November/December 2011

THE
BIG
LITTLE
TIMES
®
__________________________________________________
VOLUME XXX, NUMBER 6
BIG LITTLE BOOK COLLECTOR’S CLUB
P.O. BOX 1242
DANVILLE, CALIFORNIA 94526
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2011
_______________________________________________________________________________________
NANCY AND SLUGGO
Better Little Book
Whitman Publishing Company (1946)
NANCY HAS FUN
Better Little Book
Whitman Publishing Company (1944)
Back
Front
Cover
Cover
TOM BEATTY ACE OF THE SERVICE
AND THE BIG BRAIN GANG
PUBLIC LIBRARY
BIG LITTLE BOOK SECTION
by
Monique Berrill (Member #866)
This Tom Beatty and the Big Brain Gang Better Little Book was written
specially for Whitman. It follows where the Tom Beatty Ace of the
Service Scores Again Big Little Book left off, with Beatty on the case of a
counterfeiting ring. When Patrolman Brady finds a badly beaten man
on his lake front beat, Beatty ties him in with “Gorilla” Schultz, a member
of the Big Brain Gang.
I’ve always believed in being prepared for the unexpected. Thus in the spring of 1994,
I wrote an article on the Nancy Big Little Books® specially for the last issue of the
Big Little Times. In my years of collecting, one of the Nancy BLBs was an important
milestone. It was the last BLB needed to complete my Whitman collection.
Beatty tries to infiltrate the gang through Gorilla, but Big Brain
discovers he is really a Secret Service detective. Beatty’s young assistant,
Danny McKee is kidnapped by the gang and taken to their abandoned
factory hideout. Beatty finds the factory, then he and Danny capture or
kill all the gang members. Big Brain turns out to be a disgruntled police
file clerk named Samson.
The reason for putting Nancy in the final issue of the BLT made sense. If something
happened to me and I would not be able to prepare another issue of the BLT, my wife,
Carol would print and send out the preprepared issue as a final “goodbye. But happily
for me, I am still around, so this Nancy issue is being used to bring 30 years of
continuous publication of the BLT to a close. Next year’s publications will be fewer
in number, but I intend to occasionally send some “surprises” to continuing members.
The Secret Service that Beatty is part of was created in 1865. For the first
two years, its only duty was involvement in counterfeit currency crime.
In the 1990s, any color copy of U.S. currency that isn’t less than threequarters or more than one and a half times the actual size would be
considered counterfeit if it was double-sided.
I’ve enjoyed my many years in publishing this newsletter and interacting with
members through email, snail mail, and person to person contacts when collectors
visited my home or came to our Club Meetings. I hope that I’ve contributed in
some way to the preservation of BLB collecting as a collecting hobby rather than
an investment business. And I hope that I've given all of you some moments of
enjoyment through the BLT.
So as I tie a bow on 30 years of publication, I want to thank all those many individuals
who made contributions to the BLT over the years—the articles, letters, cartoons,
puzzles, collecting tid bits, and so on.
It has been fun!
Regards,
Editor
REMINDER: THE BLB CLUB will continue next year. There will be 2 issues
of The Big Little Times plus some surprises. Dues are $12.00 (Canada $16.00).
In 1877 a law was passed making coin, gold, and silver bar counterfeiting
illegal. Enforcing this law became the responsibility of the Service, as well
as clamping down on counterfeiting stamps when making or possessing
these also became illegal in 1895.
The Secret Service is divided into special agents and the Uniformed
Division officers. Special agents investigate crime of financial fraud.
Uniformed Division officers protect the President and Vice President
of the United States and their families, visiting heads of state, and past
Presidents.
The book has a BLB Blooper:
There are black spots on the
illustration on page 229 wheren
some high spots on the
printing plate were not
attended to.
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THE NANCY
BETTER LITTLE BOOKS®
by
Larry Lowery (Member #1)
FRITZI RITZ
United Comics #1
NANCY AND SLUGGO COMIC BOOK
I’ve have a special place in my heart for the Nancy and Sluggo BLB.
