Jack Mendelsohn, if you happen to know him, is largely known through his animation work on such shows as Scooby Doo, Hong Kong Phooey, George of the Jungle, Super Chicken, Shazam! and The Groovy Goolies among many others. I would have been hard-pressed to tell you what exactly he did, but I'm pretty sure I did see his name fly through the credits not infrequently.

Less well known than what he did on those shows is that he had a syndicated comic strip from January 1959 until December 1961 called Jackys Diary. (There's deliberately no apostrophe, by the way.) If you opt to look it up in your trusty copy of American Newspaper Comis: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide. The entry for Jackys Diary reads, in full...

Sunday strip. Running dates: Jan 11 1959-Dec 31 1961. Creator: Jack Mendleson. Syndicate: King Features Syndicate. Sources: Tampa Tribune microfilm for end date, start date from Washing Post microfilm.

The included CD-ROM has no examples of the strip. Wikipedia's information is more robust, but it's buried within the biography of Mendelsohn and doesn't have it's own entry. Apparently, IDW published a complete collection of the work a few years ago, put together by Craig Yoe and Mendelsohn himself. Yoe briefly eulogized on Facebook when Mendelsohn passed away in 2017...

Jack Mendelsohn (1927-2017) R.I.P. Very sad news to report: my good friend Jack has gone on to his reward. I first fannishly contacted the writer of Yellow Submarine and the Beatles Saturday morning cartoons, The Carol Burnett Show, Three's Company, and Laugh-In 20-some years ago to try and weasel a Jacky's [sic] Diary comic strip original out of him. Four years ago working hand in hand with Jack, we realized a beautiful dream of publishing the complete, brilliant Jacky's [sic] Diary. Jack was full of unflagging warmth, humor, and optimism and was excitedly working away on projects to the very end (he's been helping me on some new books a bit which will see the light of day over the next few years). I treasure the time I had with this beautiful, funny, sweet, human being and wonderful friend (and the framed Jacky's [sic] Diary above my drawing board he gave to me!) Jack leaves his loving, devoted wife Carole.

I went to dig up some copies of Jackys Diary, assuming most people have never seen the strip before. Turns out that Ger Apeldoorn actually did that a few years ago himself, scanning newspapers from his own collection. They're all good scans so I'll copy a few of them here, but go check out Apeldoorn's page or the IDW book for more.

Brian Hibbs just released his annual BookScan study, and there are some absolutely amazing numbers to sift through. They've got more than a few people excited, and it's great news for comics folks. I noticed something early in Hibbs' analysis that I thought he was going to gloss over, so as I kept reading, I was thinking on how best to call it out here. But to his credit, he did indeed circle back to the point I wanted to highlight. In light of all the incredible numbers, I'm still a little concerned this will be missed though, so I'm going to take a moment to reiterate possibly one of the most significant elements of this entire report to help ensure it doesn't get lost among the potentially self-congratulatory numbers...

I have to be certain to make this point as clearly as I can: the market for who is buying comics is changing, and it is changing for the wider and the better. The eight year old who is inhaling Dav Pilkey in 2021 is going to be the comics-literate adult of 2034 (or whatever), which is going to change what comics readers in the ‘30s will want or expect from comics. The kids reading comics in 1965 totally imagined what the 1980’s comics scene could and would be, which is why we’re where we are today, but the shape of the Western industry in the future is absolutely what today’s children read and see.

Ignore this at your deadliest of perils: the future is always shaped by the present, even if that isn’t what you personally want.

(Emphasis in the original.)

As he points, the highest-ranking book from either Marvel or DC is Teen Titans: Beast Boy coming in at #164. The highest Marvel book -- the publisher that has largely dominated direct market sales for decades? -- Infinity Gauntlet comes in at #892.

A lot "comics" discussion continues to revolve around DC and Marvel. Especially with Marvel movies and TV shows (generally) doing so well, and the superhero genre even more broadly remaining pretty popular. But relative to comics as an actual medium, those stories are not what's selling. The future of comics is going to be made up of people who grew up reading Dav Pilkey and Raina Telgemeier and Kohei Horikoshi. I know more than a few people who've been trying to make this point for years, but it bears repeating again in light of the 2021 sales figures hammering that point home with hundreds more data points.

In the mid-1930s, Richard Lockridge started writing some detective-style vignettes for the New York Sun, featuring a husband and wife team who were amateur detectives solving crimes and aiding local residents and the police. They were popular enough that Lockridge expanded them to short stories for The New Yorker. After these were collected into a book, Lockridge continued on to write full-length novels. This series, collectively known under the "Mr. and Mrs. North" title, continued to grow in popularity, eventually spawning a stage play, an MGM movie, a radio serial, and ultimately a television show.

