Number 711


Dragula's April Fool by Toth


Alex Toth did this 5-page strip for Drag Cartoons publisher/editor/cartoonist Pete Millar in 1963. These are scans of the originals, dug out at some point in my career of internet mining.

Note the label for Grafix paper. That paper was chemically treated; a second chemical applied by a brush brought out a pattern that the lithographic camera saw as line art. Grafix was once called Craftint. In 2009 due to low sales and a changing market it was discontinued by its manufacturer. Goodbye to an era, comic book fans! Craftint/Grafix was used to great effect by some of the best cartoonists of the Golden Age.

Sadly, Millar died in 2003, "Den-Den" (cartoonist, later editor Dennis Ellefson) died in 1997, and Toth in 2006.

Tomorrow, back for one more posting from the EC New Trend era, as we find Feldstein and Ingels in love!

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Number 236

Rat Fink Christmas

I was reminded of something the other day when I got my friend Dave Miller's annual Christmas CD. To compile his yearly CD, Dave takes some of the most obscure and oddball Christmas music he can find on record albums from thrift stores and yard sales.

Although there's nothing on the CD related to the cover artwork, the cover evokes Ed "Big Daddy" Roth and his famous Rat Fink. In the 1960s there was a magazine devoted to Big Daddy, published and edited by Pete Millar. Millar died in 2003, and has been forgotten by a lot of comic book fans, because his comic books weren't those normally sold to Marvel and DC readers. He published Drag Cartoons from 1963 to 1968, with the themes being cars and drag racing. That was a subject I wasn't interested in,* but I did like the cartoonists working in those early issues: Toth, Warren Tufts, Russ Manning, and even Millar himself. Millar got a license with Ed Roth to do four issues of a magazine that eventually failed on the newsstands. Pete overestimated how many kids who bought Rat Fink decals might be willing to pay 35¢ for a magazine based on Big Daddy. Number 2 is the only issue I bought, probably because of the Alex Toth story. But that's for later. For right now we've got Millar himself doing a Mad comics-styled "Night Before Christmas," featuring Big Daddy himself.

Pete's artstyle was developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and he is still the only cartoonist I've ever seen work in that style. I've scanned the pages bigger than I normally do. If your eyes are anything like Pappy's eyes you need something bigger so you can see all the tiny details. Just click on the pages for full-size images.



*The only thing about cars that interested me was getting girls into the seat next to me.

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Number 186

When Rick Griffin Was In Drag

When people think of artist Rick Griffin, they think of his psychedelic dance posters, his comix work, and artwork like this, taken from the important 1972 publication, The Man From Utopia:

They might not realize the Rick Griffin they know was preceded by a Rick Griffin they don't know. I've owned this copy of Drag Cartoons #12, dated February 1965, since it was new on the stands without knowing that Rick Griffin illustrated two of the strips, for a total of five pages in the magazine. Hard to explain, but I just never noticed. I stumbled onto them while looking at an Alex Toth strip in the same issue.
Griffin started out doing cartoons for Surfing magazine. I have no idea how many issues of Drag Cartoons he appeared in. That's for the Griffin completists amongst us to tell us.

When Rick did these strips he was about 20 or 21 years old, influenced by the cartooning styles of the early 1960s, and by Mad comics, which he might have read off the newsstands as they appeared, or later encountered in the series of Mad paperbacks. Or both. In the last panel of "The Highwayman" strip he uses the word "furshluginer." A dead giveaway as to his influence.

The artwork on "The Highwayman"--writer not credited, but for the record it's by Alfred Noyes from his 1906 poem--is more detailed, using a lot of pen and ink lines. The second strip isn't as ornate, and frankly, not as good. I'm including it anyway because I just know you guys wanna see this stuff. Looking at Griffin's work during his salad days can give you a comparison of how much development he made during his career. In his case there was a huge leap of development during a very short period of time, just a couple of years.

