Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

Polly and Her Pals: the Complete Sunday Comics 1925-1927 has finally arrived. Dean Mullaney has written what may be the finest book on Polly and Her Pals, gathering many many examples of the Sunday strips and adding some excellent essays at the head of the book. It’s a gem and should adorn any collector’s shelf.

Dean sent me a copy of the uncorrected proofs a while ago, and I’ve been so embedded in the strips that I haven’t written a word about it, as yet. I hope to correct that delay.

Until now, we’ve had the fine books edited by Rick Marschall: The Complete Color Polly & Her Pals 1926-1927 and 1927-1929. Both provide beautiful reproductions of the Sunday strips for those years, but offer only short essays as introduction. This new book edited by Dean Mullaney provides an extended and extensive essay with a lot of solid information about Sterrett and the strip by Jeet Heer. It’s an important document, in its own right, but then the wealth of material in the book beyond that is enormous. What a job! A delight for any lover of the strip.

The essays include:
AN ARTIST’S ARTIST by P. Craig Russell and
THE MOST MUSICAL OF CARTOONISTS, CLIFF STERRETT by Jeet Heer.

There are plenty of ads, trivia and the earliest examples of the strip, giving us a full picture of the birth of Sterrett’s comic and the popularity in its day.

This book is magnificent and deserves all of your attention if you love comic art and especially if you have any fondness for Cliff Sterret’s Polly and Her Pals.

(Click any image to enlarge.)
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The original strip.
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Polly appears.
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I’m always blown away by the incredible graphics in the strips. I didn’t want to give away too many (though there are plenty in this book) so I’ve pulled some panels from a few other strips to give you an idea of what I mean.
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June 8, 1917
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Even early on there’s a lot of black with the tree silhouetted.
The rain takes over right from the start even with all the black.
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December 14, 1924
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This strip seems to use a lot of white space. This is just
the opposite of most of the Polly strips. Black and black
silhouettes usually take over . . .
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December 13, 1925
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. . . like this strip where the silhouette of the desk takes stage center.
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June 20, 1926
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Here’s a strip that uses black for the night sky
as well as the car being driven. Very effective.

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Take a look at this book. It’d make a great Christmas present for yourself.

- As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m a long-time lover of Cliff Sterrett‘s Polly & Her Pals comic strip. I particularly love when it goes into a graphic surrealism. I’ve chosen a few strips that I’d like to post; they’re not only beautiful, but they’re still funny.

These all come from the 2nd volume of The Complete Color Polly & Her Pals (1927-1929), edited by Rick Marschall and printed by Kitchen Sink Press.

I post the strip followed by a couple panels viewed larger, for your entertainment.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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- I’ve been posting some great comic strip and comic book strips here in the last two weeks. By far, my favorite strip is Polly and Her Pals by Cliff Sterrett. I haven’ yet posted the original I own. It’s a Sunday page from March 1943.

The art is large sized and comes in two halves. I’ll post it actual size and add a couple of cut ins so that the art can be seen a little better.

I’ve had to do some photoshop touchup since the original got a bit of water damage during a flood in my studio.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

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White paper covers more trees on the left of this panel.
You can see the shapes coming through.

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This panel is composed of a lot of pasted on bits of paper.
All the glue is trying to fall off, and the papers are delicate,
especially on the roof of the building, left.

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- There’s a good British site called Skwigly which gives news from England & Europe. Its highlight is a good forum where they have live chats on Tuesday nights – 9-11pm GMT (check local times.)

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- A slew of Casper the Ghost cartoons are on line for those wacky folks out there who love Casper cartoons. (This same host, GUBA.com, also offers lots of other cartoons such as Popeye.)

I spent a lot of years watching Casper. In New York, before every channel was a national network, we got a lot of locally-made animation. Terrytoons (Mighty Mouse) or Paramount (Casper, Popeye and Baby Huey) were the predominant fare of the NYDaily News owned Channel 11 or the even lower-rent Channel 9. The Warner shorts were the B&W ones on Channel 5. The same was true of theaters. It was infrequent that a Warners or Disney short played on those Saturday morning marathons where 10 color cartoons played with Francis the Talking Mule.

(Click images to enlarge.)

I didn’t really choose Casper, and I never really liked the cartoons, but I was an animation addict and had to watch. Looking back at these shorts, it’s amazing how good they are in comparison to the nonsense we’re fed and make these days.

