With Mr. Weedon Grossmith’s Compliments

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Starring actor Weedon Grossmith

THESE IMAGES, courtesy Robert Kirkpatrick, are images from a Souvenir brochure and a programme of the 204th performance of The New Boy in England. Peter Jensen Brown discovered a poster recently which shed much new light on the origins of Alfred E. Neuman (see HERE). The Souvenir brochure contained 12 b&w photos, mounted on card, of the cast along with their facsimile autographs. Peter Jensen Brown has a new post which examines ‘New Boy’ Willis Searle’s cross-dressing background HERE. No photos of Searle have turned up as yet. Also see Faces of the New Boy HERE.

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Programme, August 13, 1894

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Souvenir Brochure, February 21, 1895

 

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Playwrite Arthur Law

 

5

May Palfrey

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Frederick Volpé

Actor Volpé played Felix Roach in later performances of The New Boy.

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Cast List

The cast list which is pasted to the inside cover of the Souvenir Brochure, with a slightly different cast to that in the earlier programme.

•¡•

The faces of The New Boy

    

[1] Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 2, 1896.

I’M VERY pleased to read Peter Jensen Brown’s The Real Alfred E. which raises new questions about the origin of the Alfred E. Neuman image so familiar to readers of MAD magazine. However, Brown’s findings raise a few other questions in my mind. First a short chronology of The New Boy on the stage will set the scene. 

[2] Grossmith, in The Bookman, Volume 37.

The New Boy, a play inspired by F. Anstey’s popular book Vice Versa, opened in London on February 28, 1894, with Weedon Grossmith in the title role, and ran for fourteen months in England, ending round April 1895. The first American show of The New Boy was produced in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on September 14, 1894 with British actor Willis Searle, whom one writer described as ‘droll and diminutive,’ as the boy. 

[3] Grossmith, in Munsey’s Magazine, 1909.

Searle’s acting was criticized by many including New York’s Spirit of the Times who on October 13, 1894, reported

‘Following the advice of the Spirit, shrewd manager Charles Frohman has sent Willis Searle into the provinces and engaged a new boy for the New Boy, at the Standard. Any change would have been for the better; but James T. Powers is a decided improvement. He looks the part and gets some fun out of it.’ 

[4] James T. Powers, 1897.

The words ‘he looks the part’ may be significant; suggesting that the actors were imitating the promotional image used on posters and advertising rather than the poster being inspired by the phiz of any particular actor. 

As Brown notes: 

‘James T. Powers performed the role until early December, 1894, and continues performing the role on the ‘original cast’ tour through April, 1895. Bert Coote played the role in the first national tour that started in mid-November, 1894, and continued for more than a year, ending in early 1896. Bert Coote later purchased the rights to produce the play himself. His independent production toured the country through 1899.’

[5] Grossmith, in Behind the Footlights, 1904.

THE FIRST actor to take on the role was Weedon Grossmith (1854-1919), who began life as an aspiring artist, studying at the West London School of Art before becoming a successful portrait painter. He illustrated his brother George Grossmith’s celebrated book Diary of a Nobody and exhibited paintings at the Royal Academy. In 1888 he took to the stage, touring America with Rosina Vokes theatrical company. Back in London he appeared in Sir Henry Irving’s Robert Macaire and Richard Mansfield’s Prince Karl. He was manager and lessee of Terry’s Vaudeville Theatre in London from 1894 to 1896, and it was here that the farce The New Boy was first produced. 

[6] ‘Who’s the NEW BOY?…’ June 3, 1895.

One tantalizing fact is that Weedon Grossmith was also well regarded as a caricaturist and as a member of the Savage Club formed close friendships with all the leading caricaturists of the day, including Harry Furniss and Linley Sambourne. This may be significant since it still has not been established if the caricatured face on The New Boy advertisements originated in London or America. Grossmith or one of his friends may actually have designed the original poster image (shown HERE when Bert Coote was enacting The New Boy) on which all others were based. That’s pure speculation at this point in time but intriguing nonetheless. 

[7] New York Dramatic Mirror, April 6, 1895.

Like Brown I could find no images of Willis Searle, also an Englishman, but his acting in the part of The New Boy was widely criticized. And, contrarily, he was widely praised in America for his part as the female impersonator in Charlie’s Aunt. 

[8] Bert Coote, Rochester Democrat, February 5, 1899.

