The Scrappy Comic Strip! (Part One)

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 23, 2016

If you were alive in the UK or Australia in the late 1930s and read a comic book called Wags, you may be intimately familiar with the Scrappy comic strip. Otherwise, your opportunities to be exposed to it–at least in English–have been severely limited. Comics historian In 2010, comics historian Ken Quattro provided one example on his Comics Detective site. And that’s about it.

Me, I’ve shared examples of the strip in French and bizarrely retouched into the adventures of Shorty Shortcake. But it was only recently that I acquired some Scrappy tearsheets from somebody’s bound volume of Wags, circa 1938. I’ll post them here in a few chunks, with a bit of commentary.

Like much Scrappyana, the Scrappy strip is tantalizingly mysterious. Thanks to strip expert Allan Holtz, we know that the 1937 edition of Editor & Publisher included a listing for a Scrappy strip (“by Charles Mintz”) from Eisner & Iger Associates, an outfit run by Will Eisner and Jerry Iger. I know of no evidence it ever made its way into a newspaper, but Eisner and Iger made good use of what they’d put together by selling it to the French publishers of Bilboquet, repackaging it in Wags, and eventually de-Mintzing it to come up with Wonderworld comics’ Shorty Shortcake.

We don’t know who wrote or drew the strip, other than the safe assumption that Charles Mintz had nothing to do with it. Presumably, it was one or more artists from the Eisner-Iger shop rather than anyone who worked on Scrappy cartoons. I’ll have some more thoughts on candidates in future installments, but for now, I’ll just admit that I don’t see any evidence that Will Eisner himself did any of the art, as fun a notion as that is. (We’re actually looking for at least two artists, I think, since the style of the first strip varies sharply from later installments.)

Anyhow, here you go: chapters 1-6 of “Scrappy and the Border Patrol,” a tale which has virtually nothing to do with anything that ever appeared in a Scrappy animated cartoon other than the fact that it stars Scrappy, Margy, and Yippy. (Sorry, Oopy.)

scrappy-wags-2

scrappy-wags-3

scrappy-wags-4

scrappy-wags-5

scrappy-wags-6

Note that the “Universal Phoenix Features Syndicate” mentioned in the copyright notice was run by Eisner and Iger. I’m not sure offhand whether the repurposed strips were dailies or Sundays–and actually, come to think of it, I’m not even positive that the entire Wags run of Scrappy consisted of repurposed newspaper strips. Like I said, it’s tantalizing and mysterious.

More strips–and thoughts–to come.

2 Comments

2 comments on “The Scrappy Comic Strip! (Part One)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *