Who's Out There?

« I hear they’ve hired a skeleton crew to take over the night shift. »

Published in 1971 by, of all entities, the Xerox Corporation, under its Xerox Education Publications banner, this oddball little volume is pretty high on charm. Its author, Kansas City cartoonist Marvin Townsend (1915-1999), placed his gags all over the place, high and low, from slicks to religious publications to pulps (including Amazing Stories and Argosy), to girlie digests such as Charlton’s Cartoon Spice, created several running strips, including the Ali feature for the long-running (1946-72) Catholic comic book Treasure Chest (of Fun & Fact). Let’s not forget that Townsend was in fine company there: contributors to TC over the years include Murphy Anderson, Reed Crandall, Graham Ingels, Fran Matera, Jim Mooney, Joe Orlando and Joe Sinnott. In the lean years of the Silver Age, it was ‘any port in a storm’, and any reliable source of income and exposure was the freelancer’s boon. Same as it ever was.

For a further sampling of these Ghostly Ghastly Cartoons, glide on over to this blog entry: http://neatocoolville.blogspot.com/2007/10/ghostly-ghastly-cartoons.html. Fret not, I kept the overlap to a strict minimum.

– RG