Jacovitti's "Pa and Ma"

Marriage, Jacovitti Style

Taking my dictionary into my hands, I've made a stab at translating a couple of later Jacovitti strips. Pa e Ma is a concept familiar to American newspaper strips: a catalog of the miseries of married life. I must say Jacovitti takes misery to a level seldom achieved in American comics.

The Grattasassi family comprises Mr. Grattasassi, a henpecked accountant whose idea of heaven is sitting working crosswords; his ball-busting wife Giangiovanna, whose verbal abuse of her husband makes the Lockhorns seem an ideal couple; his daughter Georgina, a fiery student radical; his son Atilla, a super-genius; the baby Cicciantonio, who nurses on salames; Mr. G.'s horny old grandfather; their TV-obsessed maid Audia, and the family dog Eccellenza.

The family is bizarre to the extreme, but the art and many of the jokes are pretty funny!

Amateur translator's note: I was defeated by Mr. G.'s expletives. Some examples are "Mondo vigliacco!" "Mondo caimano!" etc. They really don't make much sense in Italian either. "Mondo" means "World," so the phrases translate as "Coward(ly) world!" "Crocodile world!" and so on. After trying many ways to approximate them in English I gave up and left them as they were.

George Wunder Terry Sundays 1947--4

Bor No More!

Here's the conclusion of George Wunder's second Terry and the Pirates continuity. We see the surprising end of evil fat man Theodore Bor. Surprising to me, anyway--I mean, Burma never murdered anybody and got away with it!

20 July 1947

27 July 1947

3 August 1947

10 August 1947

17 August 1947

24 August 1947

31 August 1947

7 September 1947

14 September 1947

Alfred Mazure, Artist and Writer

A-Maz-Ing Maz

Alfred Mazure

A while back I posted a Romeo Brown story drawn by Dutch cartoonist Alfred Mazure. Talented and prolific, Mazure worked as an illustrator, a comics artist, a novelist, and a filmmaker. I spent considerable time hunting for information about Mazure and his career. While I found a fair amount of material, there were frustrating holes in his story and not everyone agreed on several points. That aggravating Internet phenomenon, Read and Repeat, clearly affected several sites. For example those who described Romeo Brown as "a suave and sophisticated detective" obviously had never read a Romeo Brown episode.

Therefore the following is a work in progress desperately in need of input from others. I'd especially like to hear from Dutch readers with access to offline material that might clear up some points. This isn't Primary Source material. Please don't cut and paste!

Alfred Mazure began his art career in his native Netherlands, where he was born in 1914 (some sources say 1913). The self-taught artist's first comic creation, a detective strip called De Chef , appeared in 1932 when Mazure was only eighteen. It didn't make any waves.  Mazure spent several years wandering about Europe and Africa.

De Chef (source: Lambiek.net)

Upon his return "Maz" tried again. This time he hit paydirt. Dick Bos, which premiered in 1940, followed the adventures of a two-fisted private detective. The series got off to a slow start until Mazure hatched the idea of handing unsold copies out to school kids.  It was a brilliant move. Before long Dick Bos was a star. Mazure both wrote and drew the Dick Bos stories, which were printed in an unusual pocket-sized format, about the size of a pack of cigarettes, with a single panel on a page. Soon the character was on his way to becoming a national institution.

From a Dick Bos story (source unknown)

Unfortunately history intervened. World War II had begun in 1939 and the Netherlands had hoped to remain neutral. However in 1940, the same year Dick Bos debuted, Germany invaded and occupied the country. The Nazi government noted Bos' popularity and asked Mazure to turn the detective into an SS officer. They offered a blank contract and a print run of a million copies an issue. It's unclear whether Mazure was an active member of the Resistance or simply a sympathizer; either way he rejected the offer. As a result his books were banned.

