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.

Possibly the single best thing about running Scrappyland is that when people decide to research Scrappy on the web, it’s pretty much guaranteed that they will find their way here–even if they start out wholly ignorant of him, as so many people regrettably are.

That was the case with Brandon Manzione, who bought a photo of Sally O’Neil, an actress who appeared in silent films and early talkies, and wondered why she was brandishing a carton of candy bars emblazoned with SCRAPPY logos. He Googled around, found my writings on Scrappy candy, and dropped me a note.

I can’t blame Brandon for not having heard of Scrappy; I was unfamiliar with Sally O’Neil until I got his email. I was pretty sure why she would pose with Scrappy bars, though, and a quick visit to IMDB confirmed my hunch. Runkel Bros.’ Scrappy candy dated from 1935–it was promoted to a fare-thee-well in Scrappy’s Own Magazine that year–and I assumed that O’Neil made a Columbia film at that time and that the studio pressed her into service to shill for Scrappy, as it was wont to do.

Yup: O’Neil costarred with Victor Jory in a 1935 Columbia release, Too Tough to Kill, about a plot to blow up a tunnel out west. She played a newspaper reporter, and I’m sorry to report that the Independent Exhibitors’ Film Bulletin dismissed the movie as “no better than passable for the city dumps and cheap rural houses.” I’m not even sure what a “city dump” is in this case, but it can’t be good.

Even in 1935, O’Neil (1908-1968) was winding down her career. (She made only one more film after Too Tough to Kill.) Born Virginia Louise Noonan, she worked in Vaudeville as “Chotsie” Noonan–a stage name I wish she’d hung onto–before entering the movie business. Some of her silent features, including Don’t, Mike, and The Auction Block, are sadly presumed to be lost; she was also in Buster Keaton’s 1926 feature Battling Butler, which survives, and which I may have seen decades ago, as “the mountain girl.” In the sound era, she starred in 1931’s The Brat, which I assume must be interesting if only because of the fact that it was directed by John Ford.

I was also briefly excited by IMDB’s contention that O’Neil was in 45 Minutes From Hollywood, the 1926 Hal Roach short that starred Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy–without managing to put them together in even one scene–until I learned that the website apparently confused Sally with her sister, who was born Susan Noonan and acted as Sue O’Neil before switching to Molly O’Day.

Sally’s star is said to have fallen in the talkie era because of her thick New Jersey accent and stage fright. A 1932 movie-fan magazine I ran across told a less conventional tale of career woe: Her beloved brother “Hutch” was convicted (perhaps unjustly) of stealing a couple of fur coats that belonged to bandleader Ted Lewis. He was sentenced to seven years in California’s Folsom State Prison, which sounds excessive even if he was guilty; Sally supposedly took off two years to be with the poor guy and spent all her money to defend him.

By the time frame of Too Tough to Kill, O’Neil may have been considered to have become a bit of a has-been: One magazine article about her carried the headline “I Wonder What’s Become of Sally.” But at least Columbia still thought she was enough of a celeb to help move Scrappy candy, which helps to make up for the fact that it misspelled her last name on the photo in which she did so.

And hey, at around the same time, the Safe-Kurl people of Cincinnati, Ohio, apparently paid her–handsomely, I hope–to endorse their miracle electric hair waver. I just wish she looked happier in the ad…

Hey, remember when Frank Miller rebooted the Scrappy franchise with the grim, dystopian Dark Scamp? Well..me neither. But Ed Loera does. He also remembers Siegel and Shuster’s Scrappy, George Lucas’s Scrappy, and others. And he pays tribute to them in these nifty pieces of artwork, which he gave me permission to reproduce:

Ed says that he created these because he “wanted to pay tribute to Scrappyland in his own way,” and that the Cappy America piece is a work in progress. He features his art and sells prints, Scrappy-themed and otherwise, at his Wondrousworx website.