You look like you’d enjoy a good Scrappy story. Here’s one from 1932—the start of one, at least.

More specifically, it’s Chapter 1 of Book One of The Adventures of ‘Scrappy’ and His Dog Yippy—written by F. Heath Cobb and illustrated by our friend Dick Huemer (working under his occasional pen name of Dick Heumor, which he adopted because it hoped it would help people figure out how to pronounce his name—which it didn’t).

While this would seem to be the first Adventures of ‘Scrappy’ booklet, it’s the second I’ve shared (here’s the earlier one). I don’t know much about them other than that they were given away at theaters. How many booklets there were, I can’t say. But in all my years of Scrappy collecting, I haven’t seen that many for sale. Unless I find a copy of Book One, Chapter 2, someday, we may never learn what happened to Scrappy and Yippy at their fishing party, and for that, I apologize in advance.

Oh, and as I wrote back in the early days of Scrappyland—and forgot until I looked it up just now–these booklets were also included in Scrappy paint sets.

But really, the main reason I’m writing this is not to talk about The Adventures of ‘Scrappy.’ My topic today is F. Heath Cobb.  Along with writing these Scrappy booklets, he was the author of How to Draw a Cartoon, an instructional pamphlet—credited to Scrappy himself—distributed through schools. (It’s less interesting than it sounds, which is why I haven’t gotten around to writing about it here yet—I will someday, I promise.)

Cobb wasn’t the only author credited with writing a Scrappy book. Pat Patterson wrote the Scrappy Big Little Book, and Hal Hode was responsible for a BLB-esque book from another publisher. But as the author of several adventures of Scrappy serialized through multiple booklets, Cobb must have been bylined on more Scrappy publications than any other scribe. He also had a wonderfully evocative name. It brings to mind a man of accomplishment—the author of works other than Scrappy booklets, surely. Maybe a bit of a toff.

Still, I couldn’t be positive that “F. Heath Cobb” wasn’t some sort of house pseudonym along the lines of Burt L. Standish, the author of the Frank Merriwell books. So I set out to learn if he was a real person—and if so, what he did with himself other than write Scrappy books.

It turns out that there have been more F. Heath Cobbs than you might expect. Take, for instance, the one who taught at a community college in Tacoma in the 1970s. He seemed like an unlikely candidate to be chronicling Scrappy’s adventures forty years earlier. But with a bit of rummaging on Newspapers.com, I found this January 9, 1949 Atlanta Constitution obituary:

A long-time publicity agent for Columbia? This is our Cobb. Scrappy’s Cobb.

Though the obit didn’t mention Cobb writing Scrappy books, it did cover a lot of other ground. Producer of the Cole Porter musical No, No, Nanette. Writer and director of other musicals. Owner of Hollywood’s famous El Capitan Theater. Prominent ad man. Father of two—here he is, on the right, with F. Heath Cobb Jr. (who, it turns out, was the aforementioned Tacoma professor).

When I tried to dig into all this, I usually didn’t get very far. For instance, I couldn’t find any evidence that Cobb owned the El Capitan (which does have a roundabout association with Charles Mintz: It’s now a Disney property). Maybe he came up with Buick’s long-running tagline, but I saw mention of that achievement only in his death notices. I am also suspicious about the claim that he produced anything for Broadway, including No, No, Nanette (which wasn’t actually by Cole Porter).

Still, Cobb did have a Nanette connection: He was married to Nancy Welford, a former Zigfield Girl who’d starred in one of several productions of the wildly popular musical that played simultaneously in 1925. Hers got to San Francisco and Los Angeles, at least. Decades later, stories about her identified her as the original Nanette (no) and said she’d played the role on Broadway (not that I’ve been able to verify).

When Cobb and Welford married in October 1924, it had made headlines—in part because she was already a celebrity but also because her parents claimed to be in disbelief. It was Welford’s first marriage but—according to one Ancestry.com family tree—Cobb’s fifth. A 1922 article, which cited his “smart clothes and irresistible manner,” said he’d gotten in trouble for marrying one of his wives before divorcing the prior one. He also narrowly avoided being prosecuted for impersonating an Army Captain; charges weren’t pressed because he’d sold $250,000 of Liberty Bonds.

