Samuel and Rose Davidavitch of Yonkers, New York had four sons who went into the animation business–all after changing the family name to Davis. There was Art, who–at least here at Scrappyland–is best remembered as part of the Mintz brain trust that gave us Scrappy. (His later work as a director and animator at Warner Bros. has its fans, too.) There was Mannie, who stayed in New York and was a key Terrytoons employee for decades. There was Sid, who was also known as Butch and worked alongside Art at Mintz after it became Screen Gems. And there was Phil, who also worked with Art at Mintz/Screen Gems.

Except that in March 1933, Phil left the studio and returned to New York. A few years later, he’d come back and head the Screen Gems in-between department. But his coworkers didn’t know that Phil would be back when they filled a scrapbook with drawings wishing him well as he departed. (Many of them were also New Yorkers who’d headed west–and in some cases would themselves go back and continue their animation careers on the east coast.)

Over at Patreon, Devon Baxter–whose presence there is a must for cartoon fans–has posted dozens of these drawings, courtesy of Art Davis’s granddaughter Sharon Davis and her husband, Steve Marshall. They’re a remarkable collection of work by people who were major figures in the animation industry long after Scrappy left the stage.

Like all good behind-the-scenes gag sketches, these ones are full of in jokes, some of which we probably don’t get. (I do believe that the references to pool in several of them involve the fact that there was a pool hall on the ground floor of the studio’s building.) They feature studio characters diverging from their on-screen behavior, are occasionally racy, and sure look like the people who drew them were having fun. (A few of them even contributed more than one piece.)

You should head to Patreon to see all the drawings–but Devon generously allowed me to share a few here. Naturally, I picked those most closely related to Scrappy.

First of all, here’s Dick Huemer himself, with a fine drawing (given that Scrappy isn’t in it, at least). That’s a self-caricature of Dick–himself a New York transplant–in the foreground. I imagine the whip references his supervisory capacity at the Mintz studio. Within a few weeks, he was at Disney, having left Scrappy and Mintz behind for the studio that would occupy most of this time for the rest of his career.

This one does show Scrappy and Oopy bidding Phil farewell. It’s by Carl Urbano, whom I didn’t realize worked at the Mintz studio. He later directed industrial cartoons for John Sutherland and eventually ended up at Hanna-Barbera before dying in 2003–relatively recently for a Scrappy artist.

Here’s another Scrappy drawing by Marshall Dunning, who worked at Columbia and Disney–but spent most of his career as a political cartoonist. This sketch references WWI, which Dunning served in–and maybe Phil Davis, too, since he would have been old enough.

Reuben Timmins had a long career in animation spanning both coasts and lots of studios, from Fleischer to Filmation. He crammed a lot into his farewell drawing for Phil Davis, starting with a hula girl causing an earthquake–surely the Long Beach one which had occurred the previous week and caused about 115 fatalities. Also in the drawing is Scrappy with a random message for Fleischer animator Dave Tendlar, whom I’m guessing had fallen out of touch with his former colleague Timmins; and Krazy Kat seemingly encouraging Phil to look up Reuben’s relatives in NYC (“Dewey 5888” would have been their phone number).

Lastly from Phil’s Scrappy-book, here’s an amazing drawing with Bimbo, Koko, Betty Boop, Scrappy, Oopy, Mutt, Jeff, Krazy Kat, Mickey Mouse, and a dame whom apparently enjoyed Phil’s company during his time in California. Devon and I am not sure who did this. It’s tempting to wonder if it’s someone who worked on all these characters, but I’m not sure if anyone had in 1933. (Dick Huemer had worked on Mutt and Jeff cartoons and spent time at Fleischer–and left Mintz later in 1933 for Disney–but was gone from Fleischer before Betty Boop arrived.) Perhaps one of you knows who might have done this–Don Yowp’s list of Mintz staffers from 1933 could provide a clue.

[Update: Devon now says: “I’ve talked it over with some trusted experts, and we believe it’s the work of Rudy Zamora. To borrow an observation from Mark Newgarden: ‘The handwriting is a reasonable match with his signature here [on this Fleischer Christmas card]. The way he handles hands & feet & line strokes all check.'”

Bonus material: This Mintz studio gag drawing isn’t from Phil Davis’s scrapbook–it was recently auctioned off by Howard Lowery. It’s by Preston Blair and features caricatures of himself and a “Joe” whom the Lowery listing says is Mintz composer Joe De Nat. I have no reason to doubt that identication, but will note that it’s not readily identifiable as De Nat based on the photos I’ve seen of him. I’m not sure about the precise meaning of the “The March of Time” caption, but it’s presumably a reference to either the radio show (which started in 1931) or the more famous newsreels (which debuted in 1935), both of which were spinoffs from TIME magazine.

You’ve been waiting for this for almost five years–or, in a way, more than 80. Or maybe not. But I hope you’ll enjoy these four examples of the ill-fated Scrappy newspaper comic strip, which seems to have failed to … well, appear in any newspapers.

Though Will Eisner and Jerry Iger couldn’t get U.S papers interested in the strip in 1937, they did sell it to comics publications overseas, including France’s Bilboquet and the U.K. and Australia’s Wags. Eventually, they lightly retouched it and ran it as “Shorty Shortcake” in Wonderworld comics. The strips below are from Wags, and as far as I know they haven’t been reprinted anywhere since their original appearance in 1938.

If you need to catch up on your Scrappy adventures, just read our earlier installments: Here are parts one, two, and three. Here’s a post in which I tried to figure out who drew the Scrappy strip. Here’s another in which I decided that Will Eisner probably had his hand in it, at least at first.

By the time the strips below appeared, the style had morphed and I don’t have any bright ideas about who drew them–could be Eisner, could be somebody else. The one person whom we can be positive had nothing to do with them is the guy who signed them: Charles Mintz.

