up anchor

“Help!”

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Once I started collecting my grandfather’s comics, I came up with two goals: publish a book and collect them all. In 2018, “The Complete Mitzi McCoy” was published, so—halfway there!

Kreighs’ comics appeared in newspapers every Sunday from November 7, 1948 until February 27, 1972, about two and a half decades. Adding it all up—the 23 complete years, the two partial years, and the four times leap years resulted in a year having 53 Sundays (1950, 1956, 1961, 1967)—amounts to 1,217 individual episodes. WIth so many of them, it’s easy to see why I chose to publish a book first.

Admittedly, I had a great head start with so many of the episodes having been given to me by my uncle. But while my grandfather saved a lot of stuff, I do not have examples of all of the individual episodes. With all 99 MITZI McCOY episodes and less than half of the UP ANCHOR! comics, what I had focused on primarily was the missing KEVIN THE BOLD episodes, but I’ve recently been making progress on my collection of UP ANCHOR! episodes too.

At some point, I was clued into the existence of comic sections found online at newspapers.com, so there aren’t any episodes I haven’t seen—but these online versions are of varying quality and are in black and white.

As for the different formats available, my preference for obtaining digital images goes as follows: color half pages, color half tabloids, color tabloids, original artwork, black and white velox proofs, black and white tabloids, color thirds, black and white thirds, etc. Obviously, I prefer to have original hard copies of the episodes, but scans are just as good as far as I’m concerned. Perhaps someone could help me fill some holes in my collection with their scans—I’d be happy to trade.

The first hole in my collection, appears about a decade into KEVIN’s run: April 24, 1960. 

A few months later, the October 2, 1960 episode draws a blank.Through 1958, I have full-sized (half-page or tabloid) versions of just about every comic, but by 1960, many of my comics are one-third page versions (sigh).

A previously published version of this post resulted in a reader sending me a bunch of scans to trade (Thanks, Arnaud!), but I’m still looking for a color version of the September 17, 1961 episode—and the one for June 23, 1963.

Here are the dates of the comics  listed above: 
April 24, 1960
October 2, 1960
September 17, 1961
June 23, 1963

Not bad for the first 18 years of my grandfather’s cartooning career—only 18 missing episodes left!

For the last three years of “Kevin the Bold,” I used to need quite a few, but a connection with a collector in New Jersey (Thank you, Dave!) has helped fill in a lot of the blanks. However, these still elude me:
January 2 , 1966
June 26, 1966
July 17, 1966
July 24, 1966
January 8, 1967
March 5, 1967
March 26, 1967
April 9, 1967
March 10, 1968
March 17, 1968
April 7, 1968
April 21, 1968
May 5, 1968
September 15, 1968

Dave has also helped me complete my collection of UP ANCHOR! strips, but there are quite a few still missing…
January 26, 1969
June 8, 1969
June 15, 1969
June 20, 1969
November 9, 1969
December 7, 1969
December 28, 1969
August 30, 1970
September 27, 1970
October 25, 1970

…especially from 1971 and 1972:
January 3–March 21, 1971 (12 episodes)
April 4–May 30, 1971 (9 episodes)
June 13–September 12, 1971 (14 episodes)
September 26, 1971
October 31–November 7, 1971 (2 episodes)
December 5–December 19, 1971 (3 episodes)
January 2–February 27, 1972 (all 9 episodes)

It looks like I’m missing about 32 episodes of KEVIN THE BOLD and 36 from UP ANCHOR! Do you have any of these in your collection? I’m more than willing to trade scans (or hard copies). If you’re willing to help, please leave a message here on my blog or contact me directly at brianedwardcollins1(at)gmail.com

Thank you! See you in the funny papers!

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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.

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.

Harsh Mistress

With a sudden storm having wrecked their sailboat, Kevin and Bunny desperately cling to its swamped hull.

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With word of her husband’s rescue coming via radio and newspaper, Jane betrays a bit of jealousy toward her husband’s co-star. However, her fears are assauged with the arrival of a telegram, which reveals Bunny’s true colors.

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On reflection, it’s interesting to note the “modern” touches of these late-period comics of Collins (e.g., the pasted up photostat of the Western Union Telegram); I guess everything is relative, even the groovy dialog.

The sequence immediately following this one ran previously, and can be viewed here.

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

Line Squall

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As he’s escorted around Hollywood by his co-star and director, Kevin learns how the movie game is played. As the action in the comic intensifies, the mood of the topper strip “Water Lore” darkens.

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Jane trusts her husband Kevin enough to ignore the rumors propagated by the Hollywood hype machine — or is she just putting on a brave face? Meanwhile, Kevin and Bunny are lost at sea without ship-to-shore communication. Rescue efforts get under way, and Pedro manages to press the spineless movie star Cecil Dunn into service.

Of note: movie director Rex Fox bears a certain resemblance to one of Collins’ old “Mitzi McCoy” characters, publisher Stub Goodman. Stub was based on the character Frank from the 1947 novel by Thomas W. Duncan, “Gus the Great.” Like Stub, Frank was a newspaperman, and a very richly developed character. Midway through the book, he retires to California (and to my disappointment, isn’t heard from again). It’s nice to see one possible outcome was Frank’s reinvention as a Hollywood director.