Do you begin to understand why Mr. and Mrs. Welford weren’t thrilled with the idea of their daughter marrying this guy?

Note that the above story identified Cobb as someone “said to be a screen director,” adding to the general mystery about the man’s actual profession. A 1925 article about him, published in a trade publication he’d joined, provided more details about his background—child of show people, newspaperman, circus, vaudeville publicist, employee of Essanay Studios. But given that it repeats his apparently spurious claim of having been an Army Captain during the Great War, I’m not sure what to believe.

Getting back to the Cobb obit: Its mention of his involvement with a musical called Nancy is one of its few alleged factoids that definitely is accurate, more or less. By now, you’ve guessed that the show starred Nancy Welford, who supposedly inspired it. According to The Los Angeles Times, she played “a little country girl bent upon spreading happiness.” Other articles on the production compared it to Pollyanna and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

Unfortunately for Cobb and Welford, Nancy was “not a pronounced success in any of the cities where it was shown,” reported a Seattle Star story. After tryouts in Long Beach, the show premiered at Los Angeles’s Playhouse Theater on May 24, 1926. On June 14, it opened in San Francisco. A little over two weeks later, newspaper accounts said it was about to begin its final week. Even that was apparently cut short when the chorus walked out in a salary dispute.

As far as I know, Cobb’s career as a theatrical producer did not survive Nancy‘s disappointing reception. But as the 1920s wound down, Welford continued to perform in stage musicals, including Twinkle Twinkle (with Joe E. Brown) and a light opera called Bambina. In 1929, she made her movie debut in Gold Diggers of Broadway—the second all-talking, all-Technicolor picture. (Sadly, only two reels survive.) I’m guessing this publicity shot, depicting her literally digging gold, relates to the film.

Gold Diggers of Broadway was a big hit, but Welford only made four more movies. By 1933, her Hollywood career was over.

Meanwhile, Cobb had already returned to the PR work he’d pursued before marrying her. A 1930 Exhibitors Herald World story noted he was involved with the promotion for a revival of (ugh) D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. In 1931, the Motion Picture Daily reported that he had joined Columbia’s advertising department. And in 1932 and 1933, newspaper articles—ones possibly planted by him—said he was the First Assistant National Chief Ranger of the Buck Jones Rangers Club, a fan group for the studio’s cowboy star.

This was also the same timeframe when Cobb wrote Scrappy books. We can assume he got the gig as part of his Columbia publicity duties. But I’d love to know: Was he just being dutiful? Or did he eagerly seize the opportunity to tell Scrappy stories? Maybe he had some measure of interaction with Mintz studio personnel—Dick Huemer, at least, since he illustrated the booklets. We’ll probably never know. But I prefer to believe he enjoyed the project. After all, he did choose to take credit for it.

And hey, in Chapter 8 of “The Adventures of ‘Scrappy,'” Cobb may have told a story with an oddly autobiographical angle. Book One, “Scrappy Meets a Hero,” involved him getting the chance to hear a WWI vet explain “what really happened to the boys in the trenches.” I don’t have this booklet—just some sample pages from an old auction listing. But the vet’s name–”Colonel Fullerton Bull”—hints at the tantalizing possibility that he, like Cobb, wasn’t a war hero after all.

Increasingly, Cobb made the news for reasons no PR man would seek out. In January 1928, The Los Angeles Times said that he and Welford had lost a suit brought by Fred Hartsook, a well-known Hollywood photographer, over a $910 bill they hadn’t paid. In 1934, Variety reported on a scandal Cobb was involved in that does sound pretty scandalous: He admitted to having forged the signatures of Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy, Sylvia Sydney, Mae West, and other stars on contracts to endorse a hosiery firm he represented. (He claimed he did it “to save time,” confident that he could gain their consent later.) Later in the month, Variety noted that Cobb and Welford had been sued again, this time over an unpaid $150 clothing bill at a New York store.

