sunday comics

Historical Fiction

Generally set in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Kevin the Bold can be labelled as historical fiction, with its early story arcs and characters being Kreigh Collins’ brainchildren.

After a couple of years, famous historical figures started appearing—sometimes as ancillary characters, and at other times being more integral to the action. The first of these was Leonardo da Vinci, who made a couple of brief appearances in 1952. (Da Vinci would make another memorable cameo in 1967, in one of Kevin’s final adventures).

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The historical figure appearing most frequently was King Henry VIII; in the September 24, 1961 episode he appears along with a mention of a noted portraitist of the era, (Hans) Holbein the Elder .

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In 1964, a young William Shakespeare was a central character, and a few years later Captain John Smith figured prominently.

King Henry first appeared in 1956, and that entire sequence will run over the next few Sundays. The tone of this story arc is different than most of what had preceded it, and it is likely that Kreigh Collins was extensively using other’s scripts for the first time. In between the more historical storylines (with King Henry, Shakespeare, etc.), Collins’ own chapters become easier to spot. This change in direction was caused in part by burn out. According to an oral history done by Kreigh’s wife Theresa , “Kreigh was always trying to think up the next story. It was the equivalent of writing a full novel every ten weeks.” Giving up the writing likely meant a cut in pay but with the overall ascendance of “Kevin the Bold” and the income it generated, it was a good tradeoff for Collins.

As Henry’s first chapter got off the ground, any time Collins saved by not writing looks like it may have been spent on the illustration. The Florida Times-Union‘s reproduction is mediocre, but the artwork is quite nice, with many compelling scenes and characters.

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To be continued…

For more information on the career of Kreigh Collins, visit his page on Facebook.

Baghdad on the Subway

The tale continues…

The action is very reminiscent of mid-period KEVIN THE BOLD, and is a welcome sight among comparatively more tepid UP ANCHOR! episodes.

The tale ends abruptly and the focus shifts back to “present-day” family life aboard a schooner.

The episode ends and would be a fitting finale for UP ANCHOR! But there were two more chapters to follow, told over the course of 22 weeks, before the strip ended, and Collins retired.

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For more information on the career of Kreigh Collins, visit his page on Facebook.

Flashing Back Further

In this 1971 episode, part of an UP ANCHOR! flashback to KEVIN THE BOLD, Kevin, Pedro, and Carmelita become trapped in a cave. To remedy the situation, Kreigh Collins flashes back even further, to the August 7, 1949 episode of MITZI McCOY.

It features an underwater cave in a very similar scene. The original took place in Lake Michigan, where sharks and barracuda weren’t a concern.

What results is a case of out of the frying pan and into the (line of) fire!

Kevin’s solution, muffling the oars, sounds fanciful but is a real thing. But will it be effective?

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For more information on the career of Kreigh Collins, visit his page on Facebook.

Some Days You Just Can’t Get Rid of a Bomb

The pirates’ mortar ball hits its target… but its fuse hasn’t yet detonated the bomb.

This episode has always reminded me of the Batman meme.

(Not the first time Collins’ artwork has reminded me of Batman).

Quick thinking by Balador, and the fortuitous location of a low stone wall, allow him to survive the explosion—and he takes several prisoners.

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For more information on the career of Kreigh Collins, visit his page on Facebook.

Carmelita

A tense moment is quickly diffused, and pretty Carmelita introduces herself. Her appearance is familiar, which seems appropriate for a story arc so close to UP ANCHOR!’s swan song. Carmelita has the svelte build of many of Collins’ female characters—characters whose poses were originally modeled by Kreigh’s wife, Theresa. At this point in his career, however, it’s doubtful the artist employed his 65-year-old wife as a model.

As this chapter set sail, there might have been some confusion as to what the sequence was called. The first two episodes carried the line “The Adventures of Pedro and Kevin” but the third one, from August 15, 1971, reversed the characters’ order—”The Adventures of Kevin and Pedro”. Most likely it was a mistake made by the NEA artist that handled the lettering.

Kevin’s resourcefulness with the old culverin goes to no avail, and the pirates return fire.

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For more information on the career of Kreigh Collins, visit his page on Facebook.

The Adventures of Pedro and Kevin

During his 25-year career as a cartoonist for NEA, Kreigh Collins was known to recycle certain ideas and elements of his work. As his early-1972 retirement approached, Collins went back to his most successful device, the flashback. 

Most notably, a 1949 flashback in a MITZI McCOY episode led to the creation of KEVIN THE BOLD. Here, a 1971 UP ANCHOR! episode flashes back to KEVIN THE BOLD. It seems Collins wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye to his most famous character.

