,” answered the outlaw, “and the five minutes of grace are quite up.”

“Stop, don’t move yet. Before you stir say ‘Lord have mercy on my soul,’” said Capitola solemnly. “I would not send you prayerless into the presence of your creator! For, Black Donald, within a few seconds your body will be hurled to swift destruction, and your soul will stand before the bar of God!”

Her foot was on the bar of the concealed trap.

He laughed aloud and stretched forth his arms to clasp her.

She pressed the spring.

The drop fell with a tremendous crash!

The outlaw shot downward.

There was an instant vision of a white and panic-stricken face, and wild uplifted hands; then a square black opening was all that remained of where the terrible intruder had sat!

Robert Bonner, proprietor of the New York Ledger was asked by a Daily Graphic reporter in 1889 “Who were your most successful story writers?” His reply was: “Mrs. Southworth and Sylvanus Cobb Jr. I think that the most popular and successful stories ever printed as serials were Cobb’s “The Gunmaker of Moscow” and Mrs. Southworth’s “Hidden Hand.”

Her last known work was The Phantom Wedding; or, the fall of the House of Flint, published in 1878.

*For an engraved portrait of Mrs. Southworth see E. M. Sanchez-Saavedra's post Novel-Based Victorian Melodrama HERE

Round the World with Jack the Ripper

2011-12-22T08:20:00.000-08:00

Jack the Ripper in novels from London, America and Sweden. Images courtesy Joe Rainone.