That last item is the final one I’ve found indicating that Cobb and Welford were still married. At some point, possibly around then, they split up. Cobb went on to wed wife #6. He mostly disappeared from newspapers by the mid-1930s, but in 1946, at least a couple of newspapers published an anti-union letter from an F. Heath Cobb of North Augusta, S.C. I think he may be our man, engaging in what we’d now call astroturfing. In any event, I’m curious what brought him to Atlanta, where he died three years later.

As for Welford, she too remarried. She also worked as a sales clerk in San Francisco, did local theater in the Bay Area (including some Gilbert and Sullivan), and enjoyed being remembered for No, No, Nanette, especially after its 1971 Broadway revival. You’ve already seen that she wasn’t mentioned in Cobb’s obituary. And when she died in 1991—more than 40 years after her ex-spouse—he was absent from hers.

I seem to have fallen down a rabbit hole here, as we so often do on Scrappyland. As usual, it’s been a rewarding experience. If there are Scrappy books written by someone named F. Heath Cobb, you know there’s going to be a story behind the intriguing name. And it will probably be even weirder than whatever pops into your head. Or did you naturally assume he was an oft-married fabulist and failed impresario?

There’s only one downside to thinking as much about Scrappy as I do: He may well take over your brain. Or at least I tend to see him–or hints of Scrappyness–in the darndest places.

The most recent instance came when I was reading an article about Israel’s COVID-19 vaccination program. In the background on some signage, a cartoon kid brandished a medicine bottle and beamed. He looked like Scrappy to me.

More specifically, he looked like Scrappy in a familiar stock pose, in which he wears a cap backwards and sticks out his right hand in salutation, often with Yippy by his side. The Mintz studio must have liked it, since it pops up frequently in one form or another.

Israel’s kid turned out to be a mascot for Clalit, the country’s largest healthcare organization. He predates the current pandemic but has turned his attention to promoting vaccines in recent months.

It’s true that he lacks the basketball-head proportions of Scrappy as depicted in the above examples. (Scrappy later developed a slightly more realistic physique himself, but by then he’d stopped wearing a cap regularly.) But the Clalid kid still has a Scrappy vibe to him–if Sony decided to make new Scrappy cartoons in CGI, he might well look like this.

However, when I went in search of other images of Clalid’s mascot, I discovered that he usually doesn’t sport a cap–and without it, he ceases to be Scrappy’s doppelgänger. (Actually, he looks more like Charlie Brown.)

I also found a line drawing of him in which even I would not detect the slightest tinge of Scrappyness.

Even with his hat on, the Clalit kid’s resemblance to Scrappy is presumably a coincidence, unless Israel is more familiar with Scrappy than I’d guess. Bottom line: Stick a cartoon boy with big black eyes and a grin in a red shirt, short pants and cap, and then put him in a jaunty pose, and the odds are pretty good that he’ll look kind of like Scrappy. To me, that is.

I’d known for years that J.C. Penney had some sort of promotional tie-in with Scrappy. After all, years ago at San Diego Comic-Con, I’d bought what seemed to be a piece of Penney’s back-to-school store signage depicting Margy and Scrappy gallivanting merrily, books in hand, with accompanying text–“This is ‘Scrappy’ and ‘Margy'”–that suggested they needed introducing.

But I had never bothered to investigate the matter further until Friend of Scrappy Mark Newgarden shared a 1933 Penney’s newspaper advertisement featuring Scrappy, Margy, and Yippy. Remarkably, he’d stumbled across it on Newspapers.com while looking for something else. The ad doesn’t mention Scrappy by name, which means it would be tough to find on purpose. (If you don’t go hunting for Scrappy, Scrappy comes hunting for you.)

Inspired by Mark’s discovery, I turned to Newspapers.com myself and found a bounty of Scrappy-themed back-to-school Penney’s ads, all from August and September 1933.

Here’s just a taste of it.

As you can see, the ads used a few drawings of Scrappy, Margy, and Yippy in various ways with different layouts and text. It seems reasonable to guess that individual stores or regional advertising managers were provided with stock art to use as they saw fit.

You may also have noticed that the ads reference a variety of Scrappy-themed local events: costume contests, parades, and screenings. Here are some more details on these lavish affairs.

The Betty Boopers referenced in that last ad seem to have been members of a Betty Boop club run by a local theater, similar to the original Mickey Mouse Club, and leading to the above bit of unexpected Fleischer-Mintz cross-promotion.