1960s Dick Bos magazine (source: Lambiek)

Information about what Mazure did during the war is contradictory. Several sources say that he went into filmmaking. However some suggest he made films for the Resistance while others say he made films commercially, though without much success. He did apparently produce anti-Nazi comics and illustrations. Dutch readers, please clear this up for me. At any rate, after the war (1946) Dick Bos reappeared, first in reprints, then in  new stories. The series was a hit all over again, appearing in both comics and novels. It seems to be at this time that Mazure signed a publishing contract that haunted the rest of his days. As has happened so often in comics history, Maz got very little while his publisher reaped huge profits from Dick Bos' growing popularity.

Exactly what happened next is unclear. Mazure was obviously unhappy with his contract, but he seems to have continued producing Dick Bos.Two subsequent events combined to end his Dutch career. I'm unsure which came first.  One was a growing public sentiment against comics. The Ministry of Education accused comics of having a pernicious effect on youth. When, in 1948, a 16-year-old boy murdered his 15-year-old girlfriend, a media storm arose around his having been a comics reader. We Americans have heard this one before!

A second event damaged Mazure's personal reputation. For reasons I can't figure out, the artist got lumped together with a group of other creators alleged to have collaborated with the Nazis during the War. How this happened given his pro-Resistance work is a mystery to me. Again I beg Dutch fans with inside knowledge to fill me in.

At any rate, Mazure gave up and moved to England to start over. He worked there for over twenty years as an illustrator, author, and strip cartoonist.

Cover for a novel (source: Radboud Coll.)

 He tried several times to recreate his success with Dick Bos. In 1948, the Daily Mirror published Mazure's Sam Stone, a detective who resembled Dick. The strip lasted two years. I also found several references to another detective strip called either Bruce Hunter or Bruce Bunter. I haven't found samples of either feature. Hunter/Bunter supposedly ran from 1951 to 1953, which would have released him just in time to launch Romeo Brown in the Daily Mirror (1954). This strip established Mazure's reputation as a pretty-girl artist. Most of his subsequent projects involved sexy women. He left Romeo in 1957 to illustrate another "girlie" strip, Jane, Daughter of Jane.

Jane, Daughter of Jane (British Cartoonists Collection)

 This was an attempt to update the grandmother of all girlie strips, Jane, which had titillated British soldiers during World War II. The attempt failed. The artist's next project seems to have been another clothing-challenged daily called Carmen & Co. Of this strip I've found a single example on Lambiek.net.

Carmen & Co. (source: Lambiek)

Somewhere in here--around 1960, apparently--Mazure returned to Dick Bos, both in print and in a film. How this came about I don't know. Maybe he was desperate: there is no record of his having renegotiated his contract, and sources imply that Mazure was always short on cash. This new Bos material seems to have ended around 1967, about the time Mazure wrote three English-language sexy-spy novels under the series banner Sherazad. He also had one more fling with comic strip ladies in 1969-1970, when Mayfair published Lindy Leigh. Mayfair was a Playboy-style magazine, and Lindy appears to have featured more nudity and sexual situations than Mazure's earlier strips Again I haven't been able to find samples online.

Sherazad title page (source)

Alfred Mazure died in 1974. He was only 59 years old. His creation, Dick Bos, is recognized as an important part of Dutch comics history. An excellent site, dickbos.com, posts classic episodes and provides background about Mazure's career. Unfortunately a link promising further information about the artist is dead.

Unidentified strip from Arie K. Collection. Could this be Carmen?

George Wunder Terry Sundays 1947--3

Four More from the War on Bor

I'm putting off my glimpse at Alfred Mazure to post a few more George Wunder Terry Sundays. The story continues as fat man--make that vast man--Theodore Bor and sexy viperess Ermine Toy try to take over an oilfield. Terry, Hotshot Charlie, and Pat Ryan don't think so.

22 June 1947

29 June 1947

6 July 1947

13 July 1947

By the way, if you want to see the entire storyline (but not all the art) of this and the previous story, check out The Digital Comics Museum. Charlton Comics (of all people) published three issues of George Wunder's Terry and the Pirates. In typical Charlton fashion they were numbered 26, 27, and 28. Also in typical Charlton fashion, the stories are wretchedly-printed chop-ups of Wunder's first two continuities. However you can get a look at the stuff that happened between the Sundays I'm posting.  This link will take you to the Charlton Terry page.

