Bygone Wishes II

    Now in our last thrilling episode, we covered a forgotten postcard custom, that of sending postcards with pigs on them to wish someone a happy and prosperous new year.  I regret that we only scratched the surface  of the subject, as those pigs are legion, and could be found engaged in dozens of different activities, from opening champagne bottles at midnight to having their smiling heads served on a platter.  How this all signified the same good wishes is beyond me, but I did say it was a forgotten custom, didn’t I/

     Postcards also brought me to an awareness of another holiday tradition which is not so much forgotten as less worldwide in nature.  And that is sending good wishes to your friends on April Fool’s Day  The first of April served as a combination first day of spring and new Year’s Day for much of the world, a day when the winter underwear could be discarded and nice clothes could be worn again.  (In some parts of the world, this was considered foolhardy.  In England, as noted in the oft-censored poem, the first of May is considered more springlike.)  For generations, people celebrated New year’s Day on or around March 25, and there are tales that when certain kings ordered their people to celebrate the first of January as New Year’s Day, the poor souls put on their best spring clothes and went out to dance and were mowed down by the hundreds by frostbite.  This is not, apparently, where the whole April Fool’s custom came from, but it may have been a contributing factor.

    In any case, in France, the first of April included both practical jokes AND good wishes, and both of these involved fish.  Fish became so inseparable from April 1 that to this day, if you fall for a joke on that day, you will not hear “April Fool!” but instead “{posspn d’April!” or “April Fish!  The prankster may well tape a paper fish to your back as another sign of how you were fooled.”

    Fish, however,likre pigs, are considered a reliable food source, though, so they communicate good wishes as well.  Chocolate fish are a frequent gift on April 1, as are cookies or cakes which are similarly flounder-formed.  And, naturally, there had to be postcards.

    Fish and/or people on these cards indulged in a variety of escapades: fish were as likely to be seen canoeing as swimming, and people carried fish, created bouquets of fish, left fish as calling cards, caught fish, or cooked fish.  They seldom appeared on the cards actually eating the fish, though this favor was not returned by the fish

    Some of these cards could be grand and glorious art nouveau fantasy creations, or just salutes to the technology of the age.

    But more often, a deadpan acceptance of a surreal holiday was simply accepted.

    Children were often combined with fish, but sometimes even the most fake-looking fish seemed to displease them.  (The poem suggests the sender of the card is simply overcome with emotion at the thought of you.)

    At other times, they were proud of their errand.

    Or impressed with the sweetness of the sentiments.

    This is a mere sampling of the fish stories available on bygone April First cards.  As noted, the custom of Poissons d’April is still strong in France, though, as in other parts of the world, the postcards are far less common now./  But this is merely another example of what we lose with the passage of time.  It’s entirely natural, so it does no good to carp about it.

Bygone Wishes

    One of the things people do not talk about when studying serious history are the little pleasures and customs of life which have faded away.  This is left to people who write mere nostalgia: a loving look back on such disappearing pleasures as the key you had to use to open canned meat or those metal ice cube trays with the recalcitrant lever which might suddenly spread ice all over the kitchen…no, wait.  Those are ANNOYANCES of days gone by.  Still, that’s the sort of thing I mean.

    One of the customs I have observed in looking through aged postcards is that there used to be quite a busy custom of sending your friends cards wishing them luck at new Year’s.  This has faded away in part because the old style postal service, which could deliver your postcard across town and bring you a reply on the same day, is now gone.  Another is that with people spending a billion or so each year on Christmas cards, a New Year’s card seems superfluous, especially to those with hyper-extended bank accounts.

    Still, once upon a time, New Year’s was considered a much larger holiday than we consider it.  In some parts of the world, Christmas was considered a nice little holiday for the kids, while grown-ups had THEIR big day on new year’s.  It was a day for drinking, yes, as we observe it these days,

    but it was also a day for greeting your customers and creditors, and for dropping in to visit your friends.  There was a whole set of rules for what the hair color of the first person to cross your doorstep on new Year’s meant.  And above all else, it was a day for wishing each other good luck in the year to come.

    So New Year’s postcards are generally laden with good luck symbols, some of which we recognize today—four-leaf clovers or horseshoes—and some of which make us blink—chimney sweeps (think Mary Poppins) or black cats.  And above all else, there were pigs.

