Mysteries of Melvin

In the late fifties William Gaines received a letter on Buckingham Palace stationary concerning the resemblance between Alfred E. Neuman and young Prince Charles of England that had been published in MAD magazine.

Gaines recalled publishing something about the resemblance between Neuman and the Prince and receiving the letter saying “I bloody well don’t look like him” and signed “Charles Printemps or something like that and it was mailed from a post office box near the palace. We never did find out if it was legitimate or not.”

Gaines also remembered MAD was sued several times over the ownership of Alfred E. Neuman. “His face has been around at least a hundred years. When I was a kid I used to see it on post cards saying “What, me worry?” We found it as early as the 1890’s. He was an advertisement for a dentist in Topeka, Kansas, whose name was Painless Romaine. He was used for a million things, even for anti-Roosevelt ads in the 1930’s.”

[1909] Winnipeg Free Press, October 30

Harvey Kurtzman said that the publishers became curious about the origin of Alfred E. Neuman, sometimes referred to as Melvin Cowznofski, and pleaded with its readers for information. “The answers were astonishing. The face dated back to the 19th century. It was supposed to have been used for selling patent medicine, shoes, and soft drinks. The kid was depicted as a salesman, a cowboy, a doughboy, and was rendered in dozens of slight to gross altered variations.”

“But the answer I have always liked to believe was that the face came from an old high school biology text -- an example of a person who lacked iodine.”

Carl Djerassi of Stanford recalled an anti-Semitic wall-poster featuring ‘the face’ as a Jewish street-pedlar. He saw it in Nazi Germany in 1938 under the message “Death to the Jews.” Craig Yoe said Alfred “probably started as a cartoonist's stereotype of an Irish idiot boy.”

[1928] Winnipeg Free Press, March 26

Alfredo Castelli found a character from Pittsburgh circa 1903 named Pickle Neary (see Pickle Neary pin-button) who had an uncanny resemblance to the Kid and also noted a close resemblance to Rube Goldberg’s brother Walter in an old photograph. The face has also been used in Australia to sell dairy products in the 1920’s. Recently I turned up some examples from New Zealand.

M. Reidelbach’s Completely Mad (1991) reported the finding of a precursor to Alfred Neuman in the “It Didn’t Hurt A Bit,” Kid found in an advertisement in the Illustrated London News, printed in New York City in 1895. He also showed up in ads for Cherry Sparkle Soda and Puck Magazine. The Christens write in ““It Didn’t Hurt a Bit” Kid: Dental Precursor to Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman:”

“In the late 1890’s, the Ritter Painless Dental Company, located at the corner of Third Avenue and Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn, New York, used a large picture of “The Kid” on their second floor outdoor display. An accompanying label stated, “It didn’t hurt a bit.” In this large painting, the boy’s facial features were exaggerated to make him look like a mentally defective “pinhead.”

[189?] New York

In 1908 Antikamnia calendar cards were supplied to dentists. In 1886 two German doctors discovered a coal-tar derivative called acetanilide which was supposed to reduce fever and numb pain. The patent medicine makers took it up for the North American market. One popular remedy was punningly called Cuforhedake Branefude, another was Antikamnia. Allegedly these medicines killed 28 people and one dog. Samuel Hopkins Adams exposed them in a series of articles in Colliers magazine between October 1905 and September 22, 1906, entitled The Great American Fraud. Antikamnia was still being sold in the 1930’s.

In 1909 the first Winnipeg Tribune “It Didn’t Hurt A Bit” Kid ads for the Winnipeg Dental Parlours appeared and ads were still shilling for Dr. Glasgow, Dentist in 1928. Apparently ads were published periodically in Manitoba until at least 1936. The Trib also published the cartoons of Grue [Johnny Gruelle] throughout 1909 which were published through the early NEA while Gruelle was working in Indianapolis. Painless Romaine “It Didn’t Hurt A Bit” Kid ads from Kansas survive dated 1910, and King Dental Parlours was another source of Kid ads. He even appeared in Gruelle’s June 17, 1911 Sunday page of Mr. Twee Deedle, in close-up with the gap-tooth in the right place, a dead-ringer for ‘The Kid.’

