For years now, we’ve known that Will Eisner and Jerry Iger tried to syndicate a newspaper comic strip about Scrappy in 1937. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that any newspapers in the U.S. ran it, but it made its way to both France and Australia.

And now, thanks to Friend of Scrappy Mark Newgarden, we know that the Eisner/Iger Scrappy was published in this country. In fact, it appeared in a rather famous comic book. It’s just that it was stripped of all obvious evidence that it was about Scrappy, and I’m not sure if anyone has noticed the connection until now — at least in the last seventy years or so.

The comic book in question was called Wonder Comics for its first two issues, then became Wonderworld Comics. It was published by Victor Fox, the early comics magnate who commissioned scads of work from Eisner and Iger. It’s rather well known that Fox had Eisner create a superhero called Wonder Man for Wonder Comics #1, cover-dated May 1939 — the first Superman imitation, and so blatant a knockoff that National Periodical Publications successfully sued him off the newsstand after one issue.

Wonder Man wasn’t Wonder‘s only blatant knockoff. Actually, almost everything in it seemed to be derived from already-popular material. And twenty issues of that comic and its successor, Wonderworld, included a feature called Shorty Shortcake about this little kid who had a girlfriend named Suzy and a dog named Snippy.

Shorty looked exactly like Scrappy, except that he had parted hair instead of a cowlick, pupiled eyes instead of pie-slice ones and suspenders instead of Mickey Mouse-style trouser buttons. Suzy looked exactly like Margy, except that she was a brunette rather than a redhead and had pupiled eyes. And Snippy looked exactly like Yippy, period.

We don’t know the precise circumstances of how Scrappy came to be Shorty, but the gist of the situation is obvious: Eisner and Iger wanted to reuse Scrappy comics they’d produced, and wouldn’t or couldn’t secure the rights to publish them as such. So they renamed the characters and retouched the strips. Rather sloppily so — here’s a panel from the first “Shorty” story (left) in which Suzy calls him Scrappy. (The original version is on the right, borrowed from Ken Quattro’s excellent Comics Detective site.)

I suppose that it’s just barely conceivable that Columbia knew about Shorty and was O.K. with him. But if Eisner/Iger and/or Fox reused this material without the studio’s permission, it would have been a risky gambit. At the very least, you’d think that there must have been late 1930s kids who watched Scrappy cartoons and read Shorty comics and wondered what the deal was.

Then again, Scrappy’s film career was already winding down: Only a handful of Scrappy cartoons were released after Shorty Shortcake’s debut, and some of them barely qualified as Scrappy cartoons. The little guy was already damaged goods.

More damning evidence that Shorty Shortcake is Scrappy, in case anyone needs it: The top level is from a Scrappy story published in France, and the bottom one is from a Shorty story. Note the extensive modifications to the art, such as the different cap on the left-hand thug in the first panel. Of course, both of these versions have been modified from the original English-language Scrappy version, so I’m not sure what was changed when.

All Shorty Shortcake stories were signed by “Jerry Williams” — a name which was, like most or all of the bylines in Wonder and Wonderworld, a pseudonym. Who for? Well, the comic-book reference works which have noticed that the feature existed at all credit it to Jerry Iger himself and to longtime Eisner associate Klaus Nordling. But you only have to skim the stories — which you can do for free at the wonderful Comic Book Plus site — to see that far more than two different cartoonists worked on the feature at various times.

More on the artists behind Shorty Shortcake, and lots more, in future posts. For now, courtesy of Comic Book Plus, here’s the first Shorty Shortcake story, from a microfiche copy of Wonder Comics #1. You can click on the first page and then step through larger images if you like.

As you’ll see, the plot involves Scrap–er, Shorty getting involved with smugglers in Mexico. As un-Mintzlike as that sounds, future Shorty Shortcake stories only veered further and further from their inspiration, as we’ll discuss soon.

I tend to assume that nobody who isn’t an obsessive cartoon fan knows Scrappy. That isn’t quite true, though — if you’re old enough, you may have watched Scrappy on TV, back when the airwaves practically buckled under the weight of vast quantities of old black-and-white theatrical cartoons.

This fascinating article from Billboard, from December 4, 1954, reports on the deals that brought Scrappy — and Krazy Kat, Oswald the Rabbit, Pooch the Pup, and others — to television. As the story explains, the medium was starved for animated content, and still reliant largely on silent cartoons starring Felix the Cat and others. Scrappy cartoons, despite being up to twenty-three years old, were fresh and exciting by the era’s standards.

