Tumey (author of the equally magnificent tome, SCREWBALL! The Cartoonists Who Made the Funnies Funny – read a review of it by Eddie Campbell* here). I highly recommend it abounding in bonus materials, it also has two introductions for the price of one, namely one by Goldberg’s granddaughter Jennifer George, and another written by comics historian Paul C. The examples below have been scanned from Foolish Questions & Other Odd Observations (Early Comics 1909-1919), published by the wonderful Sunday Press in 2017. Truly a life filled to the brim with adventure! In 1912, he went on to unleash the madcap inventions he’s remembered for today upon the world in the shape of The Inventions of Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, A.K., then shifted to political cartooning (for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948) in 1938, and then recycled himself as a sculptor in the 1960s. In 1909, Goldberg expanded the FQ world into a Sunday strip, Don’t Some People Ask the Biggest Fool Questions?, which collected previously published strips by grouping them into tiers (and occasionally padding this format out with new artwork). Questions remained as witless as ever, but the answers got kookier and more surreal over the years! His next attempt at a series is what initially made him famous (after which he went on to even greater fame): he produced around 450 Foolish Questions between 19 the very first one, published on Octowas prosaically titled ‘Foolish Question No. In parallel, he was also working for the New York Evening Mail, for which he created the short-lived Reincarnation, a goofy, modern-day take on historical characters. His first comic, after a couple of years of being a sports cartoonist, was The Look-A-Like Boys, published at the beginning of the century (1907-1908) by the World Color Syndicate. While Goldberg had a degree in engineering and worked for a short while for the San Francisco’s Water and Sewers Department (which perhaps honed his sense of the absurd, if anecdotes about a city’s treatment of sewage are anything to go by), his ambitions lay in the direction of cartooning from a very early age. ‘ Then I realized it was idiotic to even consider such a thing that I would be ashamed of it all the remainder of my life and that, if a man’s achievements are no bigger than the sound of his name, it doesn’t much matter what his name may be‘, he later wrote. Given his lasting contribution to culture, it is interesting to consider that in the early days of his career, when he was a struggling cartoonist, Goldberg almost changed his family name to hide his Jewish roots – ultimately deciding that he couldn’t live with himself, had he followed his colleagues’ counsel. (You can do both, too.The machine was of course named after Rube Goldberg (Reuben Garrett Goldberg, 1883-1970), cartoonist, inventor, sculptor, et j’en passe. You can actually buy this issue for a mere $75 (it’s also available on Amazon for a bit less)-or read “Disposable DEVO below. In the strip “a malfunctioning android cleaning lady” played by Debbie Harry attempts to sweep away a pile of humanoid debris (i.e., DEVO) only to find, against all expectation, that the five identically outfitted “zeroids” are actually capable of feeling sensations (pain). The comic appeared in issue #12 of Punk Magazine, which came out in January 1978. The title of the strip was “Disposable DEVO,” and the plot was rife with the “devolutionary” concepts that DEVO’s own name made so famous. Still, the two staples of smart American pop music were apparently well known enough even at that moment, such that PUNK magazine could feel it worthwhile to commission a silly comic strip involving the two bands, featuring photographs as the panels, as in the fumetti form often seen in Italy and also, as it happens, in frequent use by National Lampoon right around this time. Meanwhile, Akron’s DEVO had been bouncing around with sublime creativity for several years, but their mind-blowing debut album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! was still several months off. At the start of 1978 Blondie had released its self-titled debut album and was about to put out its sophomore follow-up Plastic Letters the band’s masterpiece, Parallel Lines, would be recorded in the summer and released in the autumn.
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