The TV show began in 1952 and featured Richard Denning and Barbara Britton in the title roles. Although sitting here in the 21st century, it can look exceptionally chauvinistic and misogynistic, I get the impression that making Mrs. North a more-or-less equal partner with her husband would have been seen as somewhat progressive. (When I say "more-or-less" I should probably emphasize the "less" portion though.)

In any event, the December 5, 1952 episode of the show was called "Comic-Strip Tease" and featured a local, immigrant grocer, Mrs. Helsir, who's being shaken down by a gang of young boys. (Well, they're supposed to be young boys; the leader looks like he's in his late 30s at least.) Mr. and Mrs. North enlist the help of Walter McCoy, who happens to have stopped by for dinner when they learn of the plight. You see, McCoy is in a unique position as he's the cartoonist behind the wildly popular comic strip Trip Henley, Detective which seems to be something of a Dick Tracy style strip. McCoy was complaining about having trouble coming up with ideas, and it's Mrs. North who suggests he write in Mrs. Helsir's dilemma in order to show people what the gang is up to without having to involve the police.

Which doesn't really make sense as a strategy. I mean, aren't cops going to read this too? And why would anyone assume the strip is suddenly based on a true story and not just another fictional one as before? Why not talk to reporters and get the story on the front page instead of buried in with the comics? And what good does telling other people about it do if you don't involve the police? And on top of all that, Mr. North eventually calls the police anyway.

Now we only see the one installment of the Trip Henley in the show, which makes sense; it would've had to have been produced especially for this episode and the amount of effort for that is not insubstantial. Except it wasn't produced for this episode at all.

Ron Harris has done some cartooning for television much like this, only his work appeared decades later. Perhaps most notably, he did the artwork for a cartoonist murderer story in Remington Steele in the 1980s. The production team dropped his strip into a 'standard' prop newspaper they had, and he was able to secure a copy for himself. It actually had four pages of comics (although page four was just a duplicate of page two) and if you check out the bottom of page one, you find...

The "Captain Smith" strip here is literally the exact same one that was titled "Trip Henley, Detective" decades earlier. And it's now attributed to "K. Lentz" instead of "Walter McCoy." Additionally, the strip originally shown above "Trip Henley" in 1952 is now moved to page two, but is again the exact same art three decades later. The production company who made the prop, the Howard Anderson Company, has been in business since 1927 and when Harris worked with them, their newspaper prop art was so old, no one could remember how/when/where it was first created. Given the various styles of art shown in Harris' copy and the way his art was dropped in, I suspect it's just been a decades-long work in progress. They would have whatever artist was handy do a single strip, and they'd drop it into a generic newspaper layout, offset print however many they needed for that production, and move on to their next project. At some point, they wound up with enough strips to do an entire comics section and just kept using the older strip art to fill out the section, dropping in fake names and titles as needed for a given TV show.

Was "Trip Henley, Detective" created for Mr. and Mrs. North? Maybe? The story in the strip does seem to tie pretty directly into the episode. But it'd certainly make for an interesting research project for someone more familiar with old television to go back and trace it -- and all the other 'standard' TV comic strips in these props -- to their respective origins!

Take a look at the episode yourself and see what you think...

You know, I was going to write a piece today that held up some old comics from the first half of the 20th century, showing blatantly racist caricatures of different types of people. They're sadly easy to find. I was going to show each of the major types of people being caricatured and say, "Look, here's how comic artists used to depict Black people" and "Look, here's how writers used to script Chinese accents" and "Look, here's how gay men were portrayed in comics" and so on. And each one would be so absurdly offensive that you'd have difficulty even understanding that someone would be willing to commit something like that to paper.

After I'd gone through a bunch of those, then I was going to point out that they all look/sound absurd now because we, collectively, have gotten a better understanding of those cultures. We understand where the stereotypes came from, why we white people created them, and how (deliberately) insulting they were. You'd be glad that most people don't think of those groups like that any more anyway, and you might have a little better understanding of the climate grandpa was raised in and why he still thinks it's okay to use offensive slang terms in casual conversation.

And then I was going to say make the comparison to today's comics, showing "Look, here's how comic artists depict Black people now" and "Look, here's how writers script Chinese accents now" and "Look, here's how gay men are portrayed in comics now" and so on. But this time -- since the examples would be more contemporary -- with some color commentary about how they're relying on different stereotypes, but stereotypes nonetheless. And how do you suppose those stereotypes will look in fifty years' time? Probably just as absurd as the 1940s' caricatures look to us today.