One of the most popular New Boys, and the last, was British born Bert Coote. He took to the footlights at age 5 and spent twenty years as a stage comedian in the United States. He began working in films in 1930 and died at his London home on September 3, 1938. He was seventy years old. 

[9] James T. Powers, Marie Burroughs Art Portfolio of Stage Celebrities, 1894.

James T. Powers was born in New York on April 26, 1862, and began life as a Western Union messenger boy and clerk in a tea store. He first ventured on stage with a minstrel troupe in Vernon, NY, which gave one performance before folding. He knocked around in variety and vaudeville until 1882 when he played a comic policeman in Evangeline. In 1897, after playing The New Boy, he toured with Daly’s musical comedy company and the Shuberts.

[10]

[11] James T. Powers as The New Boy, November 18, 1894.

Many of the images of comedian James T. Powers do bear a ‘real-life’ resemblance to Alfred E. Neuman but as seen in newspaper drawings of Powers playing the Boy onstage the resemblance is nonexistent, another reason to suppose that the image may have been prepared before the actor was hired for the part. On the other hand the artist may have pictured the scene from the vantage-point of a newspaper desk, or a barstool.

[12] F.M. Howarth strip cartoon in Puck, September 6, 1893.

A few questions remain – did the face of the Boy originate in England or America? Who designed the face, was it a nonentity or the work of an already celebrated English or American cartoonist? Who drew the original image – the Ur-image? In previous posts I pointed out the Neuman resemblance in pre-1894 Puck cartoons by F. Opper and F.M. Howarth. 

[13] F. Opper, March, 1888.

WAS that serendipity or was The New Boy image taken from a previous source? Thanks to The Real Alfred E. we have new avenues to explore. At this point a thorough search for New Boy advertisements in British periodicals for the period 1893-96 is needed to ascertain whether the face originated in England or America. 

[14] New York Tribune Illustrated Supplement, unknown date.

*‡*

The Real Alfred E. Neuman?

 

James T. Powers, Tacoma Times, March 7, 1911

Is the quest for the origin of Alfred E. Neuman over? Read ‘The Real Alfred E.’ by Peter Jensen Brown HERE and judge for yourself...

“It Didn’t Hurt a Bit !”

 

“After another two nights of local application and the rather futile business of holding warm water in the sag of her cheek, she found out, at the direction of Mrs. McMurtrie, a neighborhood dentist who occupied a suite of rooms over a corner drug store, the large, grinning picture of a boy, with a delighted hiatus of missing front tooth, painted on each window, and giltly inscribed: “It Didn’t Hurt a Bit.” ” – Star-Dust, by Fannie Hurst, 1920

Frank A. Ruf was born in Albany, New Jersey, April 4, 1856, and moved to Des Moines, Iowa, as a small child. He left home at thirteen and after some traveling ended up in St. Louis, Missouri where he went to work with M.W. Alexander, the town’s leading druggist. Ruf bought a half-interest in a firm called Frost & Ruf until 1888, when he began manufacturing Antikamnia – “Opposed to Pain” – as a headache and neuralgia remedy. His partner retired and Ruf became sole owner of the Antikamnia Chemical Company. Shrewd advertising paid off and offices and laboratories were opened in New York, London, Paris and Madrid. Distributing depots were set up in the large cities round the globe.
    

In 1897 he married Miss Alpha Haight of Middlebury, Vermont and filled his mansion with Fine Art and Persian rugs. Ruf was involved with various other corporations as president of the C.E. Gallagher Medicine Company, the Herriot Polish Company, the Cinderella Heel Corporation, the Actoid Remedy Company, and was vice-president of the Bowen Motor Railways Corporation. He described himself as a “man of the people,” a “man of faultless integrity,” and “no friend to deception and double dealing” – and he was also responsible for poisoning thousands of people all over the world with his deadly patent medicine Antikamnia – “Opposed to Pain”.
     

Antikamnia claimed to be an “ethical remedy” for headaches and neuralgia whose ingredients consisted mainly of acetanilide, a heart depressant, mixed with heroin, morphine, codeine, caffeine and baking soda, in different bottles, and sold through the mail and the corner drugstore. It was not only poisonous it was also addictive. Free samples were sent to medical people and advertised as “brain food,” with the boxes labeled with a deliberate lie: “No drug habit – no heart effect.” The drug led to many deaths by accidental and deliberate overdose. Patients often appeared on doctor’s doorsteps stupefied, with cyanosis of the face and lips, delirious and craving more of the “ethical” headache remedy Antikamnia. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a booklet in 1909 which listed dozens of cases of the deadly and narcotic effects of Acetanilid, Antipyrin and Phenacetin, all common ingredients in quack nostrums. In 1891:

“Woman, 22, took by mistake 24 grains of Antikamnia, supposed to represent 18 grams of acetanilide. In a few minutes she was wildly delirious. She then became unconscious. Death occurred about ten hours after ingestion of the drug. There was deep cyanosis of the entire body.”

The ugliest freckle-face boy...
(with above a ‘Happy’ comic character)

     
Like most of the other quack nostrums Ruf used printed material to help sell his poisonous products. The American Homoeopathist, Vol. 34, No. 2, February 1908, noted the introduction of the 1908 Antikamnia Tablet Calendar, prominently illustrated with a “It Didn’t Hurt a Bit” kid cartoon in full-color, and stated

“This year he (Frank A. Ruf) has perpetrated one of the funniest of cartoons to carry the Antikamnia Calendar, which shadows forth the homeliest, ugliest freckle-face carrot-redheaded boy with a generous grin, big right-angled ears, a tooth knocked out of the upper row, and underneath the legend: “It didn’t hurt a bit.” We use the word “legend” advisedly, for they are usually based on the mythical, in short, on falsehood; and everybody looking at this redhead with his leer and pretense, knows that he is lying, that he couldn’t tell the truth if he tried to. “Redhead” takes a back handspring or two into one of Juri Lloyd’s stories. If you leave Ruf’s redhead on your office table or in your reception room, it will make you and your patrons laugh in spite of your dignity and their ailments. It’s the best thing the Antikamnia Company has issued since Crusius’ skull pictures. Get one from Ruf and enjoy it.”

Crusius was Louis Crusius (1862-1898, who signed his cartoons as ‘L. Crusius MD’ and ‘Crus’), a St. Louis doctor who sidelined painting cartoon skeletons for Antikamnia calendars and cards. His work was collected in a book called ‘The Funny Bone; A book of mirth’ in 1893, with the author’s name misspelled as ‘L. Crucius.’ The trade magazine Meyer Brothers Druggist mourned “a life that gave us joy, for he made us laugh and one that does this serves one of the best ends for which God made him. There is so much in this world to cause a sigh, that when one comes our way like Dr. Crucius it’s like the sun breaking through a storm cloud.”

Juri Lloyd’s particulars remain a mystery.

Antikamnia’s freckle-faced boy, 1908.
MAD’s Alfred E. Neuman, since the mid-1950s.

     

Canadian Advertisement, 1907

Antikamnia was not alone in the lucrative patent medicine flimflam business of addiction and poison. Addicts were created in feeding babies Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Cough Syrup, containing opium. Kopp’s Baby’s Friend, sold in New York and the Midwest, was made of sweetened water and morphine. Birney’s Catarrhal Powder, Dr. Cole’s Catarrh Cure, and Crown Catarrh Powder were mostly cocaine and were given out as free samples at ferry and railway stations.

A New York druggist was quoted on the use of catarrh remedies for drugging purposes in 1905

“People come in here, ask what catarrh powders we’ve got, read the labels, and pick out the one that’s got the most cocain(e). When I see a customer comparing labels I know she’s a fiend.”

Other ‘baby killers’ on the shelf included Children’s Comfort (morphine), Dr. Fahrney’s Teething Syrup (morphine and chloroform), Dr. James’ Soothing Syrup Cordial (heroin), Dr. Moffatt’s Teethina (powdered opium), Victor Infant Relief (chloroform and cannabis indica), and Dr. Fowler’s Strawberry and Peppermint Mixture (morphine).

E.W. Kemble cartoon, Collier’s  1905-06

Think of the number of doped up babies in North America, Great Britain and the rest of the world in the 19th and early 20th centuries, all victims of the patent medicine companies. Mrs. Winslow’s was extensively used by the poor to pacify their babies. The Chicago Department of Health issued a warning: “There were numerous cases on record where the baby has been put to sleep never to waken again.” One office scrub woman was quoted as saying of her babies at home: “They’re all right. Just wan teaspoonful of Winslow’s an’ they lay like the dead ’till morning.”

Quack medicine companies best customers (and advertisers) were the medical profession. Bovinine, a supposed meat extract containing morphine, was also given to babies. Doctor’s gave it in oral and rectal form, literally drowning the patient with dose after dose. One patient was given Bovinine orally every hour – “and every four hours a high rectal injection of three ounces” – before having her ovaries removed. In operations it was sometimes inserted directly into open wounds.

