Tag Archives: comic strips

The Saturday Comics: Buster Brown

17 Sep

September 17, 2011

Today Buster Brown is known as the shoe company with the old-fashioned cartoon kid and his dog as their mascot. However, it is an amazing example of merchandising and product placement going back to 1904.

From wiki: Buster Brown was a comic strip character created in 1902 by Richard Felton Outcault which was known for his association with the Brown Shoe Company. (The name “Buster” came either directly or indirectly from the popularity of Buster Keaton, then a child actor in vaudeville.)

This mischievous young boy was loosely based on a boy near Outcault’s home in Flushing, New York. His physical appearance, including the pageboy haircut, was utilized by Outcault and later adopted by Buster Brown. The actual boy’s name was Granville Hamilton Fisher, son of Charles and Anna Fisher of Flushing. The family subsequently moved to Amityville, New York where Charles Fisher ran a real estate and insurance business on Merrick Road. Granville operated a phonograph and radio sales and repair shop across the street from his father until his sudden death in 1936.

Yes, that is based on a real person.

I can’t say I am a fan of the strip but it was extremely popular in its day. (Please click on it to enlarge. It is a little sketchy.)

However, I am a huge fan of this particular strip, which is based on the fact that they merchandised the Hell out of Buster Brown. The way The Simpsons were everywhere at the height of their popularity is pretty much how Buster Brown was back then. And here, well-over 100 years later, he is still used by Buster Brown shoes. The following strip is hysterical because on the one hand it is poking fun at all the Buster Brown merchandise but at the same time it is an amazing advertisement for all the Buster Brown merchandise. Pokemon cartoons are nothing more than half-hour advertisements for Pokemon but this beat it by a century.

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The Saturday Comics: Ben Casey by Neal Adams

10 Sep

September 10, 2011

Ben Casey was a TV medical drama that ran from 1961 to 1966. It was one of the most popular shows of the time and was referenced or parodied everywhere from popular music (“Callin’ Dr. Casey” by John D. Loudermilk) to The Flintstones. (“Monster Fred” from season five with Doctor Len Frankenstone, who switched Fred’s brain for Dino’s. Gotta love The Flintstones.)

When I was young I saw a couple of episodes and today it is, as far as I can tell, not broadcast anywhere. It is just another old TV show. But this is The Saturday Comics, not The Saturday Old TV Shows. So why am I talking about Ben Casey?

That’s why.

That’s a great piece of Neal Adams art, and he did it daily on the Ben Casey comic strip.

If you don’t know Neal Adams, feel free to turn in your pop culture badge now and walk away.

Some bits of his wikipedia bio:

Neal Adams is an American comic book and commercial artist known for helping to create some of the definitive modern imagery of the DC Comics characters Superman, Batman, and Green Arrow; as the co-founder of the graphic design studio Continuity Associates; and as a creators-rights advocate who helped secure a pension and recognition for Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

Adams was inducted into the Eisner Award’s Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1998, and the Harvey Awards’ Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1999.

Green Lantern/Green Arrow and “relevant comics”

Continuing to work for DC Comics during this sojourn, while also contributing the occasional story to Warren Publishing’s black-and-white horror-comics magazines (including the Don Glut-scripted “Goddess from the Sea” in Vampirella #1, Sept. 1969), Adams had his first collaboration on Batman with writer Dennis O’Neil. The duo would later revitalize the character with a series of noteworthy stories reestablishing Batman’s dark, brooding nature and taking the books away from the campy look and feel of the 1966-68 ABC TV series. For now, however, they would do only two stories, “The Secret of the Waiting Graves” in Detective Comics #395 (Jan. 1970) and “Paint a Picture of Peril” in issue #397 (March 1970), with a short Batman backup story, written by Mike Friedrich, coming in-between, in Batman #219 (Feb. 1970). Batman’s enduring makeover would come later, after Adams and O’Neil’s celebrated and, for the time, controversial revamping of the longstanding DC characters Green Lantern and Green Arrow.

Rechristening Green Lantern vol. 2 as Green Lantern/Green Arrow with issue #76 (April 1970), O’Neil and Adams teamed these two very different superheroes in a long story arc in which the characters undertook a social-commentary journey across America. A major exemplar of what the industry and the public at the time called “relevant comics”, the landmark run began with the 23-page story “No Evil Shall Escape My Sight” and continued to ” …And through Him Save a World” in the series’ finale, #89 (May 1972). Wrote historian Ron Goulart. These angry issues deal with racism, overpopulation, pollution, and drug addiction.

Here is a sample of his amazing Batman covers, featuring issues from my own collection.

He didn’t take the easy way out with Ben Casey either.

Comics historian Maurice Horn said the strip “did not shrink from tackling controversial problems, such as heroin addiction, illegitimate pregnancy, and attempted suicide. These were usually treated in soap opera fashion … but there was also a touch of toughness to the proceedings, well rendered by Adams in a forceful, direct style that exuded realism and tension and accorded well with the overall tone of the strip”.

So feast on Neal Adams’ craft on the Ben Casey strip, a craft which is almost too good for a daily newspaper comic.

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