    To our ancestors, many of whom lived far closer to the land than we even understand now, a pig was a sign of prosperity.  A pig was like a savings account: you put things into it and eventually you reaped a profit in bacon, ham, and other useful comestibles. 

    The pigs on the postcards don’t seem to KNOW this.  They are perfectly happy bringing good luck to all, whether they arrive on foot, on a sled, on an airplane, or on a zeppelin.  (There are cards where jovial souls are dropping horseshoes and shamrocks AND pigs from airships, without thought of bringing anyone anything but luck.

    Luck and/or prosperity are intended by all these postcard greetings.  Some of these children, by the way, seem to have made their living posing with pigs, intoxicated or otherwise, and somewhere there were apparently artists who did good business in papier-mache pigs.  Millions of these pigs were distributed in the first decades of this century, and in some parts of Europe, the custom continued until postcards themselves started to fade away in the 1970s.  A piggy grazing among fly agaric mushrooms and/or piles of gold, was the perfect announcement that 1941 was here, and all would be smooth sailing for the coming year.

Swizzle or Swag

    I was going to write about something completely different today, but I was transfixed by one of those momentous question which can change a country’s entire culture.  You know the sort of thing: the little spur of the moment butterfly cough that can derail whole civilizations and send them spiralling toward doom or greatness.

    So why do some mixed drinks have to include a paper umbrella?

    Yes, I know.  You are amazed that someone who spends most of his time on trivia about Dutch kids on postcards could tackle a philosophical point of such magnitude.  But every now and then you have to push the boat into deep waters.  (Water not necessarily being the point here, of course.)

    A few people seem to feel that the umbrella, often seen in drinks consumed in a beachfront area, provide important shade for the beverage.  A lot of these drinks are chilled, and/or contain ice cubes, so naturally you want to keep the sun off them.  That doesn’t exactly work, of course, because what’s melting the ice is the heat around the glass: your sweaty palms or the humid atmosphere.  A few other people pooh-pooh the whole ice cube theory, saying that the umbrella provides a cover to keep alcohol fumes from evaporating too quickly.  In this theory, the fumes are forced back down into the beverage enhancing the booze content.  Food scientists love this theory: they didn’t think anybody could come up with something sillier than the ice cube theory.

    An expert I asked about this said, “They have umbrellas because they have tropical names.”  There’s a lot of sense to this.  The paper umbrella business boomed about the same time the tiki craze swept the nation, though this involves us in a separate debate over what constitutes a tiki drink.  A tiki drink, according to purists, must be primarily rum and tropical fruit juice.  And, to make it worse, some tiki drinks are served with umbrellas and some are not, while some drinks with umbrellas do not fit the definition of tiki drink.  None of this negates the original thought, however: tropical drink equals umbrella.

    Another theory makes it a simple marketing tool to get women to come to bars.  The old style neighborhood bar was a men’s establishment, according to this theory.  Women and even children might show up, but only to buy beer to take home for the family.  Only men hung around the bar drinking until all hours, and a number of bartenders realized they could double the take if women could be coaxed into the place.  (Or tripled, as men who didn’t want to go to bars to drink might show up to meet women.)  What would bring women into these rugged all-male spots with spittoons on the floor and pig’s knuckles on the free ,lunch counter?  Why, little paper umbrellas, of course!  So in the 1930s, a bunch of bars got together and decided….I am still getting my head around this story, and I will get back to you when I figure it out.  Mind you, there IS a belief that any drink with an umbrella in it is a Girlie Drink.  It’s the fruit juice.)

    My personal favorite is the theory that the umbrella is there as a hiding place for the Tiki Drink Demon, who hides there and whispers “It’s full of fruit juice!  It’s healthy!  You’re getting healthy food with your alcohol.  Better get another one!”  Some purveyors of this theory suggest the demon is really the spirit of Don the beachcomber or Trader Vic, whichever one of those gentlemen you feel is the inventor of the umbrella-clad beverage.

    You can, of course, probably come up with an alternate theory that beats all of these.  Don’t just make one up, though.  Making up stories about paper umbrellas is a shady proposition.  (Sorry.  I get giddy when away from the postcards.)