[1910] Antikamnia 

One person has suggested that the Kid first appeared in 2 illustrations by Henry Holiday to Lewis Carroll’s 1876 Hunting of the Snark, “The Butcher and the Beaver” and “The Beaver’s Lesson.” It’s true it looks quite a bit like Alfred E. Neuman but the character is a boy about 6 to 9 years old while Alfred is at least beginning puberty in the dental ads. The book I studied showed the preliminary pencil drawings as well as the engraved finish work and they look nothing like Alfred. The first shows the boy with a soft and gentle face with mouth closed. The second is a bit more sinister, the boy looks like some fairy character from the Bedlam asylum art of Richard Dadd, who returned from a trip to the Holy Land and stabbed his father to death. The boy is biting on a quill pen and seems to have a full set of teeth. Maybe - but I’m not very convinced.

Going back further we find the Kid character in "The Crowded Grandstand," from July 9, 1896 Toronto Evening Star, signed Archer. He shows up again in the work of cartoonist W. M. Goodes in a book called Comic History of Greece by Charles M. Snyder, 1897, J. B. Lippincott Company.

Jock McCulla

Curiosity led me to think that perhaps he had come from one of the early travelling medicine shows, perhaps as a label on the bottles of patented painkiller. I recalled reading an article years ago in the Weekend magazine, sent all over Canada with the comic sections. I looked it up.

I don't claim this is the true story of Alfred E., merely a possible origin;

The King of Canadian medicine men was Thomas Patrick "Doc" Kelley (1865-1931), who, starting in 1886, travelled Canada and the U.S. selling patent medicine like East India Tiger Fat and Passion Flower tablets. He was so well known that druggists in Toronto and Winnipeg stocked his wares in their drugstores. His favoured stomping grounds were Illinois, Michigan and Ohio. Other medicine shows travelled the circuit, including the Kickapoo Company, but they never seemed to make it outside of Toronto.

Amongst the banjo players, wrassling bears etc., the most popular member of Kelley's troupe was a comedian, Jock McCulla, born in Scotland, whose pratfalls and slapstick, often of a very painful- looking nature, made him one of the most popular comedians in North America, pre-movies and vaudeville. I can imagine him saying after a particularly nasty fall; "It didn't hurt a bit," followed by sales of bottles of some type of pain-killer, stocked by drugstores all along the route for boys with teeth knocked out by hockey puck or baseball.

Jock McCulla bore an uncanny resemblance to Alfred E., with carrot-top hair and a gap-toothed grin -- well, judge for yourselves -- here's Jock McCulla in the flesh, possible forerunner of the What-me-worry kid sometime between 1890 and 1896.

Researching the subject I found that one of the mainstays of the medicine shows in pre-painless dentistry days was the pulling of teeth with pliers as well as providing the pain-killer for relief. The painkiller was quite effective since it was often mixed with opium or cocaine. Violet McNeal wrote a vivid outlaw memoir of the medicine-show days in 1947, Four White Horses and a Brass Band, which details the lives, cons and crimes of the travelling performers and quack doctors. Many of the men and women involved in the medicine shows supplied (and used) illicit drugs like cocaine and opium to the whole continent, from Manitoba to the Inland Empire, the American South, Midwest and the East Coast. Medicine shows were amongst the earliest of advertisers in newspapers, almanacs, bottle labels, illustrated cards, fences, farmhouses, rocks, even one joker who painted on the side of the Rockies.

Jock McCulla

The first comics I have found where some of the characters bear strong resemblance to “the Kid” were by Frederick Burr Opper in Puck and they go back as early as 1888. Cartoonist F. M. Howarth was using similar faces in both Puck and Golden Days in the same time period. Opper used the look-a-like so many times that you have to believe that either he invented the character or he knew that the audience would recognize the Kid because the character was already well-known to the public in North America.

[1900] C. A. David in Toronto Saturday Night, December 1

When I first started passing my findings around I received a mysterious letter from some wag saying that the writer had seen the face of the gap-toothed kid carved in stone doorknockers in various Museums of Antiquity in the Middle East and elsewhere. When I queried him for further information my letter was returned unread from his dead letter box. I’m sure I was just having my leg pulled but you never know. Alfred E. Neuman could very well be a part of the world’s collective unconscious, a Trickster, Shaman, or Coyote-like figure. It could still be that his idiot face and toothless grin beams down from the walls of some forgotten cave hidden from sight since the Dawn of Man.

[1911] Mr. Twee Deedle, by John Gruelle, June 17

Further Reading:

“Publisher says MAD still going strong after 32 years.” Pacific Stars and Stripes 20 Jan, 1985.

