Making the Grade

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

Yesterday I showed Harry Mace's cartoons, today we have his comic strip work. Like so many cartoonists, he was offered the chance to strut his stuff daily at least once maybe twice. As my samples show, Junior Grade started on Octorber the 14th, 1957. My samples run out in july the next year, but at least one source on the internet says it ran to 1961 (which is when Amy began). This same source (comicstripfan.com) also shows two original dalies, one from august 1959, so there must be some truth in that.

Alan Holtz' Strippers Guide tells us, there may have been a earlier daily strip called Hannibal, but it's one of those strips even he couldn't find. Hannibal sounds like a dogs name to my, by the way, so it could be one of Harry Mace's dogs...

I Kid You Not

Monday Cartoon Day.

A week ago I showed some These Funny Times and Laff--A-Day cartoons which had some by fifties cartoonist Harry Mace. Mace was best known for several strips in the sixties including the one panel series Amy (which was later taken over by fellow cartoonist Jack Tippit) and Junior Grade ( short lived strip in the late fifties). Alan Holtz also mentions a probably unsuccesful (and possibly even unsyndicated) strip called Hannibal in 1956/7. Mace worked as a cartoonist all through the fifties 9and may have had one of the best signatures I have ever seen) and was one of the last regular cartoonists to get his own newspaper strip, maybe because all his work concerned kids and that market was pretty well provided for with Dennis the Menace.

A quick look through the internet provides many places where his originals are or were sold (including Russ Cochran's http://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/1238369). Over at the Grand Comic Book Database fellow dutch comics enthousiast Ramon Schenk has indexed a 1959 Dell cartoon paperback called The Other Woman, which was edited by Bill Yates, who for years was the editor of 1000 Jokes and himself was late to get a strip series of his own as well. His style is not very unique and I keep mixing him up with Winthrop and Morty Meekle creator Dick Cavalli.

Cartoons in The American Weekly, date unknown (but late fifties).


From Oct 28 1956:


From May 12 1957:


From May 31 1958:


From Feb 7 1960:


Amy from Dec 25 1964: