Here's a comic book that featured "PEBBLES and BAMM-BAMM"!
Here's a comic book that featured "PEBBLES and SPLISH-SPLASH"!
Gotta love this gag from MUTT AND JEFF # 103 (DC Comics, Cover Date: June, 1958), with individual panels enlarged for your reading pleasure.
So, while in this comic, Pebbles watches Bamm-Bamm go "BAM! BAM!"
We learn that another "Pebbles" went SPLISH-SPLASH"!
Johnny Cash once sang: "Life ain't easy for a Boy Named Sue"!
Neither, it would seem, for a boy named "Pebbles"!
4 comments:
Is the brown thing behind the children the water they were playing in? I wouldn't throw Pebbles (or Bam-Bam) into water that looks like that!
Seriously, I think the colorist accidently colored a river as a dirt road...
Shad:
Unfortunately, I have seen water-in-the-wild flowing in a similar color. And by 1958, in both water and air, such pollution was definitely a thing… which might be why I didn’t bat an eye, or call it out.
However, as this was a Mutt and Jeff DAILY strip, it would not have been colored as DC received it… and, however belatedly, I must agree with you that the colorist likely saw the river as a dirt road! Good catch!
The Mutt & Jeff gag makes me think of a scene from "The Sun Comes Up" (Jeanette MacDonald's final film which is also the fifth Lassie film) in which Percy Kilbride in a pre-Pa Kettle appearance as an Appalachian shop owner, gives a jalopy ride to half a dozen mountain boys from the orphanage. One of the boys is named Love, and Percy remarks in his best Pa drawl: "Never thought to find Love at my age."
The Flintstones issue shown at the top is the first Flintstones comic book I ever read or owned. It is remarkable for having an incidental character on a gag cover, in this instance the bird, appear in one of the stories inside the book. Also the brown-covered issue featuring Bamm-Bamm on the cover--another early copy that I owned and relished. Is there any chance that the colorist who made the river brown in Mutt & Jeff also colored the background on that Flintstones comic? Unlikely, but the one definitely puts me in mind of the other!
Scarecrow:
Great gag!
Glad to have prompted some pleasant thoughts on your first Flintstones comic. The other one you mention, with the BROWN COVER (#27), is such a favorite that I’ve used it numerous times at this humble Blog, to illustrate an example of a great Flintstones cover! Frankly, NOBODY did Flintstones comics better than Gold Key (and Dell before them), especially when they were drawn by Harvey Eisenberg, Phil DeLara, or Pete Alvarado. …Those last few 1969-1970 issues, by the once-great Roger Armstrong, excepted of course.
And no, there’s virtually no chance that the same colorist could have done the “muddy river” of the Mutt and Jeff gag and that great cover for Flintstones #27. Though brown was an uncommon cover color for Gold Key Comics, vs. the more frequently used light blue, yellow, light green, and pink. Consider too that the Mutt and Jeff gag was reformatted for the comic book pages from a Mutt and Jeff daily newspaper strip (dating from who-knows-when), and never was seen in any kind of color until this DC printing.
DC Comics were printed at World Color Press in Sparta, IL, until some point in the later 1980s. Western Publishing’s Dell and Gold Key Comics were printed at their own in-house production shop in Poughkeepsie, NY. – until those very, very last few Whitman issues, when the plant shut down just before the comic books did. Colorist credits were “not a thing” until relatively late in the game (…it took long enough just to get writer and artist credits), but it’s doubtful that there was any crossover or mingling of personnel.
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