The point of the Penney-sponsored events was to generate publicity that didn’t feel like advertising. The effort paid off handsomely. Newspapers ran announcements about the doings, referencing both Scrappy and J.C. Penney. Then they published follow-up reports once the festivities had taken place.

Sadly, I haven’t run across any photos of the Scrappy parades, lookalike competitions, and theater shindigs—or, for that matter, any of Penney stores during the 1933 back-to-school season, when they must have been bedecked in Scrappyana such as the sign I own. But at 2005’s Scrappyland screening in LA, we unwittingly revived Penney’s tradition by holding a Scrappy masquerade of our own (I think it was Jerry Beck’s idea).

We had one entrant, Raven Loc, who came dressed as a brilliantly monochromatic Margy—and I do have a photo of her in costume.

Other than being pleased by the intensity of the Scrappy angle, the thing that I find most striking about Penney’s campaign is how evocative they are of the Great Depression that was going on at the time. The U.S. economy had bottomed out the previous year, but times were still awfully tough in 1932–unemployment was at 25%—and some of the ads feel obsessed with penny-pinching and fear of higher prices to come, even as they champion FDR’s plan to get the country back on track:

I mentioned that all the Penney-Scrappy items I found dated from August and September 1933. With a little more Newspapers.com research, I learned that J.C. Penney made a tradition of promoting its back-to-school offerings with different well-known, kid-friendly characters each year,

In 1932, the company had used Hal Roach’s Our Gang. I think that’s Spanky third from the left, with Pete on the far right, obviously; whether the others represent actual members of the Gang, I’m not sure.

After embracing Scrappy in 1933, Penney’s dumped him for Mickey Mouse in 1934. Charles Mintz must have taken that as a stinging rebuke, assuming he was paying attention.

The year after that, Penney’s mascot was Popeye. This was during the period when he was Mickey Mouse’s most serious rival, and the chain may have regarded him as an upgrade.

By 1936, however,Penney’s was apparently tired of shelling out money to license familiar characters. Its back-to-school blitz featured Peggy and Peter, the human, non-cartoon Penney Twins…

And in 1937, Peggy and Peter gave way to the largely similar Sunny and Jim, who seem to have ended this promotional tradition.

These back-to-school drives involved at least some of the same elements as the Scrappy one, such as parades and theater parties. And Penney’s distributed celebratory pins in high enough volume that eBay is fairly awash in them. (I haven’t seen any Scrappy ones.)

• 

JC Penney, of course, is still with us–albeit in battered condition. It still throws annual back-to-school events. And tonight, when I found myself in a mall with a Penney’s, I dropped in just in case it had inexplicably decided to enlist Scrappy, Margy, and Yippy in the cause again, a mere 86 years after the first time

It hadn’t. But the place now has an entire Disney-store-within-the-store. I would not be surprised if it includes even more Mickey Mouse gear than the company sold back in 1934.

Penney’s also sells Popeye and (sexy) Olive Oyl costumes, continuing the tradition it began with its 1935 back-to-school bash. So I don’t think it’s unreasonable or unrealistic to believe that it might revive its relationship with the Mintz organization and add a few Scrappy items to its current line. It wouldn’t hurt the company’s business, and it might help–or at least I’d be way more likely to stop in…

Back in 2013, we brought you a bunch of examples of Scrappy Sayings, a comic panel–weird even by Scrappy standards–that Columbia syndicated to small newspapers in the mid-1930s in hopes of getting some free promotion for its animated shorts. (The papers didn’t pay for these, did they?)

Last year, Friend of Scrappy Jason Fiore found more of the panels, which inspired me to locate even more. And now another Scrapologist, Christian Bajusz, has tracked down another dozen of them, including the intact version of one I previously published with a big chunk torn out of it.

As usual, our mystery artist seems most interested in topics that are odd fodder for a feature about a little boy, such as romance, auto safety, and skeletons in one’s closet. He (or she) draws an adult woman whose head is about 1/5th the size of Scrappy’s, and I can’t tell if it’s an artistic quirk or evidence of lack of skill, or maybe a telltale sign of a swipe from a non-Mintz source. (There were not a lot of grown women depicted in Scrappy cartoons.)

