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 Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Percy Crosby's Skippy
Posted by maggie

Joan Crosby Tibbetts has been waging a campaign for years now to defend rights to her dad's "Skippy" character. Percy Crosby (1891-1964) created an incredibly popular feature starring a little boy playing with his buddies and making observations about life -- at first in the pages of the 1923 pre-photo-magazine version of Life and then (1925-1945) via a syndicated newspaper feature. There were books, toys, and a movie that starred Jackie Cooper and brought Norman Taurog the Best Director Oscar, and the strip can't be properly conveyed with only a few samples. Nonetheless, here are three from 1939. (Owing to the size of the printed strips, I can't get more than three at a time on the scanner.) The top two of these feature the fence that lingered on jars of Skippy peanut butter long after the connection to the strip's character had been forgotten by most.



9/17/2008 9:58:15 AM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #  Comments [2]
9/19/2008 4:45:29 PM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)
I own about 6 years of the daily strip and a lot of the sundays - Crosby was especially now for the fluidity of his line as he drew kids in motion- would love a soapbox racer daily original.
The sad thing was as his mental state deteriorated so did the strip - the last few yearsfeature a lot of reruns-daileis with different captions attached and in some cases Skippy would jsut sit on the porch for week depressed- a sad end for a brillaint series- but he was losing his battle over the peanut butter and was increasing being driven to depression and paranoia. Jerry Robinson's (yes the batman artist) book on Crosby and the strip is among one of the best comic art bios written
9/21/2008 12:44:24 PM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)
Dittos on the Jerry Robinson book on Percy Crosby; it was an
amazing and emotional read...and I was lucky enough to meet
Robinson years ago and tell him so!
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