In the early 1980s when I decided to become a completest and get all the
BLBs, my friend John Stallknecht, Member #2, decided to do the same.
As the titles we needed dwindled, we kept track of what books each of us
needed. We had picked up what was considered to be the hard ones —
the two Paint Books, the two Mother Goose books, the Laughing Dragon
and John Carter of Mars books. But at the end, each of us had the same
last book to get. It was Nancy and Sluggo. Why this book was our
last one in common is not clear. It is a scarce book that had only one
reduced-size printing. But I have seen numerous copies since. For all
collectors, it is the last book, whatever the title, that is the hardest one to get.
So Nancy and Sluggo represents the capstone that concluded my basic
Whitman set of BLBs. As such, it is a very special book to me.
The story behind the creation of Nancy begins with her aunt, Fritzi Ritz.
Fritzi appeared in newspapers in 1922. Although he did not create Fritzi Ritz,
Ernie Bushmiller took it over when its author, Larry Whittington, went to work
for another newspaper. At that time, 1925, the strip was essentially a gag strip
with each day being complete in itself.
ERNIE BUSHMILLER (1950s)
In early 1933, Bushmiller added her niece, Nancy,
to the strip. Nancy had fuzzy black hair with a
large bow tied on top. Nancy came in and out of
the strip from time to time, and she added some
continuity to it. In one long sequence she traveled
with Fritzi to Hollywood where Fritzi pursued a
movie star career. Nancy became a popular character with the readership, so popular that in
1938 Bushmiller renamed the daily strip as Nancy. He kept Fritzi as a
Sunday half-page but replaced the other half, which was a feature called
Phil Fumble, with Nancy. Phil was added to the Fritzi feature as Fritzi’s
red-haired boy friend.
When Nancy took over, she also took on some weight. Then in mid-1938,
Sluggo Smith entered the strip, saving Nancy from a bully and establishing a
friendship/romance that lasted for over half-a-century.
NANCY AND SLUGGO COMIC BOOK
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NANCY SUNDAY COMIC PAGE
1947
5
Nancy grew in popularity and appeared in several hundred
newspapers in the 1940s.
Eventually Bushmiller abandoned the
continuity format of the strip. He was more expert at constructing gags on a
daily basis, thus in subsequent years, each daily strip ended with a gag-line
of some sort.
FRITZI RITZ
October 10, 1933
FRITZI RITZ
In Hollywood
NANCY
Daily Strip
Whitman published two Nancy BLBs at this time. The first, Nancy Has
Fun #1487, is an All Pictures Comics BLB—one in which each page is
illustrated rather than having a storyline text written on a page opposite a
captioned illustration. Whitman saved author's and artists’ time with its “all
pictures” books. Pictures were directly put to print without changing the
balloon dialogues and other details. The content of the first Nancy BLB is
taken from 1943-44 strips.
The second BLB, Nancy and Sluggo #1400 is also an All
Pictures Comics. Its content came from 1946 strips. This title was
published in the later years of the BLBs when the pressruns were only 250,000
copies each.
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Nancy’s creator, Ernest Paul Bushmiller, was born in the South Bronx on
August 23, 1905. His father had recently immigrated from Germany
and his mother was an immigrant from Northern Ireland. “When
I was a small child,” Bushmiller said, “we lived in a poor
neighborhood in a cold water flat with gas lights. But we were secure in the
knowledge that our parents loved us.”
His father was a talented artist who made his living by being a bartender.
Young Ernie picked up his father’s love for literature and art. He quit
school after the eighth grade and got a job as a copy-boy for the New York
World. In his spare time, he did occasional drawings and reporting for the
paper. His big break came when he was still a teenager. He was assigned to
illustrate a Sunday feature of magic by Harry Houdini who gave him personal
demonstrations of tricks in his New York apartment. During this time,
Bushmiller made friends with other important contributors to the paper:
Rudolph Dirks who did The Katzenjammer Kids; Milt Cross who penned
Count Screwloose; and H. T. Webster, the genius behind The Timid Soul.