“Once and for all the story about Alfred Neuman,” by Harvey Kurtzman, Winnipeg Free Press, 6 Feb 1975.

“That Way Lies MAD-ness: Carl Djerassi Confronts his Past” Current Comments No. 24, 12 June 1989.

““It Didn’t Hurt A Bit” Kid: Dental Precursor to Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman” by Arden G. Christen, DDS, MSD, MA, and Joan A. Christen, BGS, MS Journal of the History of Dentistry, Vol. 48, No. 2, July 2000 p.53-55.

“Behaving Madly,” by Craig Yoe, Modern Arf, Fantagraphics 2005.

“Mysteries of Melvin” Continued HERE and "Painless McPhee" HERE

[1910] John Gruelle, Winnipeg Tribune, July 16

[1948] Maclean's Magazine 

[1876] Hunting of the Snark by Henry Holiday

[1940] Hooey (reprints from a Canadian newspaper column)

[1887]From Puck, by Frederick B. Opper, December 28

[1896] by ARCHER, Toronto Evening Star,  July 9

[1909] by John Gruelle, Winnipeg Tribune, July 16

[1895] Opper in Puck, July 17

[1895] Just for Fun, Puck, by Opper

[1890] Puck's Library by Opper

[1903] Pickle Neary pinback

[1895] Wizard Oil pamphlet cover

[1908] John Gruelle, The Spokane Press, Dec 16, 1908

Turpin's Ride to York

Advertisements from The Fly, a Literary and Pictorial Miscellany, No. 1 - New Series, Saturday January 6 1839. Price Twopence, London: W. Glover, Water Lane, Fleet Street. Top 3 Aug 1839.

7 Sept 1839

Mort Walker 1948

Gallagher Gags

When I was a kid I collected gag cartoons by various gag artists and pasted them in scrapbooks. One of the best was Gallagher. Which Gallagher was it though? There were two cartoonists of that name, brothers, John Gallagher and George [Gately] Gallagher. I think this is John Gallagher. George Gately had two great comic strips, the short-lived "Hapless Harry" and the much more successful "Heathcliff."

Martini Jug Cartoonist

A reader sent these scans of a martini jug and asked if I could identify the artist. The style is a late fifties early sixties "modern" style, in the sense that the minimal style used is similar to Hanna Barbara or UPA’s minimal style.

What I find interesting is that the drawings are of photographers, writers and press reporters, which suggests that it may have been connected in some way with a newspaper. It may have even originated as a staff Christmas gift.

Another source that suggests itself is that it may have been originally produced and sold through one of the men's magazines like True or Argosy who manufactured quite a few drinking items with cartoons adorning them. However those were usually done by big-name popular cartoonists like Virgil Partch who are immediately identifiable.

I can't say I recognize the artist but perhaps someone well versed in gag cartoonists of the period may be able to identify him (or her). Anyone?

*Photos by Bruce Ramsay

The Ray and The Black Condor

One more book lugged out of the old closet. Special Edition Series 2, The Ray and The Black Condor, by Lou Fine, Reed Crandall, and others, 1974. Special Edition Reprints, Inc., East Moline, Illinois. Introduction by James Steranko.

I still consider this the best reprint volume ever published although the quality of the reproduction is only one step above a photocopy. In 1974 I had only seen some of Fine’s cover artwork in Steranko’s History of Comics. DC comics also ran a few color stories as backups in one of their Giants. It’s a large book and reprints 316 pages of Quality art from the forties Crack Comics and Smash Comics in sequence.

The Lou Fine portrait below is from a trade card set “Famous Comic Book Creators” ©1992 Eclipse Enterprises. Fine’s cover work was also heavily featured in Comic Images handsome card set The Golden Age of Comics All-Chromium.

Rocky and Bullwinkle

“We have two peasants whom we keep bound in the basement. Every once in awhile we drag them out and beat them. They come up with very funny material.” -- Jay Ward

Rocky and His Friends, (1959-1961) produced by Jay Ward and Bill Scott, hit the air in November of 1959 on ABC. Jay Ward created the first TV cartoon series, Crusader Rabbit. Scott was a former writer on Mr. Magoo, Gerald Mc-Boing-Boing and Bugs Bunny. The scripts were prepared in Hollywood but the animation plant was situated in Mexico City and employed 70 people. “It’s like the story of the talking dog,” said Scott, “The wonder is not what it says, but that it talks at all.”