Asthma Tabs contained potassium iodide and arsenic, and were sold through the mail until 1925. The maker of Raz-Mah had its headquarters in Toronto and New York. Its asthma and hay-fever remedy was found to contain aspirin mixed with charcoal and caffeine. Hamlin’s Wizard Oil, which ran its own traveling medicine show, used mainly alcohol and chloroform in its famous cure-all.

Frederick Burr Opper cartoon, 1888,
Puck’s Library No. 9

By July 1905, following exposure in the Journal of the American Medical Association, physicians gradually stopped promoting Antikamnia and the price dropped to ten cents for a vest-pocket box of tablets. The Food and Drugs Act came into force in January 1907. By 1912 

“the profession is treated to an edifying exhibition of virtue triumphant, a wolf so completely covered by the harmless coat of a sheep that he flatters himself that his wolfish nature is completely concealed. No longer are skulls and skeletons sent out in calendar form as grinning advance agents to be displayed in every doctor’s office, but instead a beautiful domestic scene, showing a convalescent child nestling in the arms of its mother... Truly Satan is appearing as an angel of light.”

The “It Didn’t Hurt a Bit” kid – whose spitting image was appropriated as a mascot by MAD magazine since the mid-1950s – first appeared on a calendar in 1908, although the character was in use as early as the 1880’s in cartoons and newspaper ads. See more HERE. His half-lidded eyes and toothless dopey grin suggest nothing more than a poor clod strung out on Antikamnia, suffering from cyanosis of the lips and face, heart thumping against his bony chest, mind bludgeoned into a stupor and desperately craving his next fix.
   

Frank A. Ruf, “no friend to deception and double dealing,” died on May 29, 1923, at his home in St. Louis, Missouri, leaving an estate worth $2,500,000 which kept his relatives squabbling for years afterward trying to break his last will and testament.

Sources:
— The American Physician, Vol. 34, No. 2, February 1908
— ‘The Nostrum Evil,’ by Samuel Adams Hopkins, Collier’s series of articles, 1905
— ‘The Propaganda for Reform in Proprietary Medicines,’ Chicago: The Association, 1912
— ‘Centennial History of Missouri,’ by Walter B. Stevens, 1921

Painless McPhee

The Quest for Alfred E. Neuman (aka Melvin -- aka Painless McPhee) is never-ending. Advertisements from the New York Daily Herald, New York Herald Dispatch, and New York Daily News from 1915 and 1916. See also Mysteries of Melvin HERE and Mysteries of Melvin Continued HERE.

Mysteries of Melvin Continued

"It Didn't Hurt a Bit" Kid, Top 1 Dec 1903, Bruce Herald, New Zealand, bottom three illustrations:10 Sept 1904, Observer, New Zealand, 23 Jan 1907, Feilding Star, New Zealand, Dr. Leon's Painless Dentistry, Washington, D.C., 10 Nov 1910. See my previous post Mysteries of Melvin HERE.

Mysteries of Melvin

In the late fifties William Gaines received a letter on Buckingham Palace stationary concerning the resemblance between Alfred E. Neuman and young Prince Charles of England that had been published in MAD magazine.

Gaines recalled publishing something about the resemblance between Neuman and the Prince and receiving the letter saying “I bloody well don’t look like him” and signed “Charles Printemps or something like that and it was mailed from a post office box near the palace. We never did find out if it was legitimate or not.”

Gaines also remembered MAD was sued several times over the ownership of Alfred E. Neuman. “His face has been around at least a hundred years. When I was a kid I used to see it on post cards saying “What, me worry?” We found it as early as the 1890’s. He was an advertisement for a dentist in Topeka, Kansas, whose name was Painless Romaine. He was used for a million things, even for anti-Roosevelt ads in the 1930’s.”

[1909] Winnipeg Free Press, October 30

Harvey Kurtzman said that the publishers became curious about the origin of Alfred E. Neuman, sometimes referred to as Melvin Cowznofski, and pleaded with its readers for information. “The answers were astonishing. The face dated back to the 19th century. It was supposed to have been used for selling patent medicine, shoes, and soft drinks. The kid was depicted as a salesman, a cowboy, a doughboy, and was rendered in dozens of slight to gross altered variations.”