Griffin died in 1991 in a motorcycle accident. He wasn't even 50 years old. He left a legacy of some wonderful artwork that will outlive us all. I believe that one hundred years from now the San Francisco dance posters of the 1960s will be as the Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha prints are to our era. The art lovers of a century hence will be celebrating an important art form, by then long gone, but idolized along with the work of the best fine artists of the era. A Rick Griffin Website is available.

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Number 105

Goofing On Flash Gordon

Flash Gordon was such a well-known comic strip and movie serial that it was a good target for parody.

Mad did the best parody of all with Wally Wood's excellent "Flesh Garden!"

In Humbug #10, 1958, the next-to-last issue, fellow Mad artist, Jack Davis, took on the job of rendering a parody of Flash as a Russian commissar. In this case Flash is used as a satire on the Soviet Union during the Sputnik era.

Click on images for full-size pages.

Mel Keefer is an artist who has worked in many fields, comic strips, animation, and on this strip from Drag Cartoons #2, December 1963, where he does a goof on not only Flash Gordon, but Buck Rogers and drag racing.

The Keefer strip is scanned from the magazine. I love the color overlays. The Davis artwork is from a photocopy, tweaked with my CompuPic software. I'm sorry it isn't as good as it would be if I'd scanned from the original magazine. The use of a lookalike Cyrillic alphabet for the lettering is a stroke of genius on somebody's part, most likely writer/editor Harvey Kurtzman.

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Number 98


Toth and Tufts in Drag Cartoons!


I got my first car in 1963. Those were the days when we thought all of the "bitchin" cars came out of Southern California. We--my buddies, me and most all the rest of the adolescent and adolescent-acting males in America--all wanted to be part of the car culture they had in that magical place of California.

That car culture produced one of the most unusual comics of all time, the black and white hot rod cartoon books, CAR'toons and later, Drag Cartoons. Both of these magazines were started in Southern California by racing enthusiast and cartoonist, Pete Millar. The story is that he created CAR'toons, walked out when he had a disagreement with the publisher, and started Drag Cartoons. Millar's artwork was pretty good, and the cover to this issue is extremely well done. But the art seems rooted in its era, maybe even earlier. It looks very 1950s to me, but it also seems perfect for the stories he was doing, about cars, hot rods and the kids who drove them.

In the earlier issues some of the best comic book artists who lived in Southern California worked for Drag Cartoons. In this installment of Pappy's I'm showing two of them, Alex Toth and Warren Tufts, both four-page stories from Drag Cartoons #2, December 1963. Toth is legendary for his comic book work, working in all sorts of genres. I think this example, "The Tell Tell Car," is a fine story. He didn't get a chance to work with satirical material often, and the splash panel shows the Mad influence of Mort Drucker. For you younger readers, the fellow making the speech in the splash is a caricature of distinguished actor E.G. Marshall. Along with "Mr. Brady," Robert Reed, he starred in a popular early 1960s TV drama called The Defenders.

Warren Tufts did a fantastic Western comic strip called Casey Ruggles, but as was claimed, was a perfectionist who spent a lot of hours at the drawing board and at some point quit the syndicated comic strip biz. The "Vincent Van Gears" story he did here shows how hard he worked. Every panel is beautifully composed and drawn. What a great-looking story with a very strangely grown-up Dennis Mitchell, swinging into a real close approximation of the Dick Tracy comic strip. Oh yeah, for you younger readers again: The "Kennedy foot bit" the hot-rodding Dennis refers to on the first page would be the Presidential Fitness Program founded by President Kennedy in the early '60s, putting more emphasis on physical activity. And we would think, less on driving. (John F. Kennedy was assassinated just before this issue went off sale.)

All of the men mentioned on this page are gone now. Millar died in 2003, Toth in 2006, and Tufts died in a flying accident in the late '70s or early '80s.

Drag Cartoons, its predecessor and its descendents, were products of their time, and had a loyal following of young readers for whom cars and that California car culture were "Bitchin, man, bitchin!"

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