On October 9, 1922 the paper launched Fritzi Ritz to counter the popular
emancipated women strips in competing newspapers, Winnie Winkle
and Tillie the Toiler. Originally created by Larry Whittington, Fritzi
was about a New York glamour girl who became a movie actress. In 1925
Whittington was hired away, and Bushmiller was given the assignment to
“ghost” Fritzi. A year later, he was allowed to use his own name on the strip
and remove Whittington’s name.
At the time when Bushmiller’s career was taking off, he fell in love with a
woman from the Bronx named Abby Bohnet. Abby married Ernie in New
York in 1930, and they remained married for more than 50 years. At that time
Ernie altered Fritzi Ritz in both appearance and personality to be more like
Abby. And in an interview he said, “I’d rather be a cartoonist than anything
I can think of. In fact, I’d keep on drawing comics even if I hit the Irish
Sweepstakes.”
Although the paper went
out of business in 1931, its
assets were merged with
Metropolitan
Features
to form United Feature
Syndicate.
Without
interruption,
the
strip
continued under United’s
guidance. By mid-30s, it
was in over 200 daily and
100 Sunday papers.
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It has been reported that Bushmiller was a night owl. He would start working
about 2 in the afternoon each day and continue at his drawing board into the early
morning hours of the next day. He tended to start by drawing the last panel and
working backwards toward the first panel. The simplicity of his style brought
praise from many of his colleagues. In 1961 he received the Humor Comic Strip
Award from the National Cartoonists Society. In 1976 the Society honored him
with the Reuben Award for Best Cartoonist of the Year. And he was listed as the
Judges’ Choice for the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2011. [1]
Bushmiller’s Nancy has been described as being simple because the lead up to
a gag was carefully controlled and brilliantly manipulated through repetition
and variety, giving the strip its unique panel compositions and visual rhythm.
Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik in their essay, How to Read Nancy, described
Bushmiller as an architect with the mind of a silent film comedian and that his
formulaic approach to humor beautifully revealed the essence of what a perfect
gag is all about – balance, symmetry, economy. [2]
In the final years of his work, Parkinson’s Disease caused Bushmiller to slow
down. Eventually he left all the drawing to Will Johnson, and when he died on
August 15, 1982, Nancy was in 880 newspapers. Obituaries in papers across the
country acknowledged Bushmiller’s great contributions to the field of cartooning.
Since 1983, Jerry Scott has written and drawn the strip. He has kept the essential
elements of Nancy intact—the polka dot skirt, classic hairdo, and red bow. But
he has softened Nancy’s look and added the humor and political correctness of a
contemporary little girl. In an interview, Scott was quoted as saying, “Nancy
speaks her mind wherever she is—often standing on top of her school desk.
She worries about her weight, but not enough to stop her from choosing
doughnuts over carrots. And her idea of exercise is a quick jog to the
refrigerator for ice cream.”
Comics theorist Scott McCloud described
the Nancy comic strip as a landmark achievement: “A comic so simply drawn it can be
reduced to the size of a postage stamp and
still be legible; an approach so formulaic as to become the very definition of the
gag-strip.”
Each item in a Bushmiller panel was thoughtfully drawn. Art Spiegelman
explained why Bushmiller often drew just 3 rocks in a panel: If Rocks were to be
in a background, 3 rocks was Ernie’s way to show there were “some” rocks. Two
rocks would be a “pair of rocks”. Four rocks would be “some” rocks but it would
be one rock too many to convey the idea of “some” rocks. Thus a Nancy panel
was an irreducible concept. [3]
An author for Wikipedia states:
“To say that Nancy is a simple
gag strip about a kid is to miss
the point completely. Nancy
only appears to be simple.