I was going to write all that up to make the point that you don't want to be remembered for some really bad representations of different minorities. Especially since, by many estimates, the United States will see Caucasians become a minority around the middle of the century with what are currently minorities rising to around 56% of the population.

I was going to write all that.

But then I wondered, "For who?"

I mean, if I hear/see something racist/misogynistic/ablest/homophobic/transphobic, I will usually call the person on it. I've called out co-workers, friends, and even relatives (both mine and my wife's). It's as often as not unintentional, and I try to point out how/why something they said is wrong. Sometimes they listen, sometimes not. But that's a response to action, usually done within a very short time of the incident. Basically, it's immediate behavioral modeling based on whatever the current situation is.

But that whole bit I outline above? That's a little different. It's more long-term and requires at the very least an acknowledgment that social demographics are changing and will continue to change. And the reason that's significant here is that the people who need to hear that message are already refusing to acknowledge those changes and, strangely concurrently, are actively fighting against them. That's partly what's fueling the rise of all these hate groups -- people who think things are better with less diversity and more homogeneity. As they see it, they are going to be viewed as martyrs for trying to revert the country to a status quo from before anyone besides cishetero white men had rights. And they're so committed to that belief that they will never see themselves as being on the wrong side of history; rather, they think they are right and if they're not acknowledged thusly, then it's history who is wrong.

And frankly, I do not have the energy for that discussion this week.

Suffice it to say that all those socially ugly comics from the 1940s that make you cringe when you realize it was a favorite artist or writer who caricatured some group so badly? Fifty years from now, readers are going to cringe at the socially ugly comics you're making today. So step up to the plate now, and make your work more progressive in terms of representation. Not only is it the right thing to do for today, but it's the right thing to do in the future.

As something of an epilogue to last week's Fantastic Four 'celebration' here, I thought I'd revisit this. In Fantastic Four #11, we first learned that Ben was an accomplished pilot before their fateful starship ride. Later stories would expand on the adventures he had in the Air Force and/or Marines (both have been cited at various times, although I think Marvel officially settled on the Air Force at some point) and we've seen a pre-cosmic-rays Ben fighting alongside Logan, Carol Danvers, Nick Fury, and Capt. Savage at various points. By pretty much all accounts, Ben was a very talented and famous pilot. His adventures with Capt. Savage came about because he was specifically targeted and captured for his skill in shooting down enemy aircraft. So that Reed would come back to his friend years after college to fly this starship makes sense.

But there's a weird little wrinkle that was added back in 1983. In Thing #1, they elaborate on Ben's backstory considerably, going into detail about seeing his older brother killed and his time in the Yancy Street Gang before eventually getting to college. It then covers Reed and Ben's first meeting and, as they're introducing themselves to one another, we get this exchange...So, I got to thinking: why suggest that he'd fly it? Of all the ways to respond that would provide some level of snark, why specifically "I'll fly your rocket ship"?

If someone tells you something you deem far-fetched, it's not uncommon to respond with something you might consider equally implausible. And typically, you'd want to keep your comeback thematically similar...

"I'm a Saudi prince."
"Yeah, well, I'm the queen of England."

"I'm dating Chris Hemsworth."
"And my wife is Scarlett Johansson."

You keep the same idea in your retort. Whatever it is that you claim to do or be should follow the same line of thinking as the original statement. So if Reed says, "I'm going to build a rocket," a typical retort might be "And I'm going to build a Mars rover" or "I'm going to build a space station." (Bear in mind that both of these were still science fiction in 1983.)

The other likely response is to extrapolate and exaggerate your own self to the same extent that you think the other speaker is. If someone claimed they were going to be a first round draft pick in the NFL next season because they play high school football now, you might come back with the claim that you're going to win the Nobel prize for literature because you got an "A" on that short story you wrote for Mr. Reynolds' English class last semester. Or if someone says they're going to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because they play in a shitty bar band, your response might be that you're going to win an Olympic gold medal for figure skating because you're a pretty good player on the local ice hockey team.

It's the second concept that seems to be where Ben is coming from since he certainly isn't mimicking Reed's basic structure. But if Ben's suggestion that he fly a starship is an extrapolation/exaggeration of his current abilities, he must have some flying ability at this point, right? If you had zero experience flying anything at all, you wouldn't make that joke. Being a football player, he might've gone with, "You build that rocket an' I'll punt it into space myself!" Or maybe going back to his Yancy Street days, "You build that rocket an' I'll cut anyone who keeps ya from launchin' it!"

But, no, he went with the notion of piloting it. This would suggest Ben already knows how to fly a plane at this point. Perhaps he didn't have his actual pilot's license, but at least the basic knowledge and skill with only some additional flight time and/or a written test remaining.

Although Reed is later identified as being 18 when he met Ben, Ben's age is never expressly noted. Presumably, he's around that age as well, but given his problematic days as a youngster, he may have been held back a year or two in school. (It's also possible that he took some time off between high school and college, but given that he had a football scholarship, this strikes me as unlikely.) Ben's expressly noted as having a layabout father who didn't bring much money in, so flying lessons seem out of the question before his parents died and he was taken in by his Uncle Jake.

So was that something his Uncle Jake did for him then? Give him or pay for him to take flying lessons? Did Ben actually have a pilot's license as a teenager? Did years of experience flying before even getting into the armed forces help propel him up the ranks faster than others that entered around the same time?

It's an absurdly minor character point, and based off one line of dialogue that was probably written with more foreshadowing in mind than anything else, but an interesting notion to think about nonetheless. Well, interesting to me at any rate!

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Celebrating the Fantastic Four
https://ift.tt/wfA9cO6

Kleefeld on Comics: Fantastic Four Life Story Review
https://ift.tt/7RTaAGv

Kleefeld on Comics: Recontextualizing FF #1
https://ift.tt/ken23WT

Kleefeld on Comics: The Importance of Alyssa Moy
https://ift.tt/09YA2PX

Kleefeld on Comics: The FF Toy That Exists Nowhere Else!
https://ift.tt/tBsM1nm

At the start of the week, I said that I'd managed to "fan a spark of curiosity" that I think has helped get back into reading comics more actively, Fantastic Four in particular. That started last year as I kept seeing more and more disparate supply chain issues pop up seemingly at random. My wife and I are pretty good planners when it comes to our own supplies and such, so we never had anything we ourselves ran out of, but there were more than a few instances of our own stockpiles running very low as we had trouble finding some items. Everything from coffee and soda to a home furnace. In light of that, it occurred to me that if I had a 3D printer, I would be able to simply make many of the items that might prove difficult to find and/or might be cost-prohibitive because of low supples.

Despite sounding super high-tech and expensive, it turns out that you can get any of several 3D printers for under $200 now. Which isn't nothing, of course, but that's not unreasonable either, I don't think. After putting in a fair amount of research, I picked an inexpensive one up last fall and started learning how make my own stuff. My intent with was largely practical. Again, what can I print myself now that would otherwise be problematic to purchase? The first thing I printed were small clips to hold the valences up on our bedroom blinds -- I couldn't find any in stores or online that matched the old ones well enough that I was confident they'd be suitable replacements for the broken ones. Next was a wall mount I designed for our shower brush and its various heads, which had previously just been kind of laying about in various corners because it didn't really fit anywhere. I had the printer running virtually 24/7 for the first two months while I was churning out a backlist of items for minor fixes and improvements throughout the house.

I've kept the printer running pretty heavily since then as well with sporadic breaks as I might take a few days to sort out some problem, or finish a new design, or wait for a new spool of filament to arrive. But I've by and large used it exactly as I hoped it would be able to. When the wheel mount for the vacuum cleaner broke, I was able to find someone had already posted a design for one online and I had it downloaded, printed, and installed in about two hours -- a fair bit quicker than the 30-45 days it would've taken if I had ordered an official replacement to be shipped from China. Even the cap on my X-Acto knife was replaced in 30 minutes -- it would've taken me at least that long to drive out anywhere where I might be able to pick one up, and then drive back home.

But, of course, you can print more fun stuff as well and I would from time to time set aside some time to make something a little more frivolous. I found designs online for Twiki (from Buck Rogers), B-9 (from Lost in Space), and K-9 (from Doctor Who) that I scaled for 6" action figures and printed out. Which is (finally) where I circle back to the Fantastic Four!

I've had a variety of Fantastic Four action figures over the years, going back to the Mego ones I had as a kid in the 1970s. However, there was never much in the way of accessories. The "Marvel World" playset from Amsco did include a Baxter Building, but that only worked for the smallest figures. ToyBiz produced a Fantasticar in conjunction with the late '90s cartoon, but it alwys felt cheaply made and I didn't care much for the design anyway. The only other one I can think of was the Fantasicar they made in conjunction with the 2007 movie, but that was a godawful design! And we did get part of model 1 Fantasticar with one of the Mr. Fantastic figures, but they never made any of the other sections.