The Yocks of Yesteryear

    While I am waiting around for customers to make use of my new consulting firm, I would like to establish my claim to be an evaluator of old pop culture things.  There must be plenty of people out there whose grandfather left them a stack of old books, or old newspaper clippings, or old magazines, and needs someone to come in and say “Yeah, those are prime recyclables” or “Do you realize you have a copy of the very first Bazooka Joe joke?”  Buy how would they know that uncle Blogsy knows his way around such stuff?

    So I thought I would just offer some more of my expertise as a student of really old jokes.  I gave been told that I am a specialist in these, even though I have not sought such acclaim.  (This acclaim, if you’ve never heard it, generally comes in the form of groans.  Weird sort if applause, but part of my job is knowing a tribute when I hear it.”

    We went into this just a little in our last outing, when we considered the joke craze which followed General MacArthur’s famous speech.  His quotation of “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away” led to the postcards we examined last time around, dealing with “Old Fishermen Never Die: They Just Smell That Way.”  But this was merely one of many, as pointed out at the time.  We would learn, as the years went by, that “Old Bartenders Never Die; They Just Tap Out”, “Old Pilots Never Die; They Just Move to a Higher Plane,” and even “Joan Crawford never died; She Just Faye Dunaway.”

    This was hardly the only joke craze to sweep the country.  Another one, though it can be traced to Shakespeare if you want to go to those lengths, really hit us at some point during the Great Depression, and has been depressing people ever since.  This was the Knock Knock joke, to which Captain Kangaroo gave a serious boost on his television show.  This requires a person who will play along, doing the second and fourth, or straight lines of such classics as “Knock Knock.  Who’s there?  Little Old lady.  Little Old lady Who?  I didn’t know you could yodel!”  Some of these rise to great narrative power, as in the Captain’s “Knock Knock.  Who’s there?  Ira.  Ira Who?  Ira ceived a gift from sister: it’s a duck that doesn’t quack.”  “Knock Knock.  Who’s there?  Herbert.  Herbert Who?  Well herbertday is tomorrow and I’m gonna give it back.”

    Wikipedia cites the L.N. Becker Company and its 1960s trading cards for nearly bringing on the downfall of the republic with a set of fifty trading cards bearing what they called “Elephant Jokes”.  The populace had no defense against being trampled by these, which aimed at sheer absurdity.  To this day, if you ask a friend, “How do you tell if an elephant is hiding in your refrigerator?” and explain “By the footprints in the mayonnaise.” they will sigh and turn away, knowing there is no support program for such as you.  If you’re lucky, someone will ask you “How do you get an elephant in your refrigerator?” and go on to say, before you can, “You just move the bowl of Jell-O to the second shelf”.  You have at least found a fellow elephantist.

   These jokes were aimed at all audiences, but there were other joke fads which were aimed more directly at the adult market (not TOO adult, as radio and television censors had their ears open,.)  Talk shows and comedians of the 1960s gave us the Cocktail Joke.  “It’s called a Heretic Cocktail.  Drink one and you get stoned.”  I find very few of these on the Interwebs, so this craze has possibly gone into remission, and no one claims to have originated them, but Johnny Carson and his cronies were probably responsible for plenty of them.  “It’s called the Corpse Cocktail.  Drink one and you’re laid out.”  I DID see someone post online “It’s the Johnson and Johnson Vaccine Cocktail.  You only need one shot.” but I don’t know if that shows this particular epidemic is on its way back.

    Also popular among the stand-up crowd was the wind-up doll joke.  I expect this has gone the way of wind-up toys and other pre-electronic playthings, but once it was everywhere.  “It’s the new Liz Taylor doll.  Wind it up and it gets married.”  “It’s a Teddy Kennedy doll.  Wind it up and it runs…for president.”  Sometimes, following technology, it turned into a pull the string doll, but the pull-the-string doll has also gone the way of all magic dragons.  Though once again, some sentimental old jokester did post “It’s the new Donald Trump doll.  Wind it up and it tells you you didn’t.”

    We haven’t even scratched the Little Willie joke, or the psychiatrist joke, , or…well, I see by the green around your gills that you’ve had enough, so I will pause until you’ve recovered.  After all, old jokesters never die; they just gag.

