March 12, 2020 11percent or so of his prolific output—
he was brutally skillful at it. Zim once
joked that he and his fellow cartoon-
ists at Puck treated the various races
and creeds that made up America with
gloves, the kind boxers wear. It may
explain why—despite the large influ-
ence he had on other cartoonists of
his time—Zim has been more or less
canceled from comics histories. Still,
Rube Goldberg deeply admired Zim’s
art and eulogized him as “the dean of
grotesque pictorial humor.”George Herriman, the creator of
Krazy Kat, sits far from Zim on the
screwball spectrum, on as high a throne
as a comics canon can offer. Krazy Kat’s
relentless vaudeville variations of a kat
getting whacked by a mouse hurling a
brick might make the work the ultimateexpression of screwball, but its ethereal
and gentle subtlety beckons the strip into
a transcendent world of its own. Know-
ing that Krazy Kat is now widely avail-
able again, Tumey has chosen instead to
offer a slice of Herriman’s far more ob-
scure Stumble Inn. Krazy was getting an
unenthusiastic response from most read-
ers and most newspaper editors—Hearst
often had to insist that his newspapers
run it—so the cartoonist doubled his
workload by simultaneously providing
his syndicate with a more conventionally
funny comic strip. Happily, he didn’t do
conventional very well; Stumble Inn is a
strip about a fleabag hotel that seems to
anticipate John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers.
It looks a bit like Mutt and Jeff if that
strip had been drawn with the precision
of a Renaissance master—some of the
most breathtakingly beautiful cartoon-
ing I’ve ever seen.
Herriman was born in New Orleans
in 1880. A Creole of color, he and his
family left the city when he was ten
years old and, as Michael Tisserand
documents in his meticulous and re-
velatory biography, relocated to Los
Angeles, where they passed for white
for the rest of their lives.^4 Reading
Krazy Kat through that lens adds new
layers of complexity to a strip about a
black cat and the white mouse (pink on
Sundays) who loathes him.^5
The most poignant panel in Tumey’s
book is in a wonderfully convoluted
Stumble Inn sequence in which Mr.
Stumble, Owl Eye (the hotel’s house
detective), and a deadbeat boarder
they’re now trying to lure back to their
inn are each disguised in hats, long
coats, and false beards. Soda Popp, the
sweet young bellboy, with black face andlarge red lips (Herriman always drew
his black humans according to the then
standard cartoon physiognomic code),
looks at the camouflaged Owl Eye and
says, “’at ole ‘Owl Eye’ he’s so disguised
I bet he dont know who he is his’sef.”
While Stumble Inn sits in a quiet
and conventional suburb of Coconino
County, in a dingy small town else-
where on the comics pages we find
Our Boarding House, established in
1921 by Gene Ahern. The homely daily
panel orbits around the landlady’s lazy
gasbag of a husband, Major Hoople, a
hybrid of Falstaff, Munchausen, and
W. C. Fields. He chases one hopeless
get-rich-quick scheme after another
and regales the other lodgers with tall
tales about his big-game hunting or
his heroism as a prisoner in the Boer
War sneaking messages out hidden in
alphabet soup.Syndicates back in the day often
required their artists to provide “top-
pers” for their Sunday pages—small
“throwaway” strips that could inde-
pendently sit atop the main feature so
papers could brag about having, say,
thirty-two strips in their supplements
rather than sixteen, or, even better,
they could replace the feature with an
ad. Comics always existed in the in-
terstice between art and commerce,
and Ahern turned the “minor” top-
pers into something simultaneously
ridiculous and sublime. The Nut Bros.,
Ches and Wal, sat above Our Board-
ing House, breaking the fourth wall by
offering their pun-laden old chestnuts
with a self-aware wink and a surrealis-
tic edge—goofy sight gags and costume
changes from one panel to the next.
In 1936 Ahern moved to a larger
syndicate at twice the pay but had to
leave Major Hoople and the strip’s title
behind. A near clone, Judge Puffle,
now lived under a new logo, Room and
Board. The Squirrel Cage, his topper for
Room and Board, developed into one of
the underappreciated hidden glories in
the history of comics. It started as a di-
rect continuation of The Nut Bros. but
transformed into a strip that didn’t just
have a surreal edge—it was surreal to its
core (see illustration on page 12).