Except for starring Scrappy, Margy, and Yippy, these comics have almost nothing to do with the Scrappy theatrical cartoons. By this point in the chronology, even the fact that Scrappy is a small boy has stopped making sense. But whoever was drawing the strip by this point had fun and deserves at least a little belated glory. So I hope the mystery artist doesn’t remain a mystery forever.

How did the Scrappy comic strip come to be? Did Columbia approach Eisner and Iger, or did they come up with the idea? How hard did they try to sell it to newspapers before shipping it overseas? We’ll probably never know, and I’m just sorry I didn’t ask Will Eisner, who was still attending comics conventions I was also at in this century. (Don’t blame me for not seizing the opportunity: I didn’t know of his Scrappy connection at the time.)

I still have some more Scrappy strips to run, but for now, I’ll leave you with this page from Wonderworld #3 (July 1939), which repurposed the above material and claimed it involved Shorty Shortcake, Suzy, and Woofy.

Normally, I would not publish a drawing featuring Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop, Gertie the Dinosaur, Porky Pig, Woody Woodpecker, Willie Whopper, Farmer Alfalfa, and Katharine “Bo Peep” Hepburn on Scrappyland. But this drawing is special–it’s by Al Kilgore.

And hey, you’ve probably already spotted Scrappy in there, too, down in the lower right-hand corner next to fellow Columbia alum Gerald McBoing Boing–a character my wife loves so much she mentions him in her Twitter profile, which is more than I do for Scrappy.

Al Kilgore (1927-1983) was a wonderfully gifted cartoonist who mostly worked on projects that weren’t all that widely seen. In the 1960s, he wrote and drew the syndicated Bullwinkle comic strip, as good a dead-tree interpretation of an animated cartoon as anyone has ever done. He also illustrated book covers (including this one), designed the glorious Sons of the Desert escutcheon, drew a monthly panel for a magazine for the floor-covering trade, created paper-doll books featuring Elvis and the Reagan family, and did some of the world’s kindest, most charming caricatures for a syndicated feature and film-fan magazines.

I’m guessing that the drawing above, which I recently acquired after learning about it from Jerry Beck, may have been a preliminary sketch for a piece in such a magazine–conceivably Alan G. Barbour’s Screen Facts or Leonard Maltin’s Film Fan Monthly. It seems likely that it dates to the 1960s. But I don’t know for sure. Come to think of it, I’m not positive that Kilgore ever turned this rough into an inked drawing, though I can’t imagine why he’d produce something so ambitious and not finish it for publication, unless he had second thoughts about copyright issues. (It’s drawn on the back of a giant piece of illustration board preprinted with blueline panels for some comic-book publisher–perhaps Gold Key.)

Kilgore loved old movies (especially those starring Laurel and Hardy), comics, and related pop-culture artifacts and imbued his work with his passions every chance he got; even the later part of his Bullwinkle run was crowded with allusions and in-jokes that feel deeply personal. So he must have enjoyed the opportunity to draw so many cartoon characters in one place. At least some of the poses are borrowed from elsewhere, but the composition has a Kilgorian feel–he often did crowd scenes of familiar figures–and it would have been even more distinctive in finished form. (Along with everything else, Kilgore was a great inker.)

At the time Kilgore would have drawn this, Scrappy was even more forgotten by history than he is today. But Kilgore remembered him, and appears to have had enough reference material handy to draw an excellent, on-model version of the character. I’m so glad their paths crossed.

If you’d like to see more Kilgore–way more Kilgore–you must check out Drew Friedman’s incredible assemblage of his art. Over on eBay, the people I bought my drawing from have scads of other Kilgore originals for sale, all of them fascinating and some costing as little as $20. And if you happen to know where my sketch might have appeared in completed form, do tell me, won’t you?

On January 21, 2005 at 9:00am San Francisco time, I sent an email to a few animation-loving friends:

Subject: Scrappyland is live

At long last, the greatest obscure cartoon character of all time has a home on the Web:  Scrappyland is up and running. 

Tell your friends–at least if they’re Scrappy fans! 

— Harry

That makes today the 15th anniversary of this site. (It did have a preview mode, with a smidge of content, that lasted through much of 2004.) I don’t remember wondering what sort of future the site would have when I was launching it. But I do know that 2005 Harry would be pleased to know that 2020 Harry was still at it.

Why has writing for this site been such a rewarding experience? Well, it’s rare to get the opportunity to create the definitive resource on anything. (I hope you won’t think me full of myself for considering Scrappyland to be such a resource.) There are other folks who write about Scrappy from time to time—hello, Paul, Steve, and Uncle John—but nobody else would be silly enough to spend so much time on the topic. (Even my own silliness flagged from mid-2005 through mid-2012, a stretch when I performed no meaningful updates to the site—but then I converted it into a blog and have since published over a hundred posts.)

It’s nice knowing that if people Google for Scrappy, the odds are high they’ll end up here. I can usually answer their questions, and some of the people who land here have stuff of their own to share. I find it therapeutic, after spending my days thinking about the present and future of technology, to devote some of my brain cells to cartoons that are almost ninety years old. I still get a little tingle from every new Scrappy discovery.

The challenge with a site like Scrappyland is that the day might arrive when I have nothing left to say—either because I’ve lost the urge or because I’ve covered every possible aspect of the subject. I’m pretty sure my interest won’t flag anytime soon. And even if all I do is write up stuff that’s still in my queue of Scrappy learnings, I’ll have enough material for the next several years.

Thank you for reading, and please stick around for more. Scrappyland has already had a longer run than Scrappy himself did as a cartoon star, so there’s no reason this can’t go on indefinitely.