Fish Story

    Seventy years ago this spring, general Douglas MacArthur made his famous address to Congress, in which he reminded everyone that “Old Soldiers never die.  They just fade away.”  Though he was not the first to express the thought (it apparently comes from a song parody of around World War I) he made it his own in the drama of the moment.  AND he set off a joke craze.  Soon the world was filled with one liners based on it: “Old librarians never diel; they just check out” and “Old pilots never die; they ascend to a higher plane.”

    Since I had a record number of likes on my column comparing the postcard cartoonists and the unfortunate cow (I do not say a record HIGH number) I thought we might look at a few renditions of a gag which spread everywhere in the 1950s.  (If you check Wikipedia for information about the phrase “Old Soldiers, etc.”, this joke is specifically mentioned among those inspired by MacArthur.  I don’t suppose he’d feel flattered.)

    This version is prosaic, a mere picture of a fisherman about his crusade to save the world from being overpopulated by small fish.  He has not shaved in a few days, and he is wearing patched garments, but otherwise, there is nothing to emphasize the caption.

    This is no problem here.  We have added emanata, and now there is an audience to let us know exactly what they mean.  Having our onlooker (onsmeller?) be a skunk means we are receiving an expert opinion.  The fisherman himself is rather tidy, though: patched knees, perhaps, but otherwise rather trim and shipshape (dockshape?  How many words are we allowed to create in one column?)

    You will note that these happy fishermen do not have a LOT to show for their work.  This vacationer is happy to catch anything at all, and his kitten seems to feel his boots smell more interesting than those teeny fish just above her head.

    Of course, you don’t HAVE to catch anything big; this is another fisherman with a small catch who is explaining about the one who got away.  His puppy, however, again finds his boots smell more interesting than the actual fish he did catch.

    Now THIS fisherman is doing it right.  He is attracting flies, and repulsing a skunk, who is doing his best to get off this postcard.  Meanwhile, the cat has taken such an interest in the proceedings that he has devoured the first course of his fish dinner, and is thinking about the next.

    THIS fishing gentleman, however, obviously takes the gold in this competition.  Both a skunk and an outhouse are declaring his supremacy in the Stench Olympics, while the sun itself seems to have a clothespin on its nose, and flowers are wilting as he passes.  His shirt is missing a chunk, his pants are held up by a rope, and his hat and shoes have seen better days.  He has a catch he can be proud of, so much so that he isn’t going to tuck it away in a creel but carry it over his back, so the sun can bear down on it and impress his scruffy shirt with its odor.

    I have looked around the Interwebs, and I find that this joke has not faded away just yet, and although it is less available on modern postcards (modern postcards themselves being less available) you can find the sentiment on T-Shirts, coffee mugs, wall plaques, and bumper stickers.  And if you think these olfactory salutes are as distasteful as the joke about the unfortunate cow, at LEAST they developed THIS one, and not its competition “Old Fisherman never Die: They Just Can’t Raise Their Rod.”

Go Fourth

    If I have scared away my readership with the previous blogs this week, I now have a nice private moment to do something I was fairly certain I would never do.  There will thus be no witnesses, giving me plausible deniability if someone says “I saw you were reminiscing about the Fourth of July.”

    People start reminiscing about Christmases past about the time they hit twelve (Hey, remember when at least half your presents would be NON-erlecronic?) and they start reminiscing about New year’s Eves past when they hit thirty (Man, I used to be able to start partying at noon New Year’s Eve and not get done ‘til dawn on the second!)  But for over fifty years, I have listened to people recall their Fourth of Julys and these were invariably REALLY OLD people.  I will thus record my own reminiscences now, before I get that old, and no one will notice.

    We did not have a red, white, and blue menu.  Blue raspberry drinks had not reached our part of the country, by and large, so blue was difficult,.  But we made up for it on red, with dinner-plate sized slices of watermelon (with seeds, which we did NOT spit).

    We were always in the high school band, so we would dress in white T-shirts, red bandanas, and blue jeans and march through town.  This was a personal problem, as I gave up jeans as soon as I was old enough to make my feelings count. (See, back in those days, denim had to be broken in by wearing it, and until you’d worn it a dozen times or so, it was the consistency of a fiberglass board. I eventually owned ONE pair of denim jeans, just for Independence Day.)