A bearded Little Hitchhiker—the di-
rect model for R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural
a generation later—started to pop up
in the strip’s shifting landscapes with
thumb extended, inscrutably asking:
“Nov shmoz ka pop?” The vaguely
Slavic-sounding gibberish was pretty
much the only thing he ever said, and it
became an unanswerable catchphrase,
the kind that screwball strips were
often able to wormhole into readers’
brains through satisfying repetition.
Ahern’s shifting backgrounds and
props are less graceful than those in
Krazy Kat. The characters, no matter
how odd, seem to walk through their
uncanny environment and impossiblesituations with the same resignation as if
they were waiting for Godot. It all makes
the irreal seem... real. The unearthly
world of the top strip exists in a dialec-
tical relationship to the drab boarding
house in the strip below that contains
the outsized fantasies of Judge Puffle.Of all the wise guys^6 gathered in
SCREWBALL!, Milt Gross is perhaps
the essence of the idiom—cartooning
distilled into precious drops of Banana
Oil. (“Banana Oil,” for the uniniti-
ated, was one of those aforementioned
wormhole phrases, Gross’s equivalent
of Rube Goldberg’s “Baloney!”) Gross
w a s b o r n t o R u s s i a n - Jew i s h i m m i g r a nt s
in 1895 and raised in the Bronx. In the
early 1920s he created Banana Oil,
among other strips, as well as an illus-
trated syndicated weekly newspaper
column called Gross Exaggerations that
crosscut conversations heard through
the dumbwaiter of a small tenementbuilding. Talk about finding one’s voice!
It was written in Gross’s fractured Yid-
dishized English (Is diss a lengwitch?
Dunt esk!) and gathered into a best-
selling book called Nize Baby in 1926
before becoming a comic strip. His mal-
apropisms and phonetic spelling ache
to be read out loud for comprehension.
His 1927 skirmish in the war against
Christmas was a retelling of the Clem-
ent Clark Moore poem, “De Night in De
Front from Chreesmas,” which starts:’Twas de night befurr Chreesmas
und hall troo de house
Not a critchure was slipping—not
ivvin de souze,
Wot he leeved in de basement
high-het like a Tsenator,
Tree gasses whooeezit—dot’s
right—it’s de jenitor!Gross was doubly gifted: an irre-
sistibly risible writer and visually a
comics genius. His cartoons are pure
doodle: effortless and effervescent.
The art looks like he was giggling un-
controllably while the cartoons just
shpritzed out of his pen—and his laugh
is infectious, bouncing off the page so
you laugh too. Of his many creations,
Count Screwloose of Tooloose, a Sun-
day page that launched in 1929, may
be his screwiest. It reveals the the-
matic heart of all the screwball works
in this book and beyond: The Count,
a half-pint, sausage-nosed, cross-eyed
resident of Nuttycrest Sanitarium, has
an even smaller companion, a yellow
dog named Iggy who wears a Napoleon
hat. In each episode the Count devises
a nutty new way to escape the institu-
tion and reenter the world outside itsPanels from Stumble Inn by George Herriman, April 5, 1924K
in
g^
Fe
at
ur
es
S
yn
di
ca
te
/^
The^ Libraryof^ AmericanComics(^4) Michael Tisserand, KRAZY: George
Herriman, a Life in Black and White
(Harper, 2015).
(^5) Chris Ware wrote about Herri-
man and race for the NYR Daily:
“To Walk in Beauty,” January 29, 2017.
(^6) And in my best post–David Foster
Wallace footnote mode, might I add
what may not need saying at all: every
one of these wise guys was a guy. While
there have been many female screw-
balls in the history of the performing
arts—Fanny Brice, Beatrice Lillie,
Carole Lombard, and Gracie Allen
come to mind, as do the two broads
in Broad City—there don’t appear to
have been any female screwballs at all
in the overwhelmingly male domain
of early-twentieth-century newspaper
comics. I refer interested readers to
historian and comics artist Trina Rob-
bins’s several books devoted to casting
light on women cartoonists and their
accomplishments.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Homage to Modern Art, 1972
Screenprint with Jim Nicholson
29 3/4 x 21 inches, Edition of 70
hirambutler.com