Thursday, March 16, 2017

Vintage Funnies

Vintage Funnies

Not long ago I got this collection of Vintage Funnies pictured above. Or the lot actually consists of Favorite Funnies 1-12, Golden Funnies 1-15 and Vintage Funnies 16-60, but they are all basically the same thing. Favorite Funnies and Golden Funnies were two different series published at the same time, while Vintage Funnies is just a new name for Golden Funnies. The name changed after #15 and according to comics.org the series lasted up to #100.


Favorite Funnies #1 and Golden Funnies #1

Golden Funnies #15 and Vintage Funnies #16 after the name changed

This newspaper sized series from the 70's reprints old newspaper comic and has everything from Superman to Krazy Kat inside. And from Vintage Funnies #29 the series also has Disney comics.
 

Sunday pages and daily strips in Vintage Funnies

The first three issues had one page with some randomly chosen Sunday pages with Silly Symphony and Mickey Mouse. But after that Vintage Funnies started printing Mickey Mouse daily strips in chronological order, usually with 6 strips (Monday to Saturday) in each issue. The source looks like are newspaper clippings probably from private collections, so the reprint quality is not that good.
 

Editorial text in Vintage Funnies #29

From the editorial text in #29, it sounds like the plan was to reprint the Mickey Mouse daily strips from the beginning, but that didn't happen. The daily strips start in the middle of "Death Valley" with the first half of July 14th, 1930 strip as an introduction and then with the strips chronologically from July 7th, 1930 and onwards. I'm glad I got this print of the introduction strip (at least half of it) because the size is huge compared to the reprint in the Floyd Gottfredson library! There you can barely read the text.

 

Vintage Funnies #32 and the Floyd Gottredson library vol.1
Vintage Funnies #32 and the Floyd Gottredson library vol.1

This might only be for people with a special interest, but I made an index of all daily strips up to issue #60. I know the strip continued after this too (if anyone knows for how long please tell)

I used the inducks way to code the different strips, so:

ZS = Silly Symphony Sunday page
ZM = Mickey Mouse Sunday page
YM = Mickey Mouse daily strip

32-07-10 = 1932-July-10th

IssueContent
29ZS 32-07-10,ZM 32-07-10
30ZS 34-01-14,ZM 34-01-14
31ZS 34-03-25,ZM 34-03-25
32YM 30-07-14 (first half as intro),YM 30-07-07,YM 30-07-08,YM 30-07-09,YM 30-07-10
33YM 30-07-11,YM 30-07-12,YM 30-07-16,YM 30-07-17,YM 30-07-18,YM 30-07-19 (half of YM 30-07-14 used as intro in last issue, YM 30-07-15 missing)
34YM 30-07-21,YM 30-07-22,YM 30-07-23,YM 30-07-24,YM 30-07-25,YM 30-07-26
35YM 30-07-28,YM 30-07-29,YM 30-07-30,YM 30-07-31,YM 30-08-01,YM 30-08-02
36YM 30-08-04,YM 30-08-05,YM 30-08-06,YM 30-08-07,YM 30-08-08,YM 30-08-09
37YM 30-08-11,YM 30-08-12,YM 30-08-13,YM 30-08-14,YM 30-08-15,YM 30-08-16
38YM 30-08-18,YM 30-08-19,YM 30-08-20,YM 30-08-21,YM 30-08-22,YM 30-08-23
39YM 30-08-25,YM 30-08-26,YM 30-08-27,YM 30-08-28,YM 30-08-29,YM 30-08-30
40YM 30-09-01,YM 30-09-02,YM 30-09-03,YM 30-09-04,YM 30-09-05,YM 30-09-06
41YM 30-09-08,YM 30-09-09,YM 30-09-10,YM 30-09-11,YM 30-09-12,YM 30-09-13
42YM 30-09-15,YM 30-09-16,YM 30-09-17,YM 30-09-18,YM 30-09-19,YM 30-09-20
43YM 30-09-22,YM 30-09-23,YM 30-09-24,YM 30-09-25,YM 30-09-26,YM 30-09-27
44YM 30-09-29,YM 30-09-30,YM 30-10-01,YM 30-10-02,YM 30-10-03,YM 30-10-04
45YM 30-10-06,YM 30-10-07,YM 30-10-08,YM 30-10-09,YM 30-10-10,YM 30-10-11
46YM 30-10-13,YM 30-10-14,YM 30-10-15,YM 30-10-16,YM 30-10-17,YM 30-10-18
47YM 30-10-20,YM 30-10-21,YM 30-10-22,YM 30-10-23,YM 30-10-24,YM 30-10-25
48YM 30-10-27,YM 30-10-28,YM 30-10-29,YM 30-10-30,YM 30-10-31,YM 30-11-01
49YM 30-11-03,YM 30-11-04,YM 30-11-05,YM 30-11-06,YM 30-11-07,YM 30-11-08 (part of panel missing)
50YM 30-11-10,YM 30-11-11,YM 30-11-12,YM 30-11-13,YM 30-11-15 (YM 30-11-14 missing)
51YM 30-11-17,YM 30-11-18,YM 30-11-19,YM 30-11-20,YM 30-11-21,YM 30-11-22
52YM 30-11-24,YM 30-11-25,YM 30-11-26,YM 30-11-27,YM 30-11-28,YM 30-11-29
53YM 30-12-01,YM 30-12-02,YM 30-12-03,YM 30-12-04,YM 30-12-05,YM 30-12-06
54YM 30-12-08,YM 30-12-09,YM 30-12-10,YM 30-12-11,YM 30-12-12,YM 30-12-13
55YM 30-12-15,YM 30-12-16,YM 30-12-17,YM 30-12-18,YM 30-12-19,YM 30-12-20
56YM 30-12-23,YM 30-12-24,YM 30-12-25,YM 30-12-26,YM 30-12-27 (YM 30-12-22 missing)
57YM 31-01-05,YM 31-01-06,YM 31-01-07,YM 31-01-08,YM 31-01-09,YM 31-01-10 (worng order, should have been printed in next issue)
58YM 30-12-29,YM 30-12-30,YM 30-12-31,YM 31-01-01,YM 31-01-02,YM 31-01-03 (worng order, should have been printed in the previous issue)
59YM 31-01-12,YM 31-01-13,YM 31-01-14,YM 31-01-15,YM 31-01-16,YM 31-01-17
60YM 31-01-19,YM 31-01-20,YM 31-01-21,YM 31-01-22,YM 31-01-23,YM 31-01-24