   Our personal fireworks were limited to sparklers and occasionally a pointless object called a snake, which, when lit, expanded into a long black ropelike thing.  Sparklers, involving personal interaction with live fire, were way more exciting.  My mother handled fire anxieties at Christmas (Did you water the tree?  Don’t leave the lights on too long) but my father was in charge of that concession on the Fourth of July.  His main concern was the whereabouts of the family cat.  A few sparks could be the stuff of nightmares.  This never happened.  The family cats were a wise breed, and never came anywhere near us when we were waving fire around.  (I believe home movies exist of us trying to make stars and spell our names with sparklers, but like a lot of holiday doings, these were a lot more exciting to perform than to watch later on.

    Fireworks outside we rook for granted.  We didn’t need to get in the car to watch them; they came to us.  Our house was not far from the fairgrounds and our neighbors across the street had thoughtfully arranged their roofs and trees so as to frame the fireballs perfectly in the sky.

    There was SOME drama to the fireworks, as PBS came to town in my formative years, and there was invariably some big Fourth of July concert just at the time we would all be outside watching fireworks.  This was before the days of YouTube or even, really, the VCR, so if you missed either the live fireworks or the live television concert, you had missed it for goods.  This could call for frantic commutes from the living room to the front steps.

    During what I laughingly refer to as my maturity, the Fourth became just a day off in the last month toward the massive book festival I worked at the end of July: I concocted maps and lists while I watched The Longest Day (if these guys could manage to pull off D-Day, I could take care of a little shindig like ours.)  It made for a quiet weekend, sometimes the last quiet one before the fireworks of the Book Fair.

    This year I am planning to watch the Longest Day, and listen to the fireworks from my window.  My refrigerator would not even hold a watermelon these days, and I’m not sure I could, either.  The last sparklers I saw had been used as bookmarks, and I quickly tossed them away before library security could go on a search for explosives in the rest of the book donation.       

    But I certainly wish anybody out there a Fourth of July you can reminisce about when you are much, much older than I am now.

Such Is Life

    “Mister Farmer!  Mister Farmer!  How is it that your cow there has no horns?”

    “Well, Ma’am, cows and their horns are an interesting subject.  Sometimes a cow never grows horns at all.  The scientists are still working on why: it may be the Good Lord just never meant that cow to have ‘em.  Sometimes an animal is just so aggressive we have to remove the horns for the safety of everyone involved.  And sometimes a couple of animals will get to fighting, or there’ll be an accident, and one horn is damaged.  So we have to remove the other horn or just leave the cow to walk with its head lopsided.  Now, that particular cow doesn’t have any horns, Ma’am, because it happens to be a horse.”

    Our ancestors were more familiar with the animals than we are, simply because the line between city life and country life was not so finely drawn for them.  Plenty of city families kept animals around the place, and the rich, who didn’t need to keep a goat in order to get fresh milk, had country estates where they could learn what it was like to be nipped by a horse or have a foot stepped on by a cow. 

    There are hundreds of cow jokes on postcards out there in the world, and you may wonder why I headed the column with a rather distasteful one.  Well, it happens to be one of the most popular cow jokes around: something even a city slicker might understand at once.  I’m not sure that justifies…well, look what I found once I looked around.

    The cow at the top of this column seems simply to be thinking of the pity of it all, but not every animal in the gallery is so accepting.  This lass seems more angry than anything else: either she suspects someone of sneaking up behind her or she has just realized what has happened and is snapping at YOU for thinking anything is wrong in YOUR life.

    Whereas Bossy here is simply consumed with self-pity.  (Entirely understandable, as the artist has given her a pig’s ears and snout.)

    Old Bess is in the same pit of self-pity as her predecessor, but SHE had to cope with a cartoonist who wasn’t quite sure what a cow’s mouth looked like.

    The black and white postcard cartoonists tend to be basic: if their publisher couldn’t afford color, they wouldn’t pay for a lot of frills, either.  But at least this one could draw a mournful cow.

    This is the only concerned cow I’ve found with a sympathetic human onlooker, and I would like to know what was in the artist’s mind when he had this shapely farmer’s daughter leaning forward so her own…next slide, please.

