A Crowded Life in Comics –

Endpapers.

By Rick Marschall.

Endpapers. The term sends shivers down my spine, at first hearing. I hope papers, and paper, never end! I am addicted to the sight and even the aroma of aged cellulose fibers. Not rot or mold, but the perfume-like scent of old paper. When I open, say, my 1889 volume of Puck, it has a slight aroma that excites what must be memory-neurons on my olfactory nerves… because I have an immediate mental picture of the first evening I owned the volume, on my family’s sun porch. My father had driven me to New York’s Book Store Row, below Union Square, to Marc Nadel’s Memory Shop. Marc had been holding the volume until I saved $25 from my paper-route money.

Yes, I am crazy. But it keeps me from going insane.

Well, I have already digressed. The “endpapers” I want to address here are sketches and inscriptions in books. Someone on a comics web thread last week thought an 1897 inscription in a book of cartoons must be the earliest example of a cartoonist’s compliance with a request. In fact, cartoonists, illustrators, and authors frequently autographed their books before then, if my own modest collection is an indication.

I might not seem like a shrinking violet, but I have often been wary of appearing to be a fan-boy and asking cartoonists for sketches. But holding forth a copy of their book always seemed to convey a reason to be confident, at least compared to my black sketchbooks, or the back of envelopes. I can count my lost opportunities and missed treasures. Dinner with Albert Uderzo. Photo “op” with Chuck Jones or Al Hirschfeld…

The number of sketches on inside front covers, or “free front endpapers” is testimony to a percentage of a large library overall, and the gumption I actually did exercise over my crowded life. Plus… inscriptions to others who preceded me; and sometimes those names are as interesting as the artists who drew the sketches.

A.B.Frost

Carl Anderson

Walter Berndt

Harry Hershfield

Roy Crane

Percy L. Crosby

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Carlo the Comic Strip

As part of Doubleday Page's promotion of the book Carlo by A. B. Frost this comic strip series appeared in the New York Sun in 1914. The 1913 book had one drawing per page. Carlo can be read entire at HathiTrust Digital Library or Open Library.

Arthur Burdett Frost (1851-1928)

Arthur Burdett Frost was born 19 Jan 1851 in Philadelphia. He began his working life at the age of fifteen as an engraver’s apprentice. He studied at night under Thomas Eakins and William Merritt Chase at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. In 1874 Frost was working as a lithographer when he illustrated (with wood engravings) the humor book Out of the Hurly-Burly by ‘Max Adeler’ (real name Charles Heber Clarke), for a Philadelphia publisher. In 1875 he was working on the New York Graphic, and in 1876 began illustrating for Harper & Brothers, where he drew numerous comic strips that combined modern style speed-lines and Muybridge inspired movements which cemented his reputation as the premier comic artist of his generation.

Frost was probably more famous as an illustrator than a comic artist, at least until modern times. Frost won fame for his illustrations to Uncle Remus, and also illustrated works by Theodore Roosevelt, Lewis Carroll, Frank Stockton, H. C. Bunner, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich. In 1884 he published Stuff and Nonsense, a collection of his comic art. Stuff and Nonsense was recently published in a handsome volume by Fantagraphics. Frost and his family lived in France from 1906 to 1914. He returned to the United States and died on 22 Jun 1928 at Pasadena, California.

Frost was a wonderful wildlife illustrator as is shown in these McClure’s Magazine images from 1904. Some of them seem to mimic his famous comic strip “Our Cat Eats Rat Poison,” although the cat in question is no mere house-cat, but a wild lynx.

A. B. Frost portrait May 1895 Harper's Monthly.

Charles G. Bush and the Comic Strip

“While drawing weekly cartoons for the New York Telegram Bush made a few hits that brought him fame. One of these was his “Klondike,” a powerful sermon against the lust for gold which even the religious papers copied. Then he gave David B. Hill the little hat with its big streamer reading “I am a Democrat.” Being well read in the classics, Bush draws upon history and mythology for characters and settings, while the main idea of the cartoon is often developed in a chance conversation or even worked up after the artist sits down to his task with the feeling that something must be done. “Study, appreciation, and hard work” is his stereotyped advice to beginners who burn for fame and yearn for emoluments around the art sanctums of the New York press.” -- Cartoonists of America. The Funny Fellows who Furnish Pictorial Political Sermons to the Newspapers. Dubuque Sunday Herald, 21 October 1900.

Charles Green Bush, a contemporary of Homer Davenport’s, was born in Boston in 1842. He began contributing political cartoons to Harper’s Weekly in the 1870’s and in 1875 studied art in Paris with Léon Bonnat, the portrait painter before returning to New York in 1879 to continue at the Weekly. Both Harper's Weekly and Harper's Magazine were pioneers in the early use of sequential art in America, most importantly in the work of A. B. Frost.

Bush was not known for his comic strip work but in 1890 he drew a series of comics for Harper’s Weekly that show the influence of A. B. Frost, and, in the case of the animated ‘baseball’ strip, probably Eadweard Muybridge, whose photographic studies in human and animal locomotion (1878) had a seminal influence on both the cinema and the comic strip.

Charles Green Bush (1842-1909) illustrated Canadian writer James De Mille's novel The Lady of the Ice (1870), Adeline Dutton Train's Faith Gartney's Girlhood, (1891), and Rhoda Thornton's Girlhood by Mary E. Pratt.(1874). In his book The Political Cartoon, Charles Press argues that the first use of Uncle Sam in a cartoon was by Charles Green Bush on February 6, 1869 in Harper's Weekly, as Frank Weitenkampf showed in "Uncle Sam Through The Years : A Cartoon Record, Annotated List and Introduction," an unpublished manuscript in the New York Public Library, 1949, 24 pg. By 1900 Press states Bush was known as the "dean of American Political cartooning."

Top to Bottom: Harper's Weekly, 30 August, 1890, 25 January 1890, 27 September 1890.

See also A Master Cartoonist HERE

A.B. Frost (1851-1928)

Out of the Hurly - Burly; or, Life in an Odd Corner by Charles Heber Clark (Max Adeler), Today Publishing Company, Philadelphia 1874. A. B. Frost's earliest work of illustration. H. C. Bunner, an author and editor at Puck, wrote an article about Frost and Hurly Burly for Harper's Magazine in 1892 which can be viewed HERE.