This batch also has the distinction of including the first one that I found ever so slightly entertaining: “If your best girl asks you to sing with her–duet!” (Okay, I’m easily amused.)

Thank you for these, Christian. At this point, I wouldn’t be started if we keep uncovering new Scrappy Sayings forever. I’d just like to know who was responsible for it.

I’ve owned the above 1933 issue of Life—the great humor magazine, not the photo weekly that later stole its name—for something like 20 years. I’ve always loved its cover’s stylish and funny rendition of FDR (the incoming president) and Hoover (the outgoing one). But it was only a couple of weeks ago, when I was getting ready to sell it on eBay, that I noticed that it’s the work of Lester Gaba—the guy best known for his soap sculptures of Scrappy, Margy, and Yippy. (Well, best known around here, at least—among non-Mintz disciples, he’s remembered for his common-law wife Cynthia, whom he happened to have carved himself.)

As a magazine person, I’m dazzled by the mere fact that covers like this once existed. The two presidents are wearing tiny well-tailored suits; the lion has a serious mane; the lamb looks pettable. And Gaba built all this for a single photograph that would appear on newsstands for one month.

I wonder what he, or Life, did with his creations after the photo shoot? If there’s any chance they’re still extant, they should be on display somewhere where people can enjoy them.

This is, by the way, the second bit of Scrappy-related art depicting presidential candidates which we’ve covered here at Scrappyland. The first was Dick Huemer’s 1960s album cover showing LBJ and Goldwater. If you come across any Art Davis paintings of Jimmy Carter and Jerry Ford, please let me know.

I’m beginning to think that deeming art of Scrappy to be mysterious is at least a tad redundant. Here’s a nicely framed drawing of Scrappy signed “Nitro.” (I assume that’s a signature–I’m not sure what else it would be.)

You might guess from a glance that this pose is a swipe. If you did, you’d be right. It’s borrowed from this stock poster, where Scrappy is wearing the same odd striped shirt and leggings.

I don’t know who Nitro was or what the purpose of this art was, and I’m afraid the chances are slim that I’ll ever learn. But I do have my semi-educated suspicions. I think this is a bootleg print that was given away at carnivals or other venues that required cheap prizes and weren’t too fussy about their provenance.

For what it’s worth, the gent who sold me this drawing also had one, with the same ornamental border, of Bill Holman’s newspaper feline Spooky–who, having first appeared in 1935, was a contemporary of Scrappy’s.

I could certainly imagine someone knocking out these drawings without any consideration of copyrights. And it’s nice to think that someone, somewhere knocked over some milk bottles with a baseball, had a choice of prints of multiple cartoon characters–and picked Scrappy.

We’ve now seen a total of 18 strips from the Scrappy newspaper strip, done circa 1937 by the Eisner/Iger studio. (Here they are: part one, part two, and part three.) There’s more to come before I run out of strips to share with you. But let’s take a break to consider a burning question: who drew these?

We can cross one name off the list without even thinking about it, and it’s the only one on the strip: Charles Mintz. After that, things get tricky.

A couple of basic points:

• I’m working under the assumption that the strip was drawn by someone under the employ of Eisner & Iger Associates. In theory, it could have been produced by the Mintz Studio, but it doesn’t have that much of an animation feel and doesn’t seem to have been done by anyone who was terribly comfortable drawing Scrappy, Margy, and Yippy.
• I think there were actually multiple someones involved. The first strip is strikingly more polished than later ones, and the word balloons are in a different style. It’s also possible that multiple collaborators worked to pull together later strips. And I don’t have a clue whether whoever worked on the art was also involved in the story.

With that in mind, let’s look at the most obvious candidates:

Will Eisner

Argument he might have drawn the Scrappy strip: mostly the fact that he was the co-proprietor of the company behind it.

The evidence, pro or con: Eisner is, of course, most famous for comics that mixed adventure and drama with a pretty generous dollop of humor–but not for humor comics per se. However, his earliest work had a higher bigfoot quotient, which he eventually outgrew. The notion of him doing a humor/adventure continuity such as Scrappy isn’t inherently unlikely.

