A most happy 2026 to each and every one of you. (Here at Scrappyland, happiness is never in short supply, regardless of how things are going elsewhere in the world.) I apologize for the lack of activity here in recent months. As usual, it’s not because of any shortage of material to share, so stay tuned.
Tommy Storslee and his wife are eBay sellers who like to pick up interesting old items at garage sales and estate sales. In certain cases, instead of selling them, they simply try to make sure that they get to a good home. I’m delighted to say that when they found a battered 1930s envelope containing 52 printed drawings of Scrappy and his pals, the good home they chose was with me.
The 52 drawings add up to a year-long course in drawing cartoons. Or at least that’s how Columbia pitched them. They came in this envelope, which curiously doesn’t mention Scrappy, though the New York address given is the one from which the firm’s legendary Scrappy Franchise Department operated.
I’ve written before about Columbia’s efforts to publicize Scrappy by convincing schools and other kid-oriented organizations to conduct drawing lessons involving the character. Indeed, one of Scrappyland’s first posts featured a 1936 letter to a camp director about this program. I had a few of the drawings the studio sent out. But the envelope Tommy sent me contained all 52—an entire year’s curriculum.
It didn’t include a cover letter or any material that was explicitly instructional in nature, but perhaps they got lost at some point in the past 90 years or so. (Columbia published a booklet called “How to Make a Cartoon by ‘Scrappy'” that—despite the intriguing title—is so boring I’ve never gotten around to writing about it here.)
As far as I know, none of the drawings in the packet were produced specifically for the “weekly cartoon lessons,” but they were clearly done by Mintz artists. They include some stock poses and others drawn from specific cartoons; the “SS-26” in the corner of the drawing at the top of this post suggests it may have originally been a lobby card or some such for the 1932 Scrappy cartoon The Railroad Wretch. Many of these illustrations also showed up elsewhere, such as in Scrappy coloring books.
Any kid who faithfully completed a year of drawing lessons by copying all 52 of these would have become a pretty swell artist. Boy, do I hope that some of those drawings still exist and will come to the attention of the Scrappy scholarly community.
Rather than doling out this embarrassment of Scrappy riches all out in this one post, I’ll just give you a sample. I promise to run them all eventually. Thank you so much to Tommy for this generous gift.