In 1997 or '98, I did make a Four Freedoms Plaza playset for myself. It was mostly cardboard, with one room basically just a re-purposed Star Trek: The Next Generation engineering playset. As that was mostly cardboard, though, that died when my basement flooded in 2010. Since then, I've moved to a place where I don't have room for an action figure metropolis anyways, so I've never bothered to rebuild it.

Ah, but with a 3D printer, I could make something smaller than an entire playset but still larger than a figure, more detailed and durable than cardboard. Something that's never been commerically produced before but with virtually the same quality level. Perhaps most importantly, I can make it to my specifications. So now that I've gotten (at least for now) all my practical printing done, I've been putting my efforts towards the Fantastic Four's first Fantasticar, colloquially named the Flying Bathtub!

I had actually looked online to see if anyone had made one already. And while there do seem to be a handful of 3D designs for them out there, none were in a format I could use. So in going about designing my own, what were the criteria I put in place? Well, first -- and seemingly most obvious -- it needed to be scaled so that it could house Marvel Legends Fantastic Four figures. They have the widest range in body sizes/types, and it would be easy enough from there to scale up to 8" Megos or down to 2" Mini-Mates or whatever. Second, it should be built as a toy. Meaning that it's less about being 100% accurate to the comic book (which, given that no one ever drew it consistently, would be impossible anyway) and more about having just enough believability in detail that a kid could look at it as a toy and come up with plausible enough explanations for any buttons, lights, etc. that might be on it, but not so many that it becomes visual noise. Third, it should match the "functionality" of the Flying Bathtub in that all four cabs should be able to separate and come back together in a reasonable manner without a lot of connectors and hookups that might significantly alter the asthetic. Basically, I didn't want this ugly tab/slot or peg/hole system visible when the four cabs were separated.

For design purposes, I use a free, online program called Tinkercad. It mostly only allows basic shapes -- which is fine for creating some kind of mounting bracket, but not so great for designing toys -- but I was able to borrow a few elements from others' 3D models to add some detail. Many of the controls, for example, were literally copy/pasted from a model of the captain's chair from Star Trek. The headlamps were a cosplay prop someone had made for their kid, and the turbines on the underside were just from a turbine model someone made. Pretty much everything else are just boxes and cylanders joined in a variety of ways.

I wanted to use magnets to hold the four cabs together and, although you can't really see them in any of these pictures, I carved out spaces for them in the backs of the seats. The idea was that by using magnets, I could just stick the pieces up next to each other and they'd hold in place, satisfying my requirement of not have external connection points visible when the cabs are separated. My initial tests with them seemed to work well, but with all four cabs and the weights of the figures, I couldn't get strong enough magnets to keep the whole thing together by itself. Each connection point currently has a magnet with an 8lb pull. But because I've got six millimeters of plastic between them, they lose just enough strength that they can't hold an entire cab in place. That's acually where the "bumper" idea came from. Coupled with the magnets, a single band around the top is enough to hold everything together pretty securely. I'd prefer not to deal with having to put this bumper around the whole thing every time I keep them together, but it does add a nice bit of color/detail to an otherwise pretty bland exterior.

The photos you're seeing here show the piece incomplete. I've been having a lot of difficulty with the dark blue printing properly (the filament is from a different company than I normally use; they have some great colors but their filaments can be very finicky) so the seat cushions are actually in really bad shape and all need to be re-printed. I've actually been wrestling with that most of this week. Because of that, I haven't glued most of the pieces in place yet, and they're prone to flopping around and falling out. (The control panels are only being held in with double-sided tape right now!) I really wanted to have everything completed by the end of this week, but it's not quite there yet. Once I'm sure everything is perfectly spot-on, I'll upload my files so that anyone can make their own. If anyone's curious about the design process I went through, I did a Twitter thread where I've posted a short background and a number of my progress shots.

I'm really proud of the design and basic functionality, moreso that it's been less than two weeks since I first started this and many of my prototypes took a full day or longer to print. I was especially pleased I was able to do some clever problem-solving around the various design issues that came up. I know I'm going to be thrilled with this once I get everything finalized and completely assembled. I can't imagine how stoked I would've been if I'd had this capability when I was a kid!

But yeah, learning 3D printing over the past several months has been very energizing and envigorating. At first being able to make tools that had practical applications around the house, and now being able to create full-on toys that I would've loved to have as a kid! It's that kind of curiosity and (mental) exploration that helped draw me to the Fantastic Four, and I think being able to tie the actual learning process back to the characters has been very satisfying.