Alfred Mazure's Romeo Brown

Wherefore Art Thou Romeo?
 
Romeo Brown first appeared in 1954 in London's Daily Mirror, home of the grandmother of "girlie" strips, Norman Pett's Jane. Romeo Brown was a clueless private detective who fancied himself irresistible. His mysteries always found him surrounded by beautiful girls wearing clothes that never stayed on. The drawings were by Alfred Mazure, a Dutch-born illustrator with a long and interesting career both at home and in England. (I'll talk about his background in my next post.) Mazure drew the strip through 1957.

Romeo Brown is poorly-documented and its history is obscure. Many online sources credit writer Peter O'Donnell as co-creator with Mazure. This is clearly an error: O'Donnell began writing Romeo in 1956. No one seems to know from whom he took over. In an interview O'Donnell merely said he was offered the job because "the editor was dissatisfied." Given that Mazure had written his own scripts in the past, might he have been the original Romeo writer? Maybe, but several sources state that Mazure, after working with O'Donnell for a year, left Romeo to launch "his own creation," Carmen & Co., at a rival newspaper. If he'd been the original Romeo Brown author, wouldn't Romeo count as his "own creation"? At any rate, following Mazure's departure O'Donnell continued writing and Jim Holdaway took over the art chores. We all know where those two wound up. (One source said Holdaway had been Mazure's assistant, but I haven't found confirmation of this.)

In a 2002 online interview, O'Donnell described the strip thus: "Romeo Brown was a comic private detective, and my brief was that every story was to revolve around a girl or girls, and the more clothes I could safely get off them the better."

The Holdaway-O'Donnell Romeo Brown has gained a small international following, though reprints are few. It's too bad that Mazure's Romeo has suffered as a result. While Mazure's free, brushy style and Holdaway's sharp-focused penwork were worlds apart, both men were excellent cartoonists and both did a fine job on Romeo Brown.

Perhaps the greatest difference between the two artists' approaches was in posing. Holdaway developed a broad slapstick approach, while Mazure's work was always tempered by fashion-art elegance.  As we see in the present story, languid, long-legged realistic women co-exist with broadly-cartooned men. Romeo himself has a cucumber head and shoebutton eyes, while his adversaries' husbands--one a wizened alcoholic, the other a bloated bureaucrat--are so incongruous that the reader wonders what the girls see in them. However there's no question what their husbands see in them.

As a fan of both men's work, I'm reluctant to label one the "better" artist. All the same, I'd like to suggest that though Holdaway brought a more consistent, more exciting look to the strip, he never managed to best his predecessor in one area: drawing pretty women. Don't misunderstand me. Holdaway's beauties had great bodies. Their faces were cute. But Mazure could draw a face that was knock-down gorgeous. He proves it in this episode, especially with Pussy, the more free-wheeling of the larcenous ladies. Mazure knew he had a good thing going, and provided us a wealth of ravishing closeups. These faces showcase the best features of Maz' bold, free brushwork.

The following story begins with strip N208. British strips I've seen with letter/number identifiers use the letter to identify which story it is (A for the first story, B for the second, etc.) and the number to indicate where the strip falls within the story (so A1 is first story, first daily and E65 is fifth story, 65th daily). That doesn't seem to be the system here  "N" may mean the 14th story, but "208" must mean something else. Probably not the cumulative number of strips--that would yield an average of only 15 strips per story!

I have never found Mazure's work in English. This story came from an Italian fanzine called Wow. I translated their script back into English. But it's possible that the Italians shot their strips from a French reprint. In that case my approximate script is three generations removed from the original dialogue. But we're here for the pictures anyway, right?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now that we've all admired these beautiful drawings, will someone please explain the talking neck shot in strip N218???!

George Wunder Originals, 1947

Original George
Since I seem to be on a George Wunder kick, I dug out my two and only Terry originals by GW. Both date from 1947. I bought them through an ad in the Menomonee Falls Gazette. They've suffered over the last forty years, having barely escaped a major ceiling-leak that destroyed much of my collection in the mid-1980s. Water chewed the bottom of the first panel of the earlier daily and both took on those brown dots which I believe are called "foxing." They're gems none the less.

Here is the daily for 14 July 1947. It comes near the end of the Theodore Bor continuity from which I've been posting Sunday pages. I've said before that I feel Wunder wasn't a great dialogue writer. In support of this view I offer the amazingly convoluted sentence in panel two.

The other original is the daily for 27 October. This is the beginning of the storyline which introduced Spray O'Hara. Spray chummed around with the boys for some time, then married Hotshot Charlie. Before long both were out of the strip. I remember reading somewhere that Wunder felt the marriage was a mistake because it severely limited Hotshot's usefulness as a sidekick. For several years afterward Wunder tried out replacements.

By examining the originals closely (they're huge--over 20 inches wide) I noted a couple of technical tidbits. I was interested to see that in many panels Wunder seems to have outlined everything first before applying shadow. For example in the second panel of 10/27 you can see Terry's eyes, nose and mouth were inked with a pen. These details were obscured by shadow. Other bits include buttons and folds on Pat's suit jacket and the steps and runner on the stairs in panel 3. This doesn't seem always to have been the case, though. I can't see signs of Chopstick Joe's hat line, ears, or collar under the shadow in panel one. Of course they might have been inked with a brush rather than a pen, in which case they wouldn't show.

The ink is remarkably black and dense. Few brush strokes are visible within the black areas. Either Wunder laid ink on really thick or the ink he used was much denser than modern inks. Maybe both. I also see that in the last panel an excess word ("to" at the end of the second line) was scratched off with a blade, yet the paper's surface is barely damaged. Sure can't do that with present-day Bristol board!

George Wunder Terry Sundays 1947--2

Nine Days' Wunder

I have no idea whether anyone is interested in these things, but as long as I have them I'll post a few more before giving it up as a waste of time. Here are nine more Terry Sundays from George Wunder's first year on the strip. In these 1947 halves Wunder begins his second storyline. The femme fatale from the previous story, Ermine Toy(!), returns in the company of Theodore Bor, an amazing fat man of the sort only Wunder could have designed. Chopstick Joe continues his supporting role and Terry's old pal Pat Ryan makes a final appearance. Again--regrettably--some strips are missing.

[UPDATE: I didn't get my facts straight. This is not Pat Ryan's final appearance. He continues into the next story, the one introducing Spray O'Hara.]

Ermine Toy represents something that irked me about Wunder's early stories. Under Milton Caniff Terry's romances had always been a big part of the strip. Wunder continued that tradition. The difference is that we could understand Terry falling in love with Caniff's women. (With the possible exception of Burma, who was plagued by the temporal paradox of having met Terry when he was a schoolboy.) Instead Wunder hooked the guy up with a string of wackos that leaves us wondering what the hell Terry saw in them. Murderous, bitchy, vain, manipulative...the prize of the lot was Baroness Popoffnikoff, who was so self-centered that she secretly dumped a cargo of desperately-needed relief supplies to make room for her fancy wardrobe. All these women had to do was approach within twenty feet of Terry, and he would instantly jettison all common sense and fall madly in love.

After awhile Wunder switched the romances to secondary characters, like Hotshot Charlie and his future wife, Spray O'Hara. This was a wise move, as it saved Terry from seeming a complete idiot. These other women were however cut from cloth similar to that of Terry's ex-paramours.

Visually Ermine is a knockout. As Wunder's angular style of character design evolved, women's faces suffered the most. Ermine combines Wunder and a bit of Caniff with excellent results. In my opinion Ermine was Wunder's hottest hottie.

I also need to mention Chopstick Joe. Wunder's work always contained a streak of humorous exaggeration, and Chopstick Joe was right up his alley. Though Caniff created Joe, it was Wunder who brought him to life. Design, posing, even his dialogue, make Chopstick Joe one of my favorite Wunder characters.

16 March 1947

23 March 1947

6 April 1947

13 April 1947

27 April 1947

11 May 1947

18 May 1947

25 May 1947

8 Jun 1947

Next time: respite from Wunder puns.