Stub on the phone

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

A Smooth Sail

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Eager to get his friend involved in the movie business, Pedro’s idea is to have Kevin’s wife Jane talk him into it. Jane is leery of the possibility of losing her man to a famous Hollywood starlet, but seems to go along with the plan —  she and Kevin are eventually persuaded by the easy money.

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As the sequence gets off the ground, the action is very light, but there are some interesting details to be noticed. The WATER LORE topper strips have some nice illustrations of various watercraft to accompany Collins’ observations, technical diagrams, and historical tid-bits. The March 7 topper references the artist’s home port of Holland, Michigan, which was located a short drive from the tiny village of Ada, where Kreigh lived with his family. Another notable from Ada was Amway founder Richard DeVos. DeVos went into business about the same time as Collins started cartooning, and one part of the Amway empire included an air charter service. Collins name-checked his friend in the March 14 comic.

It’s been a smooth sail through the first few episodes, but how long will it last?

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

Balancing Act

Counting the pre-Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA) weekly BIBLE STORIES COMICS, Kreigh Collins’ comics career lasted three decades. UP ANCHOR! was his final comic feature, it ran for about three and a half years, until Collins retired.

As summer ended in 1959, Collins and his family packed up his sailboat and headed south. They ended up spending a year on the boat, traveling down the Mississippi, and wintering in Florida. He continued with his work while aboard Heather, producing artwork for the comic strip as the journey progressed.

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With help from the NEA, Collins was happy to do promotion for his work, and given his unique situation as a sailing snowbird, this was sometimes front-page news. In an interview with the Panama City News-Herald that appeared in the daily’s November 1, 1959 edition, Collins explained how he was able to do it: “Maintaining a comic strip is a high-pressure sort of thing. You’re dealing with it every day, meeting deadlines, writing scripts, doing the artwork, and so on. To stay normal, you just about have to have your mental balance.” The article continued, Collins maintains his balance by writing children’s books, adventure stories, and travel articles. He also considers his 45-foot yacht a mental life saver. 

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A syndicate proof of the comic that appeared in Panama City News-Herald, above

After KEVIN THE BOLD had run its course, Collins launched his next comic strip, UP ANCHOR!, in 1968. Although he used many of his family’s experiences aboard Heather as fodder for his scripts, much of the material came from his imagination. While there was talk in 1966 of spinning off KEVIN into a television show, movies weren’t in the conversation. Nonetheless, Hollywood did come into focus in one of the final sequences of UP ANCHOR!

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The original illustrations for the comics that will follow in the next several weeks are all in the collection of the Grand Rapids Public Library.

(To be continued…)

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

Boom RIde

Due to their short supply of water and food, Kevin Marlin sets off, without even a fully-formed plan.

The pirates trust Kevin—some more than others!

Those filthy hippies probably needed a bath, anyway!

The story arc ends, but unfortunately, Kevin Marlin and his family haven’t seen the last of the pirate trio.

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

Marooned!

While Kreigh Collins never managed to sail Heather to the Bahamas, his Sunday comics counterpart Kevin Marlin did. While heading back to Florida, an unusual boat was spotted.

Many pieces of original artwork for UP ANCHOR! are found in a collection at the Grand Rapids Public Library, including those for two of the episodes in this installment.

In a case of “no good deed goes unpunished,” the Marlin family are ambushed.

The ersatz Manson Family members decide to maroon Heather‘s crew on a desert island, but not before the Marlins lay eyes on the hippies’ prisoner, Pedro.

While the reunion is nice, a plan to save themselves would be nicer!

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

It Was Murder!

Among some recently-acquired UP ANCHOR! half pages were most of the episodes of a story arc with an unusual plot element—murder. The choice of portraying hippies as villains was likely inspired by the tragic and ugly Manson family murders, which had occurred in the summer of 1969. In fact, the Tate-LaBIanca trial was under way when these episodes were published in late 1970.

The Marlin family, whose journey aboard Heather had led to a temporarily relocation in Florida, had just returned from Maine. Kevin Marlin had been hired to sail a cutter from Connecticut Down East. To return “home” and hear such terrible news would be very unsettling.

A couple things from the October 11, 1970 episode that caught me eye were the Manson Family lookalikes in the center panel and the second panel of WATER LORE. Occasionally, Kreigh Collins would directly reference his personal life, but I had never seen him mention his father. He was much closer to his mother.

As Heather is being provisioned, some Easter Eggs are revealed on the labels of the packages being brought aboard. In the first panel, Kevin caries a case of “Jesiek’s Oil.” Back home in Michigan on Lake Macatawa, Heather spent her winters “on the hard” at Jesiek Brothers Shipyard. Based on the box carried by his friend, I’d wager that “Schottenburg’s” was a nearby grocer the Collins family patronized. The second tier’s second panel shows Dave and Erik pestering their mother about dinner—here a box is simply labelled “Boy Food.”

The provisions were needed for an upcoming trip to the Bahamas. While many of the adventured that take place in UP ANCHOR! were based on real events, alas, a trip to the Bahamas was a dream that was never realized for Kreigh’s family. The Marlin family’s adventures in Florida were inspired by the journey the Collinses took in 1959–1960, but the Chicago Tribune’s sudden cancellation of KEVIN THE BOLD in December, 1959 necessitated a reappraisal of the family’s financial situation and resulted in the cancellation of the Bahamas leg of the trip.

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