Charles W. Kahles (1878-1931)

“Hairbreadth Harry” was extremely popular with early audiences, and inspired three early films. Kahles comic strip was based on popular stage melodrama and turns out to have been a strip of some importance, influencing Harry Hershfield’s “Desperate Desmond,” and “Dauntless Durham of the U. S. A.” and Ed Wheelan’s “Midget Movies.” When Ed Wheelan left Hearst, changing his comic strips title to “Minute Movies,” his strip was replaced by Elzie Segar’s “Thimble Theatre,” birthplace of the immortal Popeye.

Charles W. Kahles, Comic Artist, Dies

Cartoonist was Native of Germany, Coming to America at Age of 7.

Great Neck, N.Y., Jan 31.-

Charles W. Kahles, creator of the comic strip “Hairbreadth Harry” died today at his home here of angina pectoris. He was 53.

Kahles first comic strip, “Clarence the Cop,” which he drew for the New York World in the latter ‘90’s was called the first serial strip cartoon, introducing to newspaper comic strips the innovation of telling a story which was carried along day after day.

The cartoonist came from Germany with his parents as a boy of seven and lived for many years in Brooklyn. After he left The World he worked for the New York Journal and other papers. He had lived in Great Neck for 13 years. His widow, Helen, and a daughter Jessie, survive him.

> The Atlanta Constitution, 32 Jan 1931.

*Thanks to Leonardo De Sá

The Old Home Town

Lee W. Stanley’s The Old Home Town ran from approximately 1934-1944. In the later years of the comic the artwork began to resemble Bill Holman’s. Stanley held the copyright to The Old Home Town which was distributed first by Central Press and then by King Features. More can be found HERE.

James Frank Sullivan

James Frank Sullivan is an artist I don't know much about and worse I have lost the date of this article from The Magazine of Art between 1891 and 1895. Sullivan worked for Fun and Thomas Hood's Comic Annual.

London's Ha'Penny Comics

London's Ha' Penny Comics by Gelett Burgess, The (American) Bookman,Volume 14, issue 4, 1901.

The Dog Knew What to Do

Art by Ed Carey, Dec 10, 1904

Ella Cinders

Ella Cinders had been created by writer Bill Conselman and artist born Missourian Charlie Plumb. Plumb was a cartoonist on the Los Angeles Times when he teamed up with a reporter named Bill Conselman to produce Ella Cinders. The partners tried selling the strip for a year with no success; they offered it free to their home newspaper, the Times, and were rejected. The Cinderella tale was begun in a daily on 1 June 1925, syndicated by United Features, and added a Sunday page in 1927. The Ella Cinders comic strip closed, showing its age, on 2 December 1961, after 33 years of popularity.

Charlie Plumb, a vagabond who carried a cartoonist kit wherever he went, enjoyed the good life in Florida and Mexico. He left the property in the care of an “understudy” for six months while he toured Samoa, returning to Hollywood with the resulting book (“Tin Can Island”) in hand. Conselman worked in Hollywood as well writing for movies for the likes of Bing Crosby. Colleen Moore played the title role in the Ella Cinders movie, the first comic strip to be filmed.

Ella Cinders began as a poor girl, slave to a cruel stepmother and two domineering sisters, Prissy and Lotta Pill, just like in the fairy tale. Her young brother Blackie shared the home. Ella’s epic search for her Prince Charming was a soap opera and an adventure strip. She won a beauty contest which earned her free ticket to Hollywood where she worked as an extra for awhile until she met a big movie magnate who, it turns out, was her long-lost father Pa Cinders, on the lam from his harsh-tongued wife. Ella became a big movie star, made one fortune, lost it, almost married Tommy Harris, discovered a lost country where it was still the 1890’s…

The strip had gripping continuities and was beautifully drawn (until the feeble Fred Fox took over the strip) often approaching a dark surrealism. Ella herself, a freckle-faced gamin, had the wide eyed look of a silent movie star.

The color Sunday is borrowed from HERE, while the beginning dailies are HERE.

The Package from Siam

The following story appeared December 5 1928 in the Syracuse Herald. The package from “Siam” was a plot device that was widely used in comic strips and comic books by artists like Elzie Segar and Carl Barks >

St. Louis, Mo., Dec 4. - Col. George Bungle has taken the offensive against his creator and tormentor, Harry J. Tuthill, comic strip cartoonist. Tuthill has just received, at his home in Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb, a fine large monkey. The brute was delivered by express, and the crate it traveled in bears this inscription: “From George Bungle, Siam.”

Now, as all the world of newspaper readers knows, George Bungle is the leading character in “The Bungle Family,” a comic feature produced by Tuthill. Col. George Bungle has been through many strange adventures in the course of his remarkable career in the comic strips. He suffered aphasia once, and was pursued by a designing woman. He got into a neck of trouble over a necklace that he never stole, and he has had remarkable experiences on the stock exchange.

Recently, however, Col. Bungle was flabbergasted, so to speak. Somebody sent him a white elephant. A real one, that actually ate enormous quantities of expensive hay and did a lot of damages in garages and other parking spaces. Bungle and his family were furious. They lay awake nights trying to identify the wicked sender of the elephant.

While the white elephant mystery was at its height artist Tuthill received the monkey. He doesn’t know who sent it, but the tag said it came from George Bungle. Tuthill has been almost as much embarrassed by his new pet as Bungle was discommoded by the elephant, that’s certain. Tuthill can’t give the beast away, and he doesn’t know how to support a monkey in the style to which he has been accustomed in the Siamese woods. But there is poetic justice in the situation, as Tuthill’s neighbors knowingly remark. The poor comic strip characters have to put up with a lot and Col. Bungle is the first one of them to turn on his master with some of his own bitter medicine.

Mysterious Ed Carey

Ed Carey was one of the masters of early American comic strip art, once seen his grotesque faces and anatomy are hard to forget. His most well-known strip was “Simon Simple,” from the New York World, which had been previously illustrated by A. D. Reed. Other strips included “Brainy Bowers,” “The Troubles of Dictionary Jacques,” and “Professor Hypnotiser.” Carey was born in 1870 and died in White Plains, N. Y. on October 11, 1928.

Stanley's "Footprints"

I came into a whole whack of reading copies of old John Stanley stories, great stuff like Little Lulu, Dunc ‘n’ Loo and Thirteen Going on Eighteen. I hadn’t read Thirteen Going on Eighteen since I was -- well-- thirteen; an awful age. I still loved comics but dreaded having my peers spot me leaving the L&J newsstand with the latest batch of “kid stuff”. Sliding into the alley I would tuck them under my shirt and into my pants where they stayed until I was out of sight of prying eyes and hecklers.

John Stanley used certain themes and plots over and over. One for instance is that Lulu would be the victim of a theft and Tubby, as The Spider, would disguise himself and go after the perpetrator, who, as Tub instinctively knew, was none other than Lulu’s dad >

Another well-used gag involved story-telling, most evident in the Witch Hazel and Little Itch stories but used in various other titles to good effect also >

Stanley left his autograph on a story in another way through the use of sound effects. There was “OW!” >

And there was “YOW!” >

Even the use of recurring characters was sometimes mirrored from one title to the next >

Stanley’s style helped to identify him in the minds of readers; we may not have known John Stanley by name between 1950 and 1964 (or that other great cartoonist/storyteller, Carl Barks) but we knew he was the same creator as that working on Kookie, Dunc ‘n’ Loo, Nancy and Sluggo, and Melvin the Monster, his “footprints” were all over the comic books.