    Back to full color, we find our cows getting more frantic: this one, I expect, because she’s so much TALLER than the others.

    Tears become more plentiful, and mouths are open wider as our cows object to the mindless cruelty of happenstance.  (By the way, just about every cattle raiser I ever knew used the word “cows” almost exclusively.  One told me, “We only call ‘em ‘cattle’ if we’re filling in government forms or throwing the bull ay a Cattleman’s Conference.”)

    We also see our herd becoming more cartoony, as in this case, where Mignonette here has had her problems made worse by her really huge feet.

    Whereas Mootilda, if you can tear your eyes from the basic joke, has truly impressive ears and tail tuft.

    And Buttercup has the head and physique of a Great Dane, which makes her predicament that much more painful.

    When it comes to trouble waiting to happen, and the symbol of what occurs in our daily lives, though, my vote is for Notelsie here.  She has tried to improve herself: those glasses help her when she goes to the library, and she’s obviously put in time at the gym.  For she is the only one of our cows who has stepped unfortunately with a forefoot, and not a hind hoof.  I am impressed by this cartoonist’s attention to detail, and wonder if he is commenting on life in another way, as his ambitious heroine is in serious pain, while his signature seems to form the handle of a farm implement which is at peace, content to be a hoe

    (“Mister Blogger, Mister Blogger, that last joke was a misstep.

    “That was the theme of the column, Ma’am.”

Four Cheap Old Comic Books III

    So It’s taken long enough to get here, and I warned you we won’t be studying the contents of any of them, but I just wanted to let you know what happened when I obtained, and actually read, these four Tijuana Bibles I found online.

    As a brief recap, and to bore you further, Tijuana Bibles are pornographic comic books produced between the 1930s and 1960s, generally the size of a postcard with eight cheaply reproduced pages between cheaply printed construction paper covers.  They frequently, though not always, exploited the names of celebrities, especially people whose names you’d have recognized from the movies or the newspaper comics pages.  (Those of you who just asked “What’s a newspaper?” or “What’s a comics page?” will stay after class for extra homework.)

    The first of the four is “Kathrine Hepbern in ‘Belle of the Hills”.  Spelling a celebrity’s name wrong is basic practice in any kind of parody, and it should not take you long to figure out this is supposed to involve movie icon Katharine Hepburn.  I have not traced a movie or play of hers that I can link with “Belle of the Hills”, but this has nothing to do, as far as I can tell, with what goes on in the book.  And neither does Katharine Hepburn, for that matter.  The face on the cover doesn’t look much like the great Kate at any point in her career, but somebody worked on it.  The pictures in side are basically just showing a man and a woman talking way too much about the eight different sexual positions they try out.  The chances that this was a generic couple and someone tried to increase sales by putting this cover on it strikes me as highly likely.

    This is not a possibility with “Patsy Kelly Gets Shot in the Ass With Romance”, a somewhat less subtle title than that used on most of the dirty little eight-pagers, which often tried to look as blameless as possible on the cover.  Here someone actually has made an effort to get the face of the celebrity right, and a little extra work went into the illustrations, in which the usual eight sex positions are presented with a little more flair, the dialogue shows a bit of wit, and the man is actually himself presented as a celebrity, the role being awarded to Ray Milland.  Ray Milland was a Hollywood stalwart and, by the by, one of those actors who was married to the same wife for over fifty years.  For those unfortunate enough to have missed her movies, Patsy Kelly was a stand-out second banana in motion pictures, frequently the only interesting character in many films, playing the wisecracking best friend, wisecracking waitress, wisecracking nurse, wisecracking secretary, etc.  She noted, in retirement (and film historians agree) that one of the two handicaps which kept her from making it as an A list comedian was her sex life, which was not much like the one depicted here.

    I hope the world has not descended far enough into the new century for me to have to explain the celebrities copied in “Thee Men In a Girl with the Marx Bros.”  This features eight scenes of a cartoon version of Groucho performing eight different ways with his unnamed co-star.  Chico moves in in one panel, and Harpo in another, but that’s the extent of their participation.  It should be noted that both of these brothers appear with their hats on, the cartoonist obviously feeling that only Groucho would be recognizable if completely naked.  (The face is easily worth using in other venues, though his cigar does not make an appearance.)  The dialogue makes an attempt to be worthy of Groucho, and works out pretty much the way it works whenever somebody tries to write Groucho dialogue.

