silver age comics

Family Characters

Like most artists, Kreigh Collins looked to his family and surroundings for inspiration. Kreigh’s young twins were named Kevin and Glen. Kevin obviously had a major part in his eponymous cartoon strip, whereas Glen didn’t show up until eight years later.

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If you knew my Uncle Glen, you’d appreciate the irony of Pedro’s comment.

The sequence with “little Glenn” lasted nine weeks. Perhaps seeing the inequality of his twins’ like-named characters, Kreigh introduced another Glen six years later. This time, he was an orphan, stranded in the West Indies.

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Even Inky appeared. He was the neighbors’ dog.

Kreigh’s oldest sons, Erik and David, had namesake characters in Collins’ final comic strip, “Up Anchor!” Like Kreigh’s, the Marlin family sailed aboard a schooner named Heather. (In reality, Erik and David were no longer living at home, and neither were redheads).

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Fifteen months into its nearly two-decade run, “Kevin the Bold” introduced a new character, Brett. My brother Brett was Kreigh’s first grandchild, and as with Kevin, the character appeared in the funnies before the actual person was born (in Brett’s case, nearly ten years earlier).

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In “Mitzi McCoy” Stub Goodman drove a loaner car that looked a lot like Kreigh’s.

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Another character with a name from the artist’s real-life experiences appeared in a mid-1955 sequence, “The Castle of the Sleeping Beauty.” A little girl had gotten lost in the woods, and her father, the “great steel maker Temple Roemer” was distraught. Tempel Smith, Kreigh’s brother-in-law, had started a steel-stamping business ten years earlier, and by this time it had grown into a massive steel company.

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The Conflagration

It starts innocently enough as Brett and Lora spend some time together in a pleasant, bucolic setting… not realizing Kevin’s peril as the kite was readied for flight. The comics are excellent examples of Collins’ skill as an illustrator, and contain beautiful costumes, settings and perspectives.

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After having been manipulated by an evil man, the superstitious townsfolk desperately set Kevin free.

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The sequence ends with some very heavy karmic payback for Calib. The announcement that Leonardo Da Vinci has returned heralds the next chapter of “Kevin the Bold.”

The Alchemist

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In the ninth sequence of “Kevin the Bold,” some new characters are introduced. Kevin and Brett meet Dr. Claustus, an alchemist, and Lora, his granddaughter. Calib (a thug from the nearby Castle) is the villain, and Leonardo da Vinci has a cameo appearance. Da Vinci will reappear in the following sequence (and again in 1967, near the end of the comic strip’s long run).

When in need, Dr. Claustus is the type of brilliant man people seek out to solve problems. However, he is mistrusted by others. After a couple of scene-setting comics, the characters become entwined, and the drama starts.

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Twice, Kevin makes a fool of Calib and soon enough his new adversary seeks revenge.

Paper Anniversary

In recognition of one year of posting the comics of Kreigh Collins, we will celebrate traditionally. 

Among other papers, “Mitzi McCoy” initially appeared in its beautiful half-page format in the Pittsburgh Press and the Indianapolis Times. Tabloid newspapers, such as the New York Mirror, ran the comic as tabs or half-tabs. In some dailies, such as the Grand Rapids Press, it appeared in black and white.

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Famously appearing from its onset in the prestigious Chicago Sunday Tribune,  “Kevin the Bold” also ran in the Detroit News and other papers. As the Pittsburgh Press had done with “Mitzi,” the Florida Times-Union used “Kevin” to lead off its comic section.

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My collection of comics largely consists of my grandfather’s original samples. They are mostly from the Chicago Tribune and the Detroit News. There are sometimes multiple versions of a particular Sunday, from different papers, in different formats. Entire comic sections are occasionally found, often from newspapers of places Kreigh visited during journeys aboard his schooner Heather.

The inclusion of one of these comic sections always piqued my curiosity. It’s a Tribune section dated December 27, 1959. “Kevin the Bold” is nowhere to be found.  Only recently did I realize the significance — in what must have been a devastating blow to the artist, it marked the point when the Tribune dropped the strip after carrying it for a decade. Notably, “Kevin” does appear in another intact section from the same day’s Detroit News. 

