REFPACK 017
July-August 2016
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Every other month, members of Animation Resources are given access to an exclusive Members Only Reference Pack. These downloadable files are high resolution e-books on a variety of educational subjects and rare cartoons from the collection of Animation Resources in DVD quality. Our current Reference Pack has just been released. If you are a member, click through the link to access the MEMBERS ONLY DOWNLOAD PAGE. If you aren’t a member yet, please JOIN ANIMATION RESOURCES. It’s well worth it.
PDF E-BOOK:
All The Funny Folks
The Wonder Tale of How the Comic Strip Characters Live and Love “Behind the Scenes” (1925)
In 1926, William Randolph Hearst hired cartoonist Louis Biedermann away from Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and assigned him to serve as his first licensing artist at King Features Syndicate. King Features distributed the comic strips and feature stories from Hearst’s New York Journal to thousands of newspapers all over the country. Biedermann’s initial task was to create a picture book that would bring together all of Hearst’s cartoon stars into one story. To write the book, Hearst tapped Jack Lait who served as a jack-of-all-trades staff writer for King Features. Lait was known primarily for celebrity gossip and sports coverage, but for All The Funny Folks he decided to try his hand at rhyming doggerel. The poorly written text jams all of the characters together in crowds organized by species and age, and shoehorns snappy colloquialisms into their dialogue without much regard for the characters’ established personalities. The story consists mostly of superficial references to events from the strips, and it manages to provide an anchor for the illustrations, but that’s about all that can be said for it.
Biedermann was handed an almost unreadable story composed of reams of dialogue and scene after scene of complicated crowd shots. In the newspaper, each comic strip existed in its own world with its own situations and logic. The style of drawing varied from strip to strip too. This wasn’t going to be an easy book to illustrate. Clearly Biedermann was more at home with the styles of Winsor McCay and George MacManus than he was Billy DeBeck and George Herriman, but he was able to arrive at a happy medium where the characters could co-exist side by side without clashing.
The layout and color of the book is brilliant. Our high resolution PDF is set up to be viewed as two page spreads so you can appreciate how the images lead from one side of the spread to the other. Not much is known about Biedermann, but he illustrated calendars for King Features as well. If you have more information, please let me know.
REFPACK020: All The Funny Folks
Adobe PDF File / 130 Pages / 345 MB Download
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