Voices were handled by Edward Everett Horton, Hans Conried, William Conrad, Marvin Miller, Don Knotts, and Louis Nye, as well as two of the most talented “voice men” in animation, Daws Butler and Paul Frees. June Foray voiced both Rocky and his nemesis Natasha Fatale. Bill Scott was the foghorn voice of the most popular character Bullwinkle J. Moose.

The use of topical Cold War humor made Rocky and Bullwinkle a stand out among such innocuous fare as Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw and Beany & Cecil. When the show (retitled The Bullwinkle Show) moved to NBC (1961-1964) and prime-time the networks sponsors clashed with Ward and Scott, telling the exasperated duo that “You can’t kid the Army, Navy, Marines, box tops, or any racial, cultural or religious group.” The problems started with the first prime-time show, in which the Bullwinkle puppet told the audience that if the knobs on their sets were removed the sets would stay tuned to that channel until next weeks episode. The network was inundated with complaints from parents whose offspring had followed instructions.

On July 23, 1962 Rocky and Bullwinkle tackled the newspaper comics in a daily illustrated by Al Kilgore. Kilgore, like Mr. Magoo’s cartoonist Pete Alvorado, worked in animation and on various comic books for Western Publishing Co. Kilgore designed the crest for The Sons of the Desert, a club set up to honor comedians Laurel and Hardy. The crest carried the club’s motto in Latin, “Two Minds Without a Single Thought.”

The Nearsighted Mr. Magoo

The nearsighted Mr. Magoo began his career in 1948 in “Ragtime Bear,” which was followed by a long series of short cartoons from UPA. He appeared in shorts, a full length feature, commercials and public service films. Magoo won an Oscar for his creators in 1954 for “When Magoo Flew” and 1956 for “Magoo’s Puddle Jumper.”

A one hour musical special, “Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol,” had such high ratings that a half-hour series, “The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo” was produced for NBC-TV in 1964 with “the greatest writers in the world” on board. “Famous Adventures” featured Magoo in classics by Rudyard Kipling, Miguel de Cervantes, Alexandre Dumas and Herman Melville. Magoo played Friar Tuck, Long John Silver and D’Artagnan.

A comic strip began on 7 December 1964 and was drawn by animator Pete Alvarado (1920-2003) with assistants. The jokes were nothing special but Alvarado was a thorough professional and it showed in the great art and layouts. Jim Backus (“Rebel without a Cause,” “Gilligan's Island”) was the voice of Mr. Magoo.

William Giles Baxter (1856-1888)

William Giles Baxter was born in 1856 in the South of Ireland of English parents. His father failed at establishing a factory for making of starch from potatoes and the family moved to America. They soon returned to England where his father died. Baxter was apprenticed to a Manchester architect but left after his indenture period was over. At twenty-one he published a series of lithographed pictures called “Buxton Sketches.”

In 1877, in Manchester, he was hired by publisher J. A. Christie to illustrate and edit a local comic weekly entitled Comus (afterwards altered to Momus) which featured a number of portraits of life-sized heads called “Studies from Dickens.” Momus lasted until 1882 and Baxter moved to London where he produced political and humorous Christmas cards for the market with a partner Alfred Gray. His cartoons began appearing in Judy; or, the London Serio-comic Journal in 1883 and he was tapped to produce Ally Sloper cartoons for Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday in July 1884, cartoons which won him a large following.

Baxter seceded from Half-Holiday and in conjunction with Sloper creator Charles Henry Ross started a short-lived comic journal called Choodle, and was joint publisher and cartoonist on Charles Ross’s Variety Paper in 1887. He died 22 June 1888 of consumption and was buried at Kensal Green cemetery. He was 32 years old.

J. A. Shepherd

Famed animal caricaturist James Affleck Shepherd was born 29 November 1866 in London. One of his teachers was Alfred Bryan, the Judy caricaturist. He was introduced to the Punch audience in the 1894 “Punch Almanac.” J. A. Shepherd was a regular contributor of illustrations to the Strand Magazine. He illustrated “Zig Zags at the Zoo” in 1894, “Zig Zag Fables” in 1897, “The Story of Chanticleer” in 1913, “Uncle Remus” in 1921, and “Songs of the Birds” in 1922. A portrait and short biography are at Illustrators of the Strand.

Carolyn Rodgers sent along this image from an old Bible found in Hamilton, Illinois which compared to Sheppard's signature on the comic above looks suspiciously alike. I don't know if Shepherd was ever in America but a descendant may have brought the Bible over the ocean.