To look at Bushmiller as an architect is entirely appropriate, for Nancy is, in a
sense, a blueprint for a comic strip. Walls, floors, rocks, trees, ice-cream cones,
motion lines, midgets and principals are carefully positioned with no need
for further embellishment. And they are laid out with one purpose in mind—
to get the gag across.”
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9
Nancy strip reprints first appeared in comic books in the 1940s beginning in
St. John Publications and continuing with Dell and Gold Key into the 1960s.
She was featured in three animated films by Terrytoons (1942-43) and several
TV-made cartoons for Saturday morning shows.
PORTRAIT OF A BLB CLUB MEMBER: Jeff Byer, Member #
Article reprint: Discoveries, Volume 3, Number 8, October 1977
Today Nancy is a 55-foot high, helium parade balloon for New York’s Radio
City Music Hall Annual Easter Show. She still appears in over 300 newspapers.
She and her boyfriend, Sluggo, have been chosen by Camp Fire Boys and
Girls as the spokes-characters for their nationwide safety promotions. And
retrospective art shows featuring Bushmiller’s work have been traveling across
the country.
Nancy is still a favorite. May she live forever.
NANCY MEETS SLUGGO
REFERENCES
1 Newgarden, Mark and Karasik, Paul. “How to Read Nancy”, 1988.
2 Don Markstein's Toonopedia.
3 Toonopedia: Nancy.
4 Walker, Brian (1983). The Best of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy. Henry Holt,
New York.
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11
COLLECTOR’S CORNER
by
Larry Lowery
Though the opening chapter involves little more than Hoverboy on Ellis
Island, punching people as they get off the boats, the main story concerns
a family of Greek refugees who arouse suspicions in Hoverboy when he
can’t place the family’s accent after talking to the mother in a Manhattan
supermarket line.
It was not long ago that I came across the Fast-Action book shown on this
page. I’d never seen it before, so I asked several Club Members about it,
and with their help and a search of the Internet, I found the book to be
interesting. I’d like to tell you about it, but first I’ll let you know that the
book is a wonderful hoax.
The next chapters involve the Battlin’ Bucket spying on the family, and
making notes about their home life and behavior, until Hoverboy finally
confronts the father physically on Good Friday when our hero realizes the
family “…doesn’t use the same calendar that decent Americans use. . . “ to
determine when Easter is.
The book was listed as being published
in 1947 by Whitemore Publishing
Company. Its size is 4” x 4” with
88 pages.
Though police eventually do intervene and save the Greek family from
Hoverboy’s anger (though not their home, nor a beloved children’s pet duck
named “Demitrios” — but there’s a not too subtile message to readers that the
cops can’t be trusted in matters of illegal immigration, and that it’s best left
up to private citizens to run people with accents out of the country. The final
eight pages are a direct appeal to every Johnny and Janey America to do their
part to “clean up your town.”
No
Fast-Action
books
were
ever published after 1943, and
there never was a Whitemore
Publishing Publishing Company. The
size described does not correspond
to the format of the book in the
illustration.
The supposed owner of the book says:
This “Big Little Book” from the fifties is the pride of my collection, and I’m happy
to have finally dug it out of the many stacks of “collectibles” in my basement, just
to show to you, adoring handfuls of fans. I don’t like to expose it to air much, as
it’s very brittle. Most Hoverboy products were made with a rare high acid, easily
flammable paper that combusts on contact with a lot of oxygen. It means I have to
hold my breath when I read these treasures, or vacuum out the room before I scan
the covers. But it’s worth it.
This and many other treasures can be found, as usual, at Hoverboy.com, the
world’s best Hoverboy fansite.
Stunning stuff, even for 1947. But the dime novel series lived up to its name
for “Fast Action” as there are nineteen fist fights and five dead people by the
end of chapter one.
