The Ginger Meggs Blog has Moved to: gingermeggs.tumblr.com
RADIO: ABC Queensland, 3:20pm (qld time) today
February 24, 2010Queensland readers, tune in to ABC Radio Queensland to hear Jason yammering on about comics – 3:20pm today! (He does yammer on though!)
View the entire Ginger Meggs archive for 14 days
February 17, 2010
Universal are opening up their entire archives for 14 days only! If you’ve always wanted to see the full record of a comic but couldn’t go more than a month back because you’re not a paid subscriber, you can do it for free for the next two weeks. (Ahem – gocomics.com/gingermeggs )
Universal Press Syndicate celebrates 40 Years in the business!
February 16, 2010(From the Daily Cartoonist)
Universal Uclick editor John Glynn reports that Universal Press Syndicate is celebrating 40 years in business.
Money was tight in the beginning, and Andrews and McMeel didn’t have the funds to compete with the fancy New York and Chicago offices of the big syndicates. They initially worked in a makeshift office over O’Briens bar near Grand Central Station … however, they were smart enough to get a mail drop box service that had a 5th Avenue address in a posh office building.
That allowed them to put that 5th Avenue address on their stationary to give them an air of respectability. And if someone insisted on visiting them at their “5th Avenue offices,” they’d arrive at the drop box building 10 minutes prior to the meeting and then come down the elevator to the lobby, the doors would open and they’d meet their guests.
The rest of the story is found on John’s blog and he promises to share other stories of UPS’s 40 year run to date.
Here’s a (no audio) slideshow of the people and places of the last 40 years.
Ginger Meggs has been syndicated around the world with Universal Press Syndicate for over 10 Years, after James Kemsley OAM had him signed in 1999.
Ginger Meggs Daily Strip hits #5000!
February 9, 2010
It was 17 years ago that Australia’s oldest comic strip went from running as a Sunday strip for 72 years, and finally took the leap into the daily format, but it wasn’t easy…
In the early 1930′s Arthur J Lafave offered Ginger Meggs creator, James C Bancks a very substantial offer to move to America to syndicate Ginger Meggs to the world, but he believed it would be easier to market if it was also available as a daily strip (and if Bancks was living in America.)
Eric Baume, then editor of the Sunday Sun offered him a bigger sum to stay in Australia, so he did!
“This”, said Baume, made Bancks, “the highest-paid artist or journalist in the southern hemisphere, and other countries, especially the United States of America, will be the poorer.”
At the time, about three million Australians a week – almost half the population were reading Meggs.
In 1935, Bancks looked into turning Ginger Meggs into a daily strip but was worried about the volume of work involved. He asked several cartoonists if they would do the drawing while he wrote the scripts, but none were up to scratch. Some artists turned Bancks down in fear that they’d lose their own identity by becoming synonymous with such an iconic strip.
In 1946, Bancks made a trip to the US visiting Lafave in Cleveland. At that time Dan Russell was in America along with his brother Jim. Jim had taken over drawing The Potts at the end of 1939 from Stan Cross and was keen to find out if there was a chance of Lafave syndicating the strip. Bancks introduced them to Lafave and The Potts was soon running in about 40 papers across the United States. But what Lafave really wanted was to syndicate a daily Ginger Meggs. Bancks was still not interested in doing the work.
Lafave pushed for Dan to take on the drawing of the daily strip with Bancks writing the scripts. From time to time Dan did draw Ginger – for books and some advertising projects. He even says “on one occasion I drew the comic for two weeks when Bancks was unable to do it”. But realising what a taskmaster Bancks was, and the demands of the Americans, he turned the job down. He thought he “could satisfy Bancks with the drawings and I thought he could satisfy the Americans with their needs. But I didn’t think I could satisfy both at once and keep up with the daily deadlines”.
The daily strip didn’t happen, but the weekly strips were syndicated and Ginge was being read in newspapers in London, Boston, Dallas, New York and St. Louis. It was also being translated into French and Spanish, and read in South America.
37 years later, the late James Kemsley OAM, became the fifth cartoonist to take on writing and drawing Ginger Meggs.
Kemsley pushed Meggs back to a level of popularity it hadn’t enjoyed for years. 1990 saw Kemsley and Ginger Meggs win the Australian Black & White Artists’ Club “Stanley” award for Best Comic Strip.
In 1993, seventy-two years after its debut as a Sunday strip, Kemsley finally took the leap and began a daily version of the strip for the Illawarra Mercury.
It was soon picked up by the Sydney Morning Herald, Brisbane’s Courier Mail, Perth’s West Australian, then in October 1997 by the London Express, and in the USA by the American Publishing Corporation. Its appearance in the Express made it the first Australian daily strip to appear in a British national daily paper. Five annuals of strips have been published.
In 1999, Kemsley and Meggs signed with the US-based Atlantic Syndication for worldwide distribution. Ginger Meggs now appears in over 127 newspapers around Australia and the world. Apart from Australia, you can now read Meggs in the USA, Antigua, Barbados, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Fiji, Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, India, Venezuela, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Canada, Brunei, Sweden, the Netherlands, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Trinidad & Tobago, Jamaica and Thailand.