Thanks to Cat Yronwode’s excellent 1982 book The Art of Will Eisner, here are some examples of early, cartoony Eisner. (Click them for a larger view.)

This is Eisner’s 1935 high-school strip, about a character named…Spunky:

Also from 1935, part of samples he did for something called Dopey and the Duke:

A bit of another 1935 sample for Harry Carey:

The bottom line: None of these examples of Eisner being cartoony look all that much like the Scrappy strip to me. Then again, they date from a couple of years or so before the Scrappy strips were apparently done. Eisner was rapidly getting better at the time.  And whoever did draw Scrappy may have been making a (not particularly successful) attempt to give the strip an animation feel.

Basically, I’m not quite ready to declare that it’s obvious that Eisner didn’t have anything to do with the Scrappy art–but I don’t see any clear evidence that he did, either.

Jerry Iger

Argument he might have drawn the Scrappy strip: He was the co-owner of Eisner/Iger, and, as a cartoonist, had a specialty: comics about little kids.

The evidence, pro or con: Iger was more than decade older than Eisner, and by the late 1930s, his style seems to have settled. Here’s a snippet of Bobby which is very, very representative of his work.

The bottom line: This is stiff, static stuff. If anything, it looks even less like Scrappy than early Eisner does.

Bob Kane

Argument he might have drawn the Scrappy strip: Before he gained fame for Batman, young Kane worked for Eisner/Iger and was a humor specialist, best known for a creation called Peter Pupp, featured in Fiction House’s Jumbo Comics. It was a funny-animal adventure strip in the mold of Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse. That might have made Kane the most obvious candidate in the shop to tackle Scrappy, which, in the Eisner/Iger version, also has a strong Gottfredsonesque tinge.

The evidence, pro or con: Today, Kane is legendary for hiring artists more gifted than himself to draw Batman, then signing his name to their work. For what its worth, Peter Pupp varies so much in style from installment to installment that it seems apparent that Kane had help with it, too. A few samples:

Eventually, after Batman debuted in Detective Comics #27, Kane’s byline disappeared from Peter Pupp, which was credited instead to “Golleh.” Some of the Golleh strips are reprints of Kane’s work–or at least work that he signed–but some of them may have been done without his involvement. This one is of the latter sort, and I find it at least vaguely reminiscent of the flavor of the Scrappy strip. (It may or may not mean anything that both Scrappy and this strip featured the notion of shooting a gun filled with cheese.)

The bottom line: You know what? None of the Peter Pupps I’ve seen, with or without Bob Kane’s signature, look so much like Scrappy that I think that they were drawn by the same person.

Three logical candidates; no overwhelming reason to think they drew Scrappy. I’m sorry that I didn’t have the chance to ask Will Eisner about it; I first learned that the strip existed a couple of years after he passed away.

I’m going to continue to research this topic–and would welcome any information or guesses you might have.

You’ve been very patient during the many months since I last ran a chunk of the 1930s Scrappy newspaper strip. (If you’re just joining us, here are chunk one and chunk two.)

To recap what this thing is: In 1937 or thereabouts, Will Eisner and Jerry Iger tried to sell a Scrappy strip to newspapers. I know of no evidence that it ever ran in any U.S. papers. But it did show up in a comic book called Wags in Australia and the U.K., in another called Bilboquet in France, and–eventually–as a repurposed pseudo-Scrappy named Shorty Shortcake in Wonder Comics.

I still don’t know who wrote and drew this. The most logical candidates are Eisner, Iger, and Bob Kane, who did cartoony stuff for them. But I haven’t seen any work by any of them that looks much like this strip. (More on this soon.) Whoever did it, it’s unpolished but (I think) surprisingly entertaining. Even though it doesn’t have much to do with the animated cartoons it’s based on.

Anyhow, here you go. (Click on the strips to read them at a larger size.) Our silly (but, um, newly relevant) plotline involves crime along the Mexican border. The characters include Scrappy, Margy, a kleptomaniac tycoon named Mr. De Welth, and a bandito called Tiny.

More to come! I’ll be sorry when I run out of these.