This flimflam of a story is just one of a set of hoaxes that build up
Hoverboy as a “real” entity in comic character history. He wears
a bucket on his head (with a piece cut out so he can see), and he
“hovers” rather than flies. It is claimed he first appeared in 1930, that
a movie serial was made, that there was a radio program that gave
away premiums, and that he appeared in his own comic book and
daily strip.
You can have fun reading all this “made up stuff” by checking out
hoverboy.com. At the time of this writing, you could get one of his
comic books off eBay.
The owner then described the content, storyline as follows:
The first of the Fastaction series, Hoverboy vs. the Immigrants is a prose novel
loosely based on Vigilance’s cliffhanger serial of the same name published just
after the war when nationalism was still the dominant political philosophy for
most American citizens, and a fear of foreign invasion was a popular anxiety.
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•
•
•
Two very nice books devoted to Floyd Gottfredson and the Mickey Mouse
comic strips that he drew have been published by Fantagraphics Books.
Both are edited by David Gerstein and Gary Groth.
The two books are oblong, allowing for daily strips to run across a page —
10 1/2” x 8 3/4”. Strips are presented in black and white while the essay
sections have full color illustrations.
Volume 1 is titled “Race to Death Valley.” It contains the earliest Mickey
strips (placed at the back of the book - drawn by Disney himself and Ub
Iwerks just before the arrival of Floyd Gottfredson and his “Race to Death
Valley” story). The book’s content continues to January 9, 1932, and it
contains extensive additional information about Gottfredson, foreign
reproductions, and essays on related topics. Each strip’s story sequence
has it’s own introduction and lots of background material. “The Ransom
Plot” story was used as the content for the first Mickey Mouse BLB.
The second volume is titled “Trapped on Treasure Island.” It picks up
where the first volume ends and continues to January 9, 1934. As with the
first volume, there are lots of peripheral articles. This book includes three
complete strip story lines that were adapted to the BLB format: “Sails for
Treasure Island,” “Blaggard Castle,” and “The Mail Pilot.”
Gottfredson drew the Mickey of my growing up years. Those members
in our Club who grew up in the 30s and 40s consider this Mickey Mouse
to be THE Mickey Mouse. He had great adventures. The stories were
interesting and exciting. Mickey was a rough and tough hero with the
moral standards of a “good guy.” He is the Mickey in our BLBs.
Larry Johnston (Member #681) picked up the Delacourt (Dell Publishing
Company) archival files for some of the Fast Action books. The books are
filed in a hard cover binding, four titles in each set. The picture above on the
left shows the binding with the books’ four characters’ names on the spine.
The second picture displays the archival stamp on the inside page. The first
picture below shows the cover of the first book in the binding. And the
last picture shows an end view of the four books. It is assumed that all the
archival Fast Action titles were stored in the same way.
I highly recommend these books and hope that more books will follow.
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•
•
•
From time to time, Big Little Books have shown up prominently in movies.
In A Christmas Story, the books are on Ralphie’s shelves and on the desk
in his room. Even his teacher has them in her desk drawer at school. An
enlarged Flash Gordon BLB appears in the movie Seabiscuit. And Jack
Palance can be seen reading one in Four Deuces (1975).
One of the more interesting uses of BLBs in a movie was prominent in the
movie Road to Perdition starring Tom Hanks as gangster Michael Sullivan.
In the movie, Sullivan’s son is seen reading a Lone Ranger BLB. The book
is used symbolically as the son struggles with the fact that his Dad is a bad
guy although to his family he was a good guy while the BLB shows the
good guy wearing a mask as though he were a bad guy.
•
•
•
Famous Feature Stories is considered to be one of the earliest “true” comic
books. This one-color comic book was published in 1938 by Dell in an
agreement with Whitman, and it contained stories of several major BLB
characters: Tarzan, Terry and the Pirates, Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie,
Dan Dunn, Smokey Stover, Don Winslow, King of the Royal Mounted, and
Smilin’ Jack. Pages were formatted with a captioned, square picture and
text written around it. The comic sold for 10¢. The copy in my collection
has the same illustration on the back cover. Recently a copy was found
with a typical comic book ad on the back cover. The first printing of this
book had no ad. Subsequent printings have the ad.