As you can see there are some strips missing in-between, and it looks like one of the source clippings had a tear. So in addition to the bad reproduction quality this is not the collection to get if you want to read a full run of the strips. For that I recommend the Floyd Gottfredson library published by Fantagraphics.



YM 30-11-14 missing in #50 (not the 13th as the note say)


YM 30-12-22 missing in #56

Part of the panel is missing in the source used in #49
 

When making the index I actually used the Fantagraphics book as a guide to easily spot if something was missing. And by doing that I noticed something interesting that was missing in the book too! The end caption panel in the YM 30-12-06 strip is actually missing in the Fantagraphics collection.
 

YM 30-12-06 in the Floyd Gottfredson library vol.1 (top) and Vintage Funnies #53 (bottom)

To get the strip the same size as the rest it looks like the entire strip is scaled in width, so the proportion in the book is all wrong too compared to the original. It's easier to notice this by comparing the first two panels to the strip the day before. They should be about the same size, but as you can see in the picture above they are not in the Fantagraphics book.

I've seen scans from the German "Comic Buch Club" edition and I have the same strip in the British Disney Mirror #149. Both have the missing caption panel, so it couldn't have been that hard to find a source with it when compiling the book.


How the YM 30-12-06 strip originally looked (clickt to enlarge)

5 comments:

  1. Wow! Thanks very much—you've caught an important error that somehow, nobody on our team ever spotted, myself included!

    The end caption on 6 Dec 1930 seems to have accidentally gotten chopped off in the process of placing the strip in our page layout; it's definitely there in our source material! (This, after all the efforts we made to get the cleanest and most complete possible version of all the strips from 1930, a profoundly difficult year—)

    Thanks to your alert, we can publish the unedited version of the strip in the final FGL volume.

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    1. Strange that nobody noticed it. Even in WDC 630, the caption panel is included. http://2.bp.blogspot.com/rsZSpH1bUOWwKYaCpdmB--gsi9OsmeGfy_PeyOD2Z1cJ_MYZEmDLeTD6YL1TFXbtka-amiWnBn_-=s0

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    2. David, why was this actually not done?

      The error is now also in the German version :(

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  2. I just discovered this great blog series and read all of it over the past couple of days. Nice work. I'm curious as to the stopping point on the Gottfredson series. I know he continues on after the date, another 20 years or so, so does anyone know why the set stopping after only 12 volumes? Will we see any of the later stuff and will we get any more color Sundays? Did something change after volume 12 that would preclude not printing those? I'd love to have the whole set similar to Barks and Rosa or Schultz's Peanuts.

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    1. The big difference is that Gottfredson drew gag-a-day strips only from 1955 onwards, on the request of King Features and the current boss of the Disney comic strip department. So we'll get no more adventure serials from that point on (no stories at all, really), and the Mickey gag strips from the -50s to -70s aren't very highly regarded -- certainly not compared to the earlier serials. So I can understand why we're not getting another 10 volumes in the book series filled with nothing but gag strips.

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