    The foregoing may not lead you to expect much from “Peter B. Everhard presents Moon Mullins in ‘Help!’”  It is by far the best of the lot, however.  Maybe it wasn’t so difficult to draw Moon Mullins, who was a nationally known comic strip character, but this cartoonist has copied him very well.  Furthermore, there is a STORY: Moon approaches an exotic dancer performing in a circus side show and makes a proposition.  This is, in fact, exactly something the real Moon Mullins might have done.  A former professional boxer down on his luck, he spent a lot of his time in his comic strip ogling good-looking women and being rejected by them.  The cooch dancer, to giver her the title which would have been used at the time, feels a two dollar offer is decent pay, this being the Depression, and they retire to a back room where they spend the rest of the pages of the story having sex and insulting each other roundly.  (The prostitute and the customer who insult each other is a standard comedy routine, with two recorded versions in existence from the 1880s.)  This leads to one final payoff joke in the end (showing both partners dissatisfied) and the whole thing would actually have made for a complete Moon Mullins Sunday comic, in some other dimension.

    In all four books, the main interest nowadays are the celebrity impersonations by line drawing equivalents.  The sex, though graphic and  various, is not AS graphic or various as what you could find in three minutes on the Interwebs.  It’s nsfw and only for audiences we unblinkingly call “mature”, but hardly likely to distract someone who reads adult comics online.  Here and there competence sneaks in, though.  I don’t know whether I could have made my way through all fourteen I originally bid on, and there are, after all, hundreds of titles.

     By the way, to save time, a friend of mine has already sold these for me on the Interwebs, with the price realized by Patsy Kelly alone tripling what I spent to buy the four.  Good luck with your garage sale hunting.

Four Cheap Old Comic Books II

    As you will recall from our last thrilling episode, I was going to tell you about some wildly collectible comic books I turned up after years of wondering if I would ever own, if temporarily, any comic books people were thirsting for.  Then I got bogged down in discussing the theory of collecting things, condensing A. Edward Newton’s suggestion that you should collect things you like, so you’ll be surrounded by nice things even if they never appreciate in value.  Buying something for resale, he suggested that you go in for stocks or land you never look at.  Since if you’re planning to sell it some day it has to be something you won’t fall in love with.

    I might, if I had wanted to continue along those lines, to a rule set up by A.S.W. Rosenbach, the legendary book dealer who, among the many other things he did, worked hard to make sure everyone knew he was a legendary book dealer.  He frequently sold books with six and even seven figure price tags, and once in a while, his customers would suffer reverses and sell them back to him.  His rule was never to sell that returned book to a new customer: in almost all cases, he said,. The previous owner, as soon as he recouped his fortune, would be glad to come buy it back at an increased price, and be grateful for the opportunity.  (I actually knew a man who bought a book from Rosenbach’s successor, John Fleming, for a million dollars, had business losses and sold it back to him for about three-fourths of that and then, after doing his best to hold off, went back and repurchased it for two million dollars.  (The story ends happily: when he sold his best books at auction, it brought in a little over six million, a new record in the bookselling world.)

    But I was talking about comic books.  One day I spotted some auctions online with some comic books I’d read about but never read.  The prices seemed relatively low for what the comic books were, so I put in some modest bids.  I did not win…MOST of the auctions.  To my surprise, however, I was the winner of four legendary comic books  Not the sort I could have taken home to my mother, who got me hooked on Uncle Scrooge and Little Lotta and Wendy, the Good Little Witch,

    I had won four Tijuana Bibles, also known as Dirty Little Eight-Pagers.  These were small (postcard-sized) pornographic comic books which usually exploited celebrities from the world of movies, radio, and comic books.  They were published somewhere by someone from roughly the 1930s we;; into the 1950s,  (The form has occasionally been revived: I saw one featuring Donald Trump last time I went hunting.)  They are now old enough to be historic, and several books have been written about them, including several collections of reprints.  But even a faithful reprint has been through a filter.  Someone saw it and decided it was worth reprinting.  Here I had four at random.  I could read them without footnotes, make up my own mind about them, and then, I hoped, resell them for many times the purchase price.  (Remind me to tell you how Ronald Reagan’s presidency convinced me I would make mu millions in reselling old western paperbacks.  I’ll tell you the happy ending now: those books are still in excellent condition in a box in a storage locker, because I never had to sell a single one of them…no matter ow I tried.)

