Saturday, May 29, 2010

 

Herriman Saturday

Saturday, November 16 1907

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According to the USC record books, USC defeated the USS Colorado team 16-4 the previous day. The game only drew 1,200 fans.

USC's schedule that year featured two games against Los Angeles High School, three lopsided wins over Whittier Reform Santa Ana High School, and Whittier, and against the USS Colorado. Their only loss that year was to LA High School on Christmas Day (Can you imagine that happening today?)
 
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Friday, May 28, 2010

 

Stripper's Guide Video: Removing Clippings from Old Scrapbooks Parts 2 and 3

Here is the rest of the video:

Removing Clippings from Old Scrapbooks Part 2
Removing Clippings from Old Scrapbooks Part 3 

For part 1 click here.

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You wrapped this topic up very well, Allan. I gasped a bit when you put those old scrapbook pages in the sink and ran water on them, but I have to admit that when you laid them on the table and sprayed them with Spic n' Span (?), my interest really peaked and I was impressed with your restoration technique. Newspaper is a lot more durable than it's cracked up to be. Are you using the Spic n' Span spray starch for laundry? Is that what puts the sizing back in the newspaper? 1930's telephone book collectors might have use for the pages you discarded after removing the comics! I wonder how soaking would work with rubber cement, Lepage's glue or Elmer's glue? Enjoyed the video! Mark Kausler
 
Hi Mark --
The spray is Magic Sizing, available at your local grocery store.

I, too, gasped the first time I heard of a restorer putting newspapers in water, thinking that they'd just fall apart. Not so, not so!

So far I've only had a few glued scrapbooks that gave me any appreciable trouble. Of course there's no telling what glue was used so the only option is to do a test. If it turns out that you can't remove the clippings because the glue doesn't dissolve, you really haven't lost anything because you can dry that test page and slip it back into the scrapbook.

As I said in the video, I would never buy a scrapbook and go to all this work unless the material was really rare.

--Allan
 
Marvelous stuff, Allan. Thanks.
 
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Thursday, May 27, 2010

 

Stripper's Guide Video: Removing Clippings from Old Scrapbooks Part 1 of 3

This winter I got the idea to try creating a video for the blog. It turned out to be about 1000% more work than I thought it would be, and when I got it all done I had no end of problems using Camtasia to produce the final video. I finally shelved the project in disgust at the awful results.

Then just a few days ago someone wrote to me with some questions about removing comics from scrapbooks, which is the subject of the video. So I decided to take another swing at it, and I do seem to have gotten it to work -- it's not beautiful by any means, but, hey, you get what you pay for here at Stripper's Guide.

I haven't figured out how to embed the video in a Blogger post, so please click on the link to see part one:

Removing Clippings from Old Scrapbooks -- Part 1 of 3

If anyone has suggestions for embedding the video here, or has problems viewing it, please let me know.

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Very nice opening video, Allan. I couldn't figure out how to blow it up to screen size, which would make it easier to view. It would be nice to work on an occasional close-up, just to break up the one-camera look of the piece. I'm looking forward to parts two and three, as I have a lot of old comic scrapbooks, some of which should be taken apart. Of course, the pages could be scanned and saved digitally too. You look very young for someone with so much knowledge about ancient comic strips! Thanks, Mark Kausler
 
Hi Mark --
The size of the video is unfortunate. I didn't realize the videocamera had different quality settings, and turned out I was using the lowest possible quality. Wasn't about to shoot it all over tho. What you see is full size.

... and thanks for the compliment. I sure don't feel any too young these days!

--Allan
 
Can you use HTML in a Blogger entry? If so, I'd stay away from Flash and drop the video in using the HTML 5 video tag. Doesn't work in older browsers, but Flash is on its way out, thanks to this new tag.
 
Hi Jeff -
While you can use HTML code in posts it has limitations, most of which are undocumented. I've read that people can have a lot of trouble posting videos on Blogger so figured I wasn't going to beat my head against that particular wall.

--Allan
 
Ack! This is a topic I'm desperately interested in, but the video link does not seem to be working. Is there any way I can view a copy of these three videos? Thanks for making these videos, and thanks for any help in fixing the broken link! --Joe
 
Ack! This is a topic I'm desperately interested in, but the video link does not seem to be working. Is there any way I can view a copy of these three videos? Thanks for making these videos, and thanks for any help in fixing the broken link! --Joe
 
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Tuesday, May 25, 2010

 

Obscurity of the Day: Little Chauncey

Little Chauncey was a talking baby, but as you can see from the samples, cartoonist Chase Craig didn't really capitalize on the idea. The baby just mouths punchlines appropriate for essentially any age. This series appeared sporadically in the Christian Science Monitor from October 18 1938 to May 16 1942.

Craig's CSM features could disappear for months on end, so presumably he was submitting them in between other jobs. His submissions slacked off to pretty much nil after the end of Little Chauncey, apparently finding himself all booked up as a scriptwriter at Western Publishing.

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Monday, May 24, 2010

 

Obscurity of the Day: Dumbell Dan

Stan MacGovern may not exactly be a household name, but to those who read the New York Post in the 1940s he was a star of the first magnitude. It was in those years that he produced the totally demented Silly Milly comic strip, which is still fondly remembered by a select few. The Post did try to syndicate the nutty strip but with practically zero success.

Although Silly Milly itself qualifies as an obscurity, today we're going to focus on a far more obscure MacGovern offering, Dumbell Dan. MacGovern produced this strip for Herald-Sun Features, the syndication arm of the New York Herald and New York Morning Sun, which the hated consolidator Frank Munsey merged in 1920 (the Sun name was dropped in 1924 when the Herald and the Tribune merged, so that syndication name came and went quickly).

MacGovern sold Dumbell Dan to the Sun-Herald when he was just eighteen years old, but his anarchic style of humor is already in evidence at that tender age. The gags are mostly joke book material but the zany drawings, full of rubber limbs and ass-over-teakettle takes, raise the material into a preview of great things to come. Dumbell Dan ran from March 6 1922 until at least November 1923.

Thanks to Cole Johnson for the samples.

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Hello, Allan---So did the N.Y.Sun go from being merged with the Herald, back to being an independant entity when the Herald felt the Tribuune a better mate?--Cole Johnson
 
The Morning Sun ceased to be. The Evening Sun continued on (renamed and switched to mornings I think). It's all very confoozing.

--Allan
 
The Sun's morning edition was killed off by Frank Munsey, the Grim Reaper of New York newspapers, in 1916, but the evening edition continued on until 1950, when the World-Telegram (another evening paper) bought it.
 
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Sunday, May 23, 2010

 

Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics

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