For this, Collins’ 103th story arc (of 105 total), I only have one color original of its ten episodes. Eight others are represented by photographs of the original artwork, which is held in one of the Grand Rapids Public Library’s Special Collections. The sequence’s first episode comes is a BW image from Newspspers.com, and unfortunately, it is not accompanied by UP ANCHOR!’s topper strip, WATER LORE.

In UP ANCHOR, the protagonist is Kevin Marlin, and Marlin’s buddy is named Pedro. The action flashes back via a book compiled by Pedro’s ancestor (also named Pedro). OG Pedro was best friends with another (bolder) Kevin. (That’s the conceit of the flashback, anyway).

The second panel of the opening episode shows Pedro at a Parisian book stall, with the Cathedral of Notre Dame looming in the background. As a 21-year-old, Kreigh Collins first visited Paris, and among other subjects, he sketched book stalls, and has used these elements in other instances of his career.

To be continued…

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For more information on the career of Kreigh Collins, visit his page on Facebook.

The Mountebank’s Lions (continued)

At each others’ throats just moments before, Kevin and Karl are now completely aligned.

The short chapter’s quick pace continues, and with Brett’s lion cub/baby switcheroo, the story begins to transition to Kevin’s next adventure.

Before Kevin’s lady friend gets a chance to share it, her story comes alive!

This story line would continue in the pages of the Monomonee Falls Gazette. KEVIN THE BOLD debuted in issue No. 109 (January 14, 1974), which featured Kreigh Collins’ artwork on the cover. For the next six months, KEVIN ran on the gazette’s back cover, and continued inside until the demise of the publication four years later.

In case you can’t get your hands on MFG issues 109–232, the next dozen or so KEVIN THE BOLD chapters are collected in the book Kevin the Bold: Sunday Adventures. The 154-page collection, about 97% of which was compiled from BW syndicate proofs, is available on Amazon.com.

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For more information on the career of Kreigh Collins, visit his page on Facebook.

Brett and the Lions

This past week, Thanksgiving was celebrated here in the USA. It is traditional for the professional football team I grew up rooting for, the Detroit Lions, to play on Thanksgiving Day. One thing I am especially thankful for is my close relationship with my brother Brett, Kreigh Collins’ eldest grandchild. Growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Brett was originally a Lions fan, too. Here, Kevin the Bold’s ward, Brett, stars in the short story arc that follows.

I originally posted this sequence a few years back. This “encore presentation” is due to the unfortunate circumstances my brother finds himself, battling a very nasty form of cancer—I’m currently helping his wife while he is hospitalized.

The five episodes that will appear were all taken from the Chicago Sunday Tribune, and although they are a bit past that newspaper’s prime years (as far as reproduction and printing of Sunday comics is concerned), they are beautiful examples nonetheless. This early chapter—KEVIN THE BOLD’s 17th—immediately precedes the episodes that ran in the Menomonee Falls Gazette.

As noted in the opening caption, the action is set in 1491. The year is somewhat arbitrary—my feeling is that it just serves to peg the action as occurring just before Christopher Columbus’ first voyage to the New World. It was a busy year for Kevin—the strip’s three previous chapters also took place in 1491. These were the first times a specific date was referenced for KEVIN THE BOLD’s action.

This sequence also kept Kevin busy—quite a bit of action was packed into its five episodes, which lacked the longer exposition normally found at the beginning of a chapter.

Having just arrived, Kevin makes immediate impressions on both the town’s law and order man and his pretty female friend. The jealous Swiss guardsman insults Kevin and moments later they square off to fight. Oh, and there are lions!

As quickly as it started, the fight ends, and the two combatants join forces in a common goal, finding the lioness’s cub. It’s all happened so quickly that I barely had time to look up the definition of mountebank—if he’s a charlatan, the townsfolk don’t seem to mind. Now back to the action!

In an odd form of payback, the lioness kidnaps a baby. Brett emerges as the voice of reason, the lion cub returns and… has Brett lost his mind?

To be continued…

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For more information on the career of Kreigh Collins, visit his page on Facebook.

Recyclable Material

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 to 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 feature, 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 [1955]. This is our Heather, little sister of the Bowdoin.

Kreigh and Teddy met MacMillan after they sailed into 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 most of the Great Lakes (Heather never plied the waters of Gitche Gumee, aka Lake Superior); the Erie Canal, the Hudson River, New York harbor, Long Island Sound, the Cape Cod Canal, Maine, the Bay of Fundy; and the Intracoastal Waterway, Florida, the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River. Although they never made it to the Bahamas, as a late-1950s newspaper article mentioned, they certainly covered a lot of water.

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For more information on the career of Kreigh Collins, visit his page on Facebook.

A 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.”

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For more information on the career of Kreigh Collins, visit his page on Facebook.