   I could judge the narrative flow, the accuracy of the caricatured portraits of the rich and famous, the risibility of the jokes, if any.  I could gauge for myself just how pornographic they were.  You know the ancient cliché: “That may have been pornographic back THEN, before people understood about sex, but nowadays….”  (This is generally untrue, by the way.  As I noted in a public lecture once, our ancestors knew all about sex.  It’s how they became  ancestors.

    I could…well, I could go on, but I see I’ve run out of space again.  See you next week, breathless fans.  (You can save your breath over one thing: I am anxious to maintain my PG-13 rating, so you ain’t gonna see much reprinted but the covers.  The contents ARE pornographic by 2021 standards.)

Four Cheap Old Comic Books

    The time to get into collecting anything is before anybody else thinks of it.  If you wait until the market is established, rarities agreed upon, and prices set, you will look in vain for legendary items and have to settle for lesser choices. 

    Do keep in mind, as you look over that last sentence, that it simplifies matters.  If you want to make money in collectibles, you must also be sure to collect something that people will eventually yearn for.  Your collection of ice cream sandwich wrappers may be definitive, but no one but a reporter from the Sunday paper, or the staff of Hoarders, is going to be interested.  Similarly, if you’re planning a profitable collection, you need to dispose of it while the iron is hot: not like all the people who went into beer can collecting because everyone else was doing it only to realize everyone else had moved on to collecting pogs, and nobody wanted to buy those precious bits of tin and aluminum.

    In fact, the best advice I ever read on collecting came from book collector A. Edward Newton, who suggested collecting things you like.  Then even if you never make money, you’ll enjoy the stuff.

    I was really starting for another destination at the beginning of this blog.  I was going to note that I came to comic book collecting much too late.  The time to start collecting was really around 1954, when the comic books which had survived the World War II paper drives were still affordable and horror comics were in their prime.  The new age of superheroes was right around the corner, and somewhere around the time The Fantastic Four first appeared, people started collecting comic books in earnest.  By the time I was interested, that first Fantastic Four was selling at prices in four figures, and the legendary issues, like Action #1 (first Superman) or Detective #27 (first Batman) were sneaking up to six figures.  I had to settle for what odds and ends I could pick up (baseball cards were not as hot at that moment, so I wound up swapping my duplicates—which would have been worth a cool profit just ten years later—for a World War II Batman and some 1920s comic strip reprint booklets.)

    I pored over the price guides, dreaming of what I MIGHT find at some garage sale, and sent away to comic book archives for photocopies, so I could read the not very classic adventures of the Rubber Robot, Invisible Scarlet O’Neil, and the Blue Blaze (whom I have hitherto nominated for one of the dumbest origin stories in the world of superheroes  He was, like Spider-Man, a scientific accident, but all Peter Parker had to do was get bitten by a radioactive spider.  The Blue Blaze got dressed up for a costume party just before an earthquake struck, throwing him in front of his father’s experimental ray gun, after which he was buried alive for about eighty years until grave robbers dug him up and….  He was also easily one of the grimmest of superheroes: Superman may have matched him in the invulnerability department but Superman never picked up an evil scientist and walked through the scientist’s river of acid, knowing HE would come out of it okay but the villain would be dissolved to a mere skeleton.)

    But the great finds always eluded me.  One garage sale—involving the sale of the estate of someone rumored to be a fence, so everything there was under suspicion of being stolen—turned up a number of Animal Comics featuring early Pogo stories, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to buy all of them and, as usual, picked the ones that ,looked like fun but were worth the least.  And that was about the extent of my rare finds until just recently while hunting online for things to sell to buy pretzels and cheese during the pandemic, I bid on fourteen comic books I’d HEARD about but never expected to hold in my hand—not superheroes, it’s true, and not by artists people were yearning for, but….

    Oh, I see that’s all the room for today’s column.  Next time, then, true believers.