A Sight Unseeen--6

The Comic Section That Never Was--Over and Over Again

I've been digging through my garage looking for this item for months. Finally my labors have borne fruit.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I'd done comic-style artwork for an episode of the TV series Remington Steele. One of the props in that show was a fake newspaper comic section. Remington and Laura are fans of "The Blaster", an adventure strip supposedly produced by curmudgeonly cartoonist Raymond Kelly, but actually ghosted by his murderous assistant, Arte Wayne. Among the art I produced was a Sunday episode (in black and white) which presented the show's opening action in comic form.

The Sunday episode art was inserted into a mockup comic section that the post-production house had lying around. The post house was the Howard Anderson Company, a legendary post-production and effects company that has been around since 1927. It goes without saying this mockup had been around a l-o-o-o-ng time...no one remembered just how long. Whenever a client needed a phony comics section, Anderson stuck new art into an empty space on the mockup and ran off a new four-page "edition."

I'm not sure exactly how they did this. These were the days before large-format copiers and computer printers. They either had an old-fashioned letterpress unit or an offset printer which they fired up for these special occasions. The copy I have doesn't have the "indentations" characteristic of letterpress printing, so I'm voting for offset. It had to have been a big machine: the fake paper is the same size as a full-sized American newspaper spread.

I was fortunate to get a spare copy of the Remington Steele edition. I present it here for two reasons: first, to give everyone a look at this comic oddity; and second, to invite you Golden Era art-hawks to tell me who drew the other features. I'm sure there are some interesting stories buried here.

Here's page one:

The first strip, "Our Street," has a 1950s UPA look to it. The strip isn't very slick and like several other features has no story. To me this implies it was made specially for the section and not taken from some cartoonist's back stock of unsold strips. Bill Carter is surely an alias.

The second strip, "Casey the Cop" by Wally Bullock (another alias?), seems amateurish to me. Or is it just "stylized"?

The third strip, "Donny and Dolly Dewlap" could conceivably have been someone's unsold strip. It delivers a gag rather than being open-ended like the last two. 'Ted Baker' is too generic to take seriously.

The fourth feature, which has no title, is drawn in a capable early-1930s adventure style reminiscent of "Tailspin Tommy". The signature is interesting: 'Jan Grippe' is unusual enough to be a real name. Google turned up two references to a 1950 movie producer with this name, but I couldn't find the pages. Then there was a Jan Grippo (b. 1906) who co-produced the Monogram "Bowery Boys" movies. The sig could be "Grippo." Maybe he started out as an artist and tried to sell a daily adventure.

The last strip, "Captain Smith", is drawn in a competent 1940s semi-realistic style...except for the main character, who is Dick Tracy under another name. Though the episode has a beginning and an end, it doesn't seem like an unsold daily. "K. Lentz" means nothing to me. IMDB didn't have any Lentzes that made sense, and the name was too vague to make a meaningful Google search. The lettering on this strip is the most professional of the bunch; it has almost a Ben Oda look to it.

And now page two:

"Uncle George" by 'Max Morgan' (surely a fake name) could be from almost any time. My guess is 1950s. The art isn't exactly bad, but it ain't great either.

"A Day at the Fair" by 'Todd' is completely unlike any other strip in this potpourri. Whoever this guy is (the signature 'Michael Kent' sounds unlikely), he must have trained as a 1930s animator. Both character design and drawing style point that way. It's a damned nice job, too.

Look who's here! "Toby" is by none other than animator extraordinaire T. Hee (real name Alex Campbell). He signed his own name and got a byline. Among his many employers was UPA (early 1950s). Given the style of "Our Street", could there be a UPA connection to this paper? Or am I grasping at straws?

"Marty" by 'Herb Klynn' appears to have been drawn by a cartoony artist drawing straighter than usual. Something about it says late-1940s to me (could it be Marty's resemblance to the Bardahl man?).

"Snips and Runty" seems to be the top row of a real (unsold) Sunday page, although the signature is probably phony. Unlike most of the strips here, the lettering appears to be professional.

"The Rovers" intrigues me. Based on both the cartooning style and the heroine's dress and hair, I'd swear this was an unsold strip from the late 20s or very early 1930s. Its pacing suggests it's part of a longer story, and its subject brings to mind all those "Joe Palooka"-style strips. Google drew a blank on 'Leo Courey'.

Page three has a couple of features I know something about:

"Gerry" is likely the work of Gerry Woolery of Playhouse Pictures, the animation studio which contracted with the Steele team to supply art for the show. It was probably done on the spot to fill the hole to the left of "Sylvia Trace."

"Sylvia Trace" is, of course, two retouched "Dallas" dailies over which I lettered new dialogue. This was from my latter days on the project, when the late Thomas Warkentin was brought on as inker. You don't need a very keen eye to recognize J. R., Pam, Bobby, and Miss Ellie under those mustaches and glasses. Gerry agreed to my leaving Thomas' and my names on the strip, since Playhouse Pictures got screen credit for the Steele art, not me.

"The Blaster" is the fake Sunday I drew. Of course I signed it 'Raymond Kelly', but using my own signature style. Some friends who saw the episode thought I'd actually signed my own name to the art.

"Dinky" seems to be signed 'Ade'. It appears to be newer than most of these strips. It has that light, casual style that started in the 60s and continues to this day.

The fourth page of the mockup merely repeats the strips on page two. Now listen up, art spotters and strip historians. Who drew these strips? When? Why? Has anyone out there seen this comic section in other TV shows or movies? Get to work! And thanks.

Things that happened to me

1. Blades and Guns

While I was working as director on the final season of the animated TV series Street Sharks, an odd thing happened. One day Management came in and announced that the legendary Sharks were going to be booted out of their own series and replaced by an entirely new cast of alien dinosaurs.

Like all toy-driven series, Street Sharks was owned (and run) by the toy company. Publicly both studio and manufacturer belched a lot of gas about how toy shows were independently-produced entertainment, not manufacturer-dictated commercials. Everyone inside (indeed, anyone with half a brain) knew otherwise. In this case the toy company had run the latest Street Shark numbers and determined that the finheads were at the end of their long, lucrative career. The company wanted to get busy on what they hoped would be the Next Big Thing. Plugging the dinos into Street Sharks would introduce remaining Shark viewers to the new toy line, giving the rollout an extra boost it wouldn't have were the dinos simply launched cold in their own series.

The last several Street Sharks scripts were ditched and new ones quickly written. The Sharks would meet the team of good-guy alien dinosaurs (and their bad-guy alien dinosaur antagonists), then work with them for an episode or two. After that the Sharks would disappear and the dinos--as I recall their name back then was the Dino-Vengers--would have the remaining shows all to themselves. Once the change was decided upon, there was no time to mourn the Street Sharks' passing. If anything the toy company was annoyed by the transition episodes. They'd rather have dumped the Sharks immediately and got on with it.

We needed to rush out new model sheets because we had no development time. The toy company arranged for us to see their character prototypes. Our studio brass and several of us creative types drove to toy headquarters, a shiny high-rise south of Santa Monica. In a generic conference room we met with their management and chief designers. The designers, pleasant if rather intense fanboy types, proudly displayed their maquettes. These were highly-detailed resin statuettes the same size as the finished toy. The maquettes were modeled in pieces and came with removable accessories. Eventually they'd be the basis of moulds for the actual toys. The maquettes were amazing pieces, bristling with teeth, blades, spikes, guns, and every other mayhem-producing device imaginable.

After the meeting I found myself chatting with one of the toy executives, a tall youngish man who bore an uncanny resemblance to self-improvement guru Anthony Robbins. Our conversation turned to how the studio would tone down the dinos' blades and guns to meet network guidelines limiting violence in cartoons. Clearly the exec chafed at the rules. After all, the blades and guns were the toys' selling points. Then in a moment of remarkable honesty the executive said something that really creeped me out.

“You know,” he said, “we advertise these things as being for 8-year-olds, 9-year-olds, but they're not our real audience. You gotta learn to like these things, and if you're 8 or 9 and aren't already playing with them you never will. But four- and five-year olds, they love this stuff [the blades and guns]. If we hook 'em when they're four, we've got them for years. They'll keep buying 'til they're practically teenagers. We can't say it directly, of course, but four- and five-year-olds, that's who we're really designing these things for.” I remember thinking the guy would make a great tobacco company executive.

Anyway, the Sharks went bye-bye and the Dino-Vengers took their place. The following season the dinos, now rechristened Extreme Dinosaurs, spun off into their own series. Alas, they were not the Next Big Thing. Many, many more maquettes have marched across the conference table since then. Some have hit the mark; most haven't. I wonder how many four-year-olds we hooked with our show. And whether their present-day incarnations--they'd be in their early twenties now--are training their own four-year-olds to love blades and guns.