“But the answer I have always liked to believe was that the face came from an old high school biology text -- an example of a person who lacked iodine.”

Carl Djerassi of Stanford recalled an anti-Semitic wall-poster featuring ‘the face’ as a Jewish street-pedlar. He saw it in Nazi Germany in 1938 under the message “Death to the Jews.” Craig Yoe said Alfred “probably started as a cartoonist's stereotype of an Irish idiot boy.”

[1928] Winnipeg Free Press, March 26

Alfredo Castelli found a character from Pittsburgh circa 1903 named Pickle Neary (see Pickle Neary pin-button) who had an uncanny resemblance to the Kid and also noted a close resemblance to Rube Goldberg’s brother Walter in an old photograph. The face has also been used in Australia to sell dairy products in the 1920’s. Recently I turned up some examples from New Zealand.

M. Reidelbach’s Completely Mad (1991) reported the finding of a precursor to Alfred Neuman in the “It Didn’t Hurt A Bit,” Kid found in an advertisement in the Illustrated London News, printed in New York City in 1895. He also showed up in ads for Cherry Sparkle Soda and Puck Magazine. The Christens write in ““It Didn’t Hurt a Bit” Kid: Dental Precursor to Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman:”

“In the late 1890’s, the Ritter Painless Dental Company, located at the corner of Third Avenue and Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn, New York, used a large picture of “The Kid” on their second floor outdoor display. An accompanying label stated, “It didn’t hurt a bit.” In this large painting, the boy’s facial features were exaggerated to make him look like a mentally defective “pinhead.”

[189?] New York

In 1908 Antikamnia calendar cards were supplied to dentists. In 1886 two German doctors discovered a coal-tar derivative called acetanilide which was supposed to reduce fever and numb pain. The patent medicine makers took it up for the North American market. One popular remedy was punningly called Cuforhedake Branefude, another was Antikamnia. Allegedly these medicines killed 28 people and one dog. Samuel Hopkins Adams exposed them in a series of articles in Colliers magazine between October 1905 and September 22, 1906, entitled The Great American Fraud. Antikamnia was still being sold in the 1930’s.

In 1909 the first Winnipeg Tribune “It Didn’t Hurt A Bit” Kid ads for the Winnipeg Dental Parlours appeared and ads were still shilling for Dr. Glasgow, Dentist in 1928. Apparently ads were published periodically in Manitoba until at least 1936. The Trib also published the cartoons of Grue [Johnny Gruelle] throughout 1909 which were published through the early NEA while Gruelle was working in Indianapolis. Painless Romaine “It Didn’t Hurt A Bit” Kid ads from Kansas survive dated 1910, and King Dental Parlours was another source of Kid ads. He even appeared in Gruelle’s June 17, 1911 Sunday page of Mr. Twee Deedle, in close-up with the gap-tooth in the right place, a dead-ringer for ‘The Kid.’

[1910] Antikamnia 

One person has suggested that the Kid first appeared in 2 illustrations by Henry Holiday to Lewis Carroll’s 1876 Hunting of the Snark, “The Butcher and the Beaver” and “The Beaver’s Lesson.” It’s true it looks quite a bit like Alfred E. Neuman but the character is a boy about 6 to 9 years old while Alfred is at least beginning puberty in the dental ads. The book I studied showed the preliminary pencil drawings as well as the engraved finish work and they look nothing like Alfred. The first shows the boy with a soft and gentle face with mouth closed. The second is a bit more sinister, the boy looks like some fairy character from the Bedlam asylum art of Richard Dadd, who returned from a trip to the Holy Land and stabbed his father to death. The boy is biting on a quill pen and seems to have a full set of teeth. Maybe - but I’m not very convinced.

Going back further we find the Kid character in "The Crowded Grandstand," from July 9, 1896 Toronto Evening Star, signed Archer. He shows up again in the work of cartoonist W. M. Goodes in a book called Comic History of Greece by Charles M. Snyder, 1897, J. B. Lippincott Company.

Jock McCulla

Curiosity led me to think that perhaps he had come from one of the early travelling medicine shows, perhaps as a label on the bottles of patented painkiller. I recalled reading an article years ago in the Weekend magazine, sent all over Canada with the comic sections. I looked it up.

