The Rest of the Scrappy Comic Strip. Finally!

Among Scrappy rarities, few items are as tantalizingly obscure as the Scrappy newspaper strip. Though perhaps “newspaper strip” is a misnomer: As far as I know, the guys who tried to sell it to papers, Will Eisner and Jerry Iger, didn’t get it into any. But they did manage to sell it overseas, where it appeared in an Australian comic book called Wags around 1938. If you didn’t read it there (or in France’s Bilboquet), chances are that you didn’t read it anywhere—at least until 2016, when I began running the Wags version here. I apologize for taking so long to complete this exercise, but at long last I’m going to share the last Scrappy strips I have with you.

First, in the unlikely event that you’ve somehow forgotten our story thus far, kindly revisit these four previous Scrappyland posts:

Strips 1-6

Strips 7-12

Strips 13-18

Strips 19-22

Second, a little background on the strip…well, actually, more of an admission that I don’t know anything about it. Man, I wish I’d known about it a little earlier when I might have been able to buttonhole Will Eisner at the San Diego Comic-Con and grill him on the topic.

The big question, of course, is: Who drew this thing? When I started running these examples, I tried to answer that question, and failed. The one thing I was pretty confident about is that Eisner himself didn’t do it. But then, after seeing some additional examples of his early work, I changed my mind and decided he might well have been the mystery artist. However, I was thinking about the earliest examples: As the strip continued, the style changed noticeably. I really don’t have an opinion about who did the ones you’re about to read, except that they don’t feel like they were by an otherwise unpublished neophyte. The quality of the cartooning and storytelling is quite good, even if it has virtually nothing to do with the Mintz theatrical cartoons. So there seems a decent chance that we’ll eventually figure this out.

With that out of the way, here are strips 23-26 in the thrilling tale of “Scrappy and the Border Patrol.” Return with us now…

And that’s all the Scrappy comics I have for you. Whether it’s all that was drawn and/or Wags ran, I’m not sure. You’ll note that it seems to end in mid-action. But a few years later, when Eisner and Iger transmogrified Scrappy into a “new” character named Shorty Shortcake for Wonderworld Comics and ran a lightly retouched version of the Border Patrol story, they left off the last panel in the last strip above, giving the tale an abrupt conclusion in Wonderworld #3. And then, in the next issue, “Shorty” and his girlfriend “Suzy” were on to a new adventure set in Guatemala, drawn by a new artist. (The nominal creator, Jerry Williams, was a whole bunch of different guys over the feature’s run.)

Shorty Shortcake continued to run until Wonderworld #20. So if you consider him to be Scrappy operating under an assumed name, as I do, the end of the official Scrappy comic strip didn’t mean the end of Scrappy comics. Maybe I’ll run some of his stories here—it would be sad to think there are no more Scrappy strips out there to rediscover.

Meet Gury, the Oopy of Brazil

We have long known that the French loved Scrappy–or at least grudgingly tolerated him as comic-book filler. The pioneering cartoonists of Japan–maybe even including Tezuka himself–may have been Scrappy fans, too.

But I’ll bet you didn’t know that Oopy led a secret second life in Brazil. Or at least I didn’t until I stumbled across these examples on Facebook, right after I pressed Publish on my last post.

According to Luigi Rocco’s blog about the history of Brazilian comics, the venerable newspaper Diário de Pernambuco–now the world’s oldest Portuguese-language paper–began publishing a children’s supplement called O Gury in January 1936. Among its features was As Aventuras do Gury, a comic by a cartoonist named Corrêa. Despite its “Original de Corrêa” billing, the strip starred a character who looked uncannily like a slightly older Oopy–or, if you prefer, a hybrid of Scrappy and Oopy. He had a wiry little dog who could have served as an adequate substitute for Yippy in a pinch.

(It just occurred to me, however, that Oopy’s cowlick is at least vaguely Tintin-esque, and Gury’s dog looks resembles Snowy almost as much as he does Yippy. Perhaps Corrêa drew artistic inspiration from both Charles Mintz and Herge.)

Rocco’s post about As Aventuras do Gury includes two examples of the strip, and I found another one online shown in a spread from a book of Diário de Pernambuco cartoons. Here they are:

I’m not sure how long the Gury strip ran. There was a later standalone Brazilian comic book, also called O Gury, which reprinted American strips such as Batman and Mary Marvel. It was revived on occasion, as recently as 1968. What its connection was to the O Gury that featured Gury, I can’t say.

In any event, Brazilian comics blogger Rocco caught As Aventuras do Gury‘s Scrappy influence–“Corrêa’s drawings showed a strong influence of the characters of the American animator Charles Mintz”–and included an example of the Scrappy comic strip produced by the Eisner-Iger shop, translated into Portuguese recently enough that it uses digital lettering:

I don’t know if Corrêa was specifically influenced by the Scrappy strip. For one thing, I’m not positive when the Scrappy one first appeared anywhere: The earliest reference to it I know is its listing in the 1937 Editor & Publisher yearbook. If O Gury debuted in January 1936 and Corrêa had indeed seen the Scrappy strip before creating his, that suggests that dead-tree Scrappy had made his way to Brazil by the end of 1935. Which is not inconceivable: We know that Eisner and Iger sold their strip to publishers in France and Australia.

But wait: Gury looks even more like Oopy than he does like Scrappy, and Oopy never appeared in the Scrappy strip. That would seem to be evidence that Corrêa had seen Scrappy in animated form. So perhaps the Gury strip’s stylistic similarity to printed Scrappy is a coincidence. Unless the artist simply removed Scrappy’s hair coloring, resulting in a purely coincidental resemblance to Oopy.

In any event, we can now properly honor Gury–like Shorty Shortcake–as a proud resident of one of the many alternate-reality Mintzverses that are clearly out there.

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Shorty Splashes

Let’s continue our exploration of the bizarre world of Shorty Shortcake — the Wonder and Wonderworld comics character who is very nearly Scrappy, but not quite so. Starting with Wonderworld #5, each Shorty story started with a splash panel — often an elaborate one. Taken as a group, they summarize the storyline, which started being distinctly un-Mintzlike and grew only more so in subsequent issues. They also show that Jerry Williams, the feature’s cartoonist, utterly changed his style every few issues. Gifted man.

Here are all the Shorty splashes I’ve found. They’re from Wonderworld #5-#20, and a few are missing.