All that watching paid off years later when I worked alongside Johnny Gent, Izzy Klein, Marty Taras or Nick Tafuri. There are so many more: Bob Little, Cosmo Anzilotti, Gerry Dvorak, Jim Logan and others. I was able to talk intelligently about their work. I already knew their names before I met them.

Casper is also the focus of an upcoming book by Jerry Beck and Leslie Carbaga. This collects the Casper comic books in a 400 page tome. It’s available from Dark Horse comics and can be ordered in advance of its April 2007 publication date.

It’s amazing how many of these same artists did a good share of moonlighting on these comics. It was their night job.

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The comic strip I do love is Polly and Her Pals. Cliff Sterrett never failed me; I love everything about his strip. Once again the ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive comes through with some more first rate images. From Kent Butterworth’s collection they have 5 beautiful Sunday pages newly posted.

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– Something else I love are the films of Japanese animator, Koji Yamamura. His short, Mt. Head, was nominated for the Oscar a couple of years back, and another, The Old Crocodile, was a hit on the festival circuit the past couple of years. Apparently, there’s a recently released video collection of his work. I found this interesting review on the Senses of Cinema site.

Incidentally, if you’re not familiar with this site, stay there and take a look around. It’s one of those high-minded, intellectual magazine sites with lots of well written reviews and information. I can’t get enough of them.

– As I pointed out in the past, I’m a big fan of Cliff Sterrett‘s comic strip, Polly & Her Pals. It’s an exuberant, funny strip that’s packed with a lively graphic design.

Originally, like a number of other strips, the story was about Polly and her dating life and was called Positive Polly . It didn’t take long for Sterrett to move “Maw” and “Paw” into the household, and before long the strip was about them and renamed. Polly and her boyfriends moved into the background.

Sterrett‘s design of Polly & Her Pals had the life of Herriman’s Krazy Kat strip, but it owed more to Picasso than cartoonists of the past. He used cubism, expressionism and surrealism at the strip’s height in the 20′s.

Polly was accompanied by the “top strip,” Dot and Dash, two dogs that went through their own, non-speaking adventures above Polly’s panels. This was eventually replaced by Sweethearts and Wives, another commentary on marriages.

I can’t get enough of it.

Here are four more of the Sunday pages:

(Click on any image to enlarge.)

- Thanks to Drawn, I was led to a site that gave me the Evolution of Speech Balloons. This is an off-page from Andy Bleck’s website: Andy’s Comix Website. It’s worth visiting both.

Thomas Rowlandson – “The Ugly Club”

For those who aren’t aware of this site, Coconino-Classics.com is an excellent French website which features galleries of early comic strips and illustrations. There are lots of Herriman (early Krazy Kat strips and lots of them), Cliff Sterrett, Rube Goldberg, George McManus. And lots more.

It’s a good place to spend and hour or two and comeback for more.

I was particularly entertained by William Glackens‘ panel strip, Rabbi Fleizer’s Xmas. It’s certainly an oddity and interesting. There’s something curious to me about seeing the print work of some notable artists like Glackens or Feininger or Kley or Cruikshank.

- Polly & Her Pals is the perfect strip to accompany any thoughts about the Group Theater.

The strip originally followed the adventures of Positive Polly through the Jazz Age on her jaunts about town. The ideal flapper with her bobbed hair, short skirts and devil-may-care attitude.

Like several other strips, the side characters eventually took over as Maw and Paw adjusted to the nouveau riche lifestyle and spent the rest of their existence in a strip following Paw. Polly, like Nancy’s Aunt Fritzi Ritz, calmed down and became a good working girl once they hit the thirties, and the depression changed everything. The days of Jay Gatsby and found money settled into a more suburban world for the family as they moved into the 40′s.
(Click on any image to enlarge.)

What always separated Polly & Her Pals from other strips, such as Bringin’ Up Father or Nancy, was Cliff Sterrett’s delicious graphic styling. Taking clues from the art world in general, Sterrett morphed the world under the feet of his characters to capture their emotions; it became hilarious to read and delightful to look at.

Like the actors in the Group Theater, comic strips became more popularized; more concerned with the common man, or in the case of Polly, the common gal.

My favorite comic strip is Polly & Her Pals by Cliff Sterrett. Here’s one republished in “The Complete Color Polly & Her Pals.”

(Click on image to enlarge.)