If you get a copy of the Road to Perdition DVD, look at the outtakes on the
disc’s special features. There is a scene that was cut from the movie where
Judd Law examines the boy’s room. Under the boy’s bed are many BLBs
and they can be seen in various places in his room. The movie is a “period
piece” and the BLBs were used to convey a time during the depression
years of the 1930s. Only BLB enthusiasts would notice that the setting was
1931, several years before the first Lone Ranger BLB was published.
The movie was adapted from Max Allan Collins’ and Richard Piers Rayner’s
award-winning graphic novel
Perhaps the most interesting feature
of the Road to Perdition film is the
fact that a BLB was made of the
David Self’s screenplay, and it was
given out at the movie’s premier
in 2002 and briefly distributed by
Dreamworks. The illustration on
this 3 1/2” x 4” hard cover BLB
was done by Bill Garland. It shows
Tom Hanks on the cover, and the
illustration has fake wear around
the spine and edges to give it a
nostalgia feel of the 1930s.
NEWLY IDENTIFIED SECOND PRINTING OF
FAMOUS FEATURE STORIES
Dell Publishing Company 1938
•
•
•
A variation of the open-box set of
Mickey Mouse Wee Little Books has been
discovered. It is a British printing of the
6 little books that tell about Tanglefoot,
Mickey’s horse. The main difference
from the U.S. version is that the box
holds the books in a vertical position and
the box has some different printing on it.
This is a very nice and scarce item.
As a collectible, this very limited
edition BLB is a very difficult book
to find.
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17
Russell Rainbolt: Master of Giant Images
by
Walt Needham
Limited by publishing parameters, big little book characters have a stature
of several inches at best. Fans of comic books and newspaper comics often find larger depictions of their heroes and villains, especially since the
adoption of splash panels. However the original art for big little books
and comics, either a single panel or series of panels, is typically no larger
than that of a front page of an old fashioned newspaper
In contrast, artist Russell Rainbolt produces big images. He seldom works
smaller than ten and a half feet. An internationally recognized billboard
painter and muralist, his works include both one of a kind commercial
products and art of a more permanent type. A partial list includes the
murals outside of the Yale International Building, as well as outdoors murals for the Science and Technology Festival in Toulouse, France, and the
Garden Festival in New Castle, England. Russell notes that New Castle is
the location of that famed Brewery.
RAINBOLT STANDING IN FRONT OF HIS MURAL
Russell was born in Dallas, Texas but spent much of his early life in rural
Louisiana. After his undergraduate work, he moved to New York City.
He is an Honors graduate of the famed New York School of Visual Arts.
He settled in New Haven, Connecticut. Russell is married to Barbara, a
Yale Ph.D., and they have a 7 year old son, Anton.
Of particular interest to big little book and comics fans is Russell’s huge
mural The History of Comics from 1897 to 1975. The size is 20 feet high
by 60 feet long. It is composed of oil on vinyl. It must be disassembled
before it can be transported. Its figures range in size from many times
larger than life to several feet or more. None would fit on a big little book
page although many of the characters from big little books can be found
on its left side. The mural has been featured at comics conventions and
most recently at the art gallery of the Stamford Campus of the University
of Connecticut. The impact that it makes upon a first time viewer can be
described as no less than awesome.
Russell is a very friendly, highly intelligent, although modest, soft-spoken
and likeable man. He has been interested in comics since early boyhood
when he started collecting them. Big little books have been part of his collection. His interests are wide and intellectual. Some of his work is classic
in nature. His detailed drawings of hands are especially inspiring. He is
considering working in graphic novels and has made some preliminary
efforts in this field, collaborating with writer Ron Goulart.
Russell often meets with Big Little Book Club members along with interested writers and artists at their weekly Saturday luncheons.
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CLOSE-UP SECTION OF MURAL
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