In 2011, Ginger Meggs will celebrate his 90th Birthday, making Meggs one of the longest running comic strips in history. You wouldn’t know it looking at him!
Visit Ginger Meggs online at www.gingermeggs.com and while you’re there, be sure to sign up to the mailing list, subscribe to the Blog, Twitter Feed, or Facebook fan page!
(Daily strip #0000, published in 1993)
(Daily strip #5000, published in 2010)
Exclusive sneak peek at one of next month’s upcoming Sunday strips…
January 20, 2010
Ginger Meggs to feature in John Read’s Traveling Comic Exhibition in the U.S.
January 5, 2010
This post from The Daily Cartoonist, with thanks to Alan Gardner
January 4, 2010
John Read, the publisher of “Stay Tooned!” is curating a comic strip exhibit to travel through five major southern cities in the coming two years. He tells me in an email that after publishing “Stay Tooned!,” his next ambition is to create an art museum in the South. To get things started, he has 73 comic strip cartoonist thus far to contribute Sunday original art for a “One Fine Sunday in the Funny Pages.”
I’m beginning with an exhibit featuring currently-syndicated comic strips. This show will be a unique, one-of-a-kind collection of today’s comics, from the oldest, The Katzenjammer Kids and Gasoline Alley, to the newest, Dustin (which launches next week), and will be billed as “a celebration of a quintessentially American Sunday pleasure.” One Fine Sunday in the Funny Pages will feature the original art of 85 to 100 different comic strips and panels (that will have been) published in newspapers on the same Sunday (April 11, 2010). Alongside the framed “raw” art of the strips will be displayed the actual comics sections from newspapers across the country, giving people a behind-the-scenes, before-and-after experience. The first showing of One Fine Sunday will begin in late May/early June of 2010.
Here’s the list of who’s contributing so far:
* Aaron Johnson – W.T. Duck
* Alex Hallatt – Arctic Circle
* Bill Amend – FoxTrot
* Bill Hinds – Tank McNamara
* Bill Holbrook – On the Fastrack
* Brian Anderson – Dog eat Doug
* Brian Crane – Pickles
* Carla Ventresca – On a Claire Day
* Carole & Jack Bender – Alley Oop
* Chad Carpenter – Tundra
* Chip Sansom – The Born Loser
* Chris Cassatt – Shoe
* Corey Pandolph – The Elderberries
* Cory Thomas – Watch Your Head
* Dana Summers – Bound & Gagged
* Darrin Bell – Candorville
* Dave Coverly – Speed Bump
* Don Wimmer – Rose is Rose
* Fernando Ruiz – Archie
* Gary Brookins – Pluggers
* Greg Cravens – The Buckets
* Greg Evans – Luann
* Guy Gilchrist – Nancy
* Hy Eisman – Popeye, Katzenjammer Kids
* Jan Eliot – Stone Soup
* Jason Chatfield – Ginger Meggs
* Jef Mallett- Frazz
* Jeff Parker – The Wizard of Id
* Jerry Van Amerongen – Ballard Street
* Jim Borgamn – Zits
* Jim Davis – Garfield
* Jim Scancarelli – Gasoline Alley
* Jimmy Johnson – Arlo & Janis
* John Hambrock – Edison Lee
* John Hart Studios – B.C.
* John Marshall – Blondie
* John Newcombe – Zack Hill
* John Rose – Snuffy Smith
* June Brigman – Brenda Starr
* Keith Knight – The Knight Life
* Kieran Meehan – Pros & Cons
* Leigh Ruben – Rubes
* Lincoln Peirce – Big Nate
* Mark Buford – Scary Gary
* Mark Parisi – Off the Mark
* Mark Tatulli – Lio, Heart of the City
* Mell Lazarus – Momma
* Michael Fry – Over the Hedge
* Mort Walker – Beetle Bailey
* Norm Feuti – Retail
* Patrick McDonnell – Mutts
* Paul Gilligan – Pooch Cafe
* Ralph Hagen – The Barn
* Randy Glasbergen – The Better Half
* Ray Billingsley – Curtis
* Richard Kirkman – Baby Blues
* Richard Thompson – Cul de Sac
* Rick Stromoski – Soup to Nutz
* Rina Piccolo – Tina’s Groove
* Rob Harrell – Adam at Home
* Ron Ferdinand – Dennis the Menace
* Russell Myers – Broom-Hilda
* Sandra Bell-Lundy – Between Friends
* Scott Stantis – Prickly City
* Stephan Pastis – Pearls Before Swine
* Stephen Bentley – Herb and Jamaal
* Steve Kelley & Jeffry Parker – Dustin
* Ted Slampyak – Annie
* Terri Libenson – Pajama Diaries
* Terry LaBan – Edge City
* Tom Batiuk – Funky Winkerbean, Crankshaft
* Tony Cochran – Agnes
* Wiley Miller – Non Sequitur
Ginger Meggs Ice Cream!
January 1, 2010Southern Hemispherians! Beat the heat this summer with some delicious Ginger Meg(g)s Ice Cream!
(Way to beat a a trademark infringement by misspelling the name, guys!)
Ginger Meggs jewellery
December 18, 2009
Want to get something special for your partner this Christmas? How about a nice peice of hand-made Ginger Meggs jewellery?