Desert Alliance

Their sea journey over, the group now travels across the desert with Stormza continuing to cause trouble due to her rebellious nature. In search of lost treasure, Kevin and Selim discover that they aren’t the only ones trying to recover it, and a new villain is introduced.

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Before facing the Rog, Kevin has a close call with some locals and is saved by a wise and kindly old Arab sheik. It is an interesting to see how Arabs are portrayed in this 60-year-old comic. The sheik and his men become Kevin’s allies as they prepare to face Rog, the villainous European.

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Stormza

In 2004, I acquired my first “Kevin the Bold” comics. I purchased two years of Florida Times-Union half-pages from a woman whose husband had died. The comics were inexpensive, and I later realized that they were rather poor-quality examples. The colors printed rather garishly, there was a lot of show-through and other problems — but it was great having a two-year run of half-page comics.

The action was exciting and featured exotic, nicely-rendered  locales. In the following sequence, rooted in the history of the Hanseatic League, Kevin’s patron wants to find a trade route through the Suez. In order to gain the trust of the powers that be, he has enlisted Kevin to deliver a “priceless jewel” — the Pasha’s daughter has to get home after spending time in Europe. Kevin soon realizes how difficult his assignment will be.

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Stormza is perhaps Collins’s most headstrong female character since Mitzi McCoy, and like Mitzi, she has a knack for getting into — and out of — trouble.

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As usual, the transitional comics in the sequence feature light-hearted, humorous situations.

Recycling

I started my professional career as a graphic designer in 1987. Like a lot of young people in the publishing industry, I was a big fan of Spy magazine. Spy was a satirical monthly that ran from 1986 to the mid-90s and was based in New York City, like me. There were plenty of interesting components of the magazine, among them “Separated at Birth.” It wasn’t a high-brow feature, and no doubt it’s been parodied to death.

Kreigh Collins often had characters that were inspired by ones from his previous comics. Occasionally ideas were recycled too, but these are examples of the former.

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These examples might not be as elegant as those found in Spy, but they are still pretty interesting. Sometimes it wasn’t so much a recurring character as it was an object.

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“Up Anchor!,” Kreigh’s final comic, was set aboard a representation of his own boat, the 45-foot long Heather. The Bowdoin didn’t feature in any of Kreigh’s comics, but the historic 88-foot long schooner was the design upon which the half-size Heather was based.

Uniquely designed for Arctic exploration, the Bowdoin was launched in 1921.Under the direction of skipper Donald B. MacMillan, it made dozens of trips above the Arctic Circle. Earlier, MacMillan had accompanied Robert Peary on his historic expedition to the North Pole in 1909.

Kreigh’s wife Theresa described how Heather came to be in the article she wrote, and which Kreigh illustrated, “The Wake of the Heather.”

When [Arctic] explorations were in the forefront of the news, a Chicago doctor wrote to the ship’s designer and asked him to design a half-sized schooner, built as she was and able to go anywhere and do anything. The doctor died two years after his boat was launched in 1927, and the superbly built schooner passed on to a succession of owners until we bought her twelve years ago. This is our Heather, little sister of the Bowdoin.

Kreigh and Teddy met MacMillan at Mystic Seaport in the summer of 1966. They had known of Heather’s parentage, and had sought out the Bowdoin. The 92-year-old MacMillan, a rear admiral in the Naval Reserve, invited the couple to dine with him and his wife aboard their boat.

Kreigh and his family sailed Heather for nearly 15 years, and she lived up to her go-anywhere, do-anything billing. Among the places they took her were all of the Great Lakes, the Erie Canal, the Hudson River, New York harbor, Long Island Sound, the Cape Cod Canal, Maine, the Bay of Fundy; and the Inter-coastal Waterway, Florida, the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River. I’m not sure if they ever made it to the Bahamas, as a late-1950s newspaper article mentioned, but they certainly covered a lot of water.