Hygo, the company mentioned as distributing the Scrappy cartoons to television, owned Samba Pictures, the company whose name pops up in the opening titles of most of the prints of Scrappy cartoons I’ve ever seen (such as this one). I believe that Samba may have technically owned the television rights to the shorts, but Hygo did the actual distributing.

The article also says that fifty Mintz cartoons were rejected for poor print quality or objectionable content. I wonder which ones they were, and what you had to do to be too offensive for 1950s TV?

Among Scrappy’s many notable achievements: he starred in not one but two unsuccessful newspaper comics. I’ll write about one of them — the one with the Will Eisner connection — another time. This post is about Scrappy Sayings, which ran in papers as early as 1935. Years ago, comics scholar D.D. Degg alerted me to its availability in an online archive of a paper called the Grosse Pointe (Mich.) Review. The paper ran it erratically — sometimes every week, sometimes two panels in one week, often not at all — in 1936 and 1937.

Scrappy Sayings is weird — it involves Scrappy, so it would be weird if it wasn’t weird. How to describe it? It’s a little like Love Is, if Love Is starred a fully-dressed Scrappy and Margy, used terrible jokes which made no sense in a feature about small children, and took place during the depression. And was drawn by someone who didn’t know how to draw Scrappy. (Anytime he looks like himself, he’s almost certainly a swipe.)

The panel was syndicated by something called the Columbia Feature Service, which was apparently an arm of Columbia Pictures, since all its features involved the studio’s films. I assume that nobody ever looked at Scrappy Sayings as anything other than promotion for Scrappy cartoons. (It sure wasn’t Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse.)

Here are all the examples I could find — including one fragment — in the order the Grosse Pointe Review ran them, although they don’t seem to have published them in chronological order, nor to have run all of them. But even this poorly-reproduced smattering is probably the most Scrappy Sayings ever published in one place at one time.

You recognize the gentleman above, of course, as Eugene Talmadge (1884-1946), who was elected four times by the people of Georgia as their governor. (He only served three terms, though — he died before taking office a fourth time.)

When Talmadge was in his first term, he accepted a distinct honor which merits commemorating here. The Film Daily for August 14, 1934 reported it:

I'm old enough to remember Eugene Talmadge's son, Herman Talmadge, who served as Georgia's governor as well, and was later a senator from the state, famous for his staunch segregationist views. I sort of hope he wasn't a Scrappy fan.

(Republished from a 2007 Harry-Go-Round post)

So it’s come to this: I’m no longer the most enterprising Scrappy scholar in my own family. Once again, my sister–with the able assistance of my brother-in-law–has made an astonishing discovery. Namely, an appearance by Scrappy (and Margy, and Yippy) in a Humphrey Bogart picture.

The film in question is 1942′s All Through the Night, and it’s got an all-star cast: Bogie is joined by Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt, William “You kids get out of my kitchen” Demarest, Phil Silvers, Jane Darwell, Jackie Gleason, and others. The plot involves Damon Runyonesque types and Nazis; Bogie, playing “Gloves Donahue,” has suffered the assassination of the baker of his favorite cheesecake and has been framed for (another) murder himself.

A dame may be able to clear him, and Bogie has reason to think she may be at a warehouse on East 61st. He goes there with Demarest…

They break into the warehouse, which is chockablock with toys…

Including a SCRAPPY, MARGY, AND YIPPY PULL TOY (!!!)…

Attempting to sneak around the warehouse, Demarest accidentally gives the pull toy a kick…

And it goes careening, causing Scrappy to energetically play his xylophone whilst Margy does the hula…

A nonplussed Bogie tells Demarest to can the noisy tomfoolery…

And it turns out the whole thing is the setup for a gag in which Demarest gets buried in a veritable avalanche of toys.

What to make of this? If this had been a 1930s Columbia flick, I’d accuse Harry Cohn of product placement. (I don’t know of any Scrappy appearances in live-action Columbia pictures, but the studio sure tried every other avenue to promote the guy.) But All Through the Night was a Warner film, made the year after the Scrappy series ended. So maybe the use of the Scrappy toy was random rather than an intentional promotional effort.

In any event, I’m pleased to say that The National Scrappy Gallery‘s collection includes an example of the toy in question, in absolutely wonderful condition.