kvmfaith.blogg.se - All the Funny Folks by Jack Lait

They are enormous, 30" X 40"! And done in pen and ink with breathtaking virtuosity. They were mind blowing! At least, they blew mine, due to, among other things, their size. It was, obviously, created for a King Features Calendar that no one, I know, has ever seen. S everal years ago, auctioneer, Rick Opfer, turned up five panels of badly damaged original Biedermann art. I believe, just these two spectacular Calendars, alone, due to their rarity and visual virtuosity merit a page on this wed site. The art at the top features assorted vignettes of King Features stable of characters, unimaginatively displayed. The first one that remains is for the week of January 6,1924. Like the Biedermann variation of this format that is to come four years later, there is a series of comic strips, below, to be torn off, one a week, to show the dates. So, I am convinced that this is actually the King Features Calendar for 1924, as it looked before Louis Biedermann created All the Funny Folks, and God knows how many Comic Calendars in the years that followed. Simply sell it for use by other business, as well, and imprint their name.

It would appear to be a clever way of paying for the cost of printing an elaborate calendar each year, and giving it away free. But before we look at that, and the Calendar he did in 1926, here is another calendar that is similar, dating from two years earlier, not done by him.Ĭ learly, this is King Features’ annual calendar, imprinted with the name of a hardware store. I have the only known example of the 1928 Calendar. And only two years have been discovered to date. It would appear that when Biedermann drew All the Funny Folks, in 1926, he carved himself a niche, producing annual Calendars for King Features Syndicate.

U.S.A.S o, you might be asking what all this has to do with collecting.

Chicago Confidential (with Mortimer) – Crown 1950.

Washington Confidential (with Mortimer – Crown Publishers 1951.

New York Confidential, The Lowdown on Its Bright Life (with Lee Mortimer) – Chicago: Ziff-Davis, 1948.

Put on the Spot – NY: Grosset & Dunlap (1930) (basis of 1931 film Bad Company).

Beef, Iron, and Wine – Garden City, Doubleday, Page & Co 1916.

Lait died of a circulatory ailment in Beverly Hills, California at the age of 71. Lait and Mortimer's books inspired the films New York Confidential (1955) and Chicago Confidential (1957) and the television series New York Confidential.

With Lee Mortimer, Lait wrote New York Confidential, Chicago Confidential and Washington Confidential, which became a 1951 bestseller. In 1963, nine years after Lait's death, it ceased publication following a strike and was absorbed into the then top-selling paper the New York Daily News. During his tenure as editor, the New York Daily Mirror gained the second highest circulation of any U.S. He was the editor of the New York Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror, and he ended his career working for the Hearst Corporation.