I don't claim this is the true story of Alfred E., merely a possible origin;

The King of Canadian medicine men was Thomas Patrick "Doc" Kelley (1865-1931), who, starting in 1886, travelled Canada and the U.S. selling patent medicine like East India Tiger Fat and Passion Flower tablets. He was so well known that druggists in Toronto and Winnipeg stocked his wares in their drugstores. His favoured stomping grounds were Illinois, Michigan and Ohio. Other medicine shows travelled the circuit, including the Kickapoo Company, but they never seemed to make it outside of Toronto.

Amongst the banjo players, wrassling bears etc., the most popular member of Kelley's troupe was a comedian, Jock McCulla, born in Scotland, whose pratfalls and slapstick, often of a very painful- looking nature, made him one of the most popular comedians in North America, pre-movies and vaudeville. I can imagine him saying after a particularly nasty fall; "It didn't hurt a bit," followed by sales of bottles of some type of pain-killer, stocked by drugstores all along the route for boys with teeth knocked out by hockey puck or baseball.

Jock McCulla bore an uncanny resemblance to Alfred E., with carrot-top hair and a gap-toothed grin -- well, judge for yourselves -- here's Jock McCulla in the flesh, possible forerunner of the What-me-worry kid sometime between 1890 and 1896.

Researching the subject I found that one of the mainstays of the medicine shows in pre-painless dentistry days was the pulling of teeth with pliers as well as providing the pain-killer for relief. The painkiller was quite effective since it was often mixed with opium or cocaine. Violet McNeal wrote a vivid outlaw memoir of the medicine-show days in 1947, Four White Horses and a Brass Band, which details the lives, cons and crimes of the travelling performers and quack doctors. Many of the men and women involved in the medicine shows supplied (and used) illicit drugs like cocaine and opium to the whole continent, from Manitoba to the Inland Empire, the American South, Midwest and the East Coast. Medicine shows were amongst the earliest of advertisers in newspapers, almanacs, bottle labels, illustrated cards, fences, farmhouses, rocks, even one joker who painted on the side of the Rockies.

Jock McCulla

The first comics I have found where some of the characters bear strong resemblance to “the Kid” were by Frederick Burr Opper in Puck and they go back as early as 1888. Cartoonist F. M. Howarth was using similar faces in both Puck and Golden Days in the same time period. Opper used the look-a-like so many times that you have to believe that either he invented the character or he knew that the audience would recognize the Kid because the character was already well-known to the public in North America.

[1900] C. A. David in Toronto Saturday Night, December 1

When I first started passing my findings around I received a mysterious letter from some wag saying that the writer had seen the face of the gap-toothed kid carved in stone doorknockers in various Museums of Antiquity in the Middle East and elsewhere. When I queried him for further information my letter was returned unread from his dead letter box. I’m sure I was just having my leg pulled but you never know. Alfred E. Neuman could very well be a part of the world’s collective unconscious, a Trickster, Shaman, or Coyote-like figure. It could still be that his idiot face and toothless grin beams down from the walls of some forgotten cave hidden from sight since the Dawn of Man.

[1911] Mr. Twee Deedle, by John Gruelle, June 17

Further Reading:

“Publisher says MAD still going strong after 32 years.” Pacific Stars and Stripes 20 Jan, 1985.

“Once and for all the story about Alfred Neuman,” by Harvey Kurtzman, Winnipeg Free Press, 6 Feb 1975.

“That Way Lies MAD-ness: Carl Djerassi Confronts his Past” Current Comments No. 24, 12 June 1989.

““It Didn’t Hurt A Bit” Kid: Dental Precursor to Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman” by Arden G. Christen, DDS, MSD, MA, and Joan A. Christen, BGS, MS Journal of the History of Dentistry, Vol. 48, No. 2, July 2000 p.53-55.

“Behaving Madly,” by Craig Yoe, Modern Arf, Fantagraphics 2005.

“Mysteries of Melvin” Continued HERE and "Painless McPhee" HERE

[1910] John Gruelle, Winnipeg Tribune, July 16

[1948] Maclean's Magazine 

[1876] Hunting of the Snark by Henry Holiday

[1940] Hooey (reprints from a Canadian newspaper column)

[1887]From Puck, by Frederick B. Opper, December 28

[1896] by ARCHER, Toronto Evening Star,  July 9

[1909] by John Gruelle, Winnipeg Tribune, July 16

[1895] Opper in Puck, July 17

[1895] Just for Fun, Puck, by Opper

[1890] Puck's Library by Opper

[1903] Pickle Neary pinback

[1895] Wizard Oil pamphlet cover

[1908] John Gruelle, The Spokane Press, Dec 16, 1908