▶︎ Presto = Alfredo = Moco

Posting about Boofhead reminded me of Presto, a daily comic that ran on the back page of the Melbourne Herald in the 50s and 60s.

Presto was a round-headed little man with a moustache who turned up from day to day in various roles: one day he could be a policeman, the next day a burglar or a ship-wrecked sailor. He often had his eye on a good-looking girl, but he had a formidable wife who was usually onto his case. The strip was all in pantomime, no dialogue.

I suspected it wasn't Australian, but it turns out to be from Denmark, where its title was Alfredo. WeirdSpace tells us, though, that it had appeared initially in the French newspaper Le Figaro in the late 40s, where it was entitled Presto, just as it was here. In the USA it was called Moco, derived from the names of Alfredo's creators, Jørgen Mogensen (1922-2004) and Cosper Cornelius (1911-2003).

Mogensen was a distinguished Danish cartoonist who created a number of comics. Defunct Danish site Rackham.dk had a cartoon at its Mogensen page that shows his characters meeting up with each other [archived version]. Alfredo/Presto/Moco is at the lower left, shaking hands with a later creation, Violin Virtuoso Alfredo.
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Image from Maurice Horn (ed.), The World Encyclopedia of Comics (1976)

▶︎ Boofhead

You don't have to look far to find examples of boofhead in Australian English. It's time for Bozo and Boofhead to go, says a Melbourne Age headline about obnoxious footballers; an ABC radio site had Boofhead of the week, an inept home handyman. It appears in plenty of blogs, which may give you a flavour of its usage, and Google Image results for boofhead are also instructive.

I guess a boofhead is what Mark Twain would've called a puddenhead, maybe with some sense of what the Brits call a likely lad. A boofhead is a bit slow, maybe clumsy and unthinking, a likeable clot. It can be a friendly term (the inept handyman), but a boofhead can also be uncouth and boorish (the obnoxious footballers). You could say the behaviour of yer soccer hooligans is a bit boofy.

The image of Boofhead the character (above) is from R.B. Clark's daily comic strip. Boofhead ran in Sydney's Daily Mirror and in comic book reprints from 1941 until its creator's death in 1970.

It's one of those instantly recognisable Australian images, adopted by Mambo design and by the artist Martin Sharp for Regular Records. The Powerhouse Museum's website shows Boofhead on a 1966 Oz Magazine cover by Martin Sharp. There's even a statue of Boofhead in a park at Leura in the Blue Mountains.

You could say the strip itself has an endearing boofheadedness about it, with its daft situations and its two-dimensional artwork (as far as I know, Boofhead himself is always seen in profile, Egyptian-style).

John Ryan, the Australian comic strip historian, puts it this way:

Boofhead - drawn by Bob Clark and featuring a simplistically drawn, waistcoated young man with an elongated nose sheltered by a cantilever hairstyle - was amateurish and the humour mundane. It is difficult to fathom the reasons that this strip attracted readers but there can be no disputing its popularity. (In Panel by Panel: An illustrated history of Australian comics, 1979.)

The Australian Oxford and the Macquarie dictionary both say a boofhead is a fool, or - picturesquely - a person with a large head. They both suggest its source is the British word bufflehead, defined by the Oxford Second Edition as fool, blockhead, stupid fellow, which is certainly in boofhead territory, and its earliest citation is from 1659.

An Australian National Dictionary updates page has citations for boofhead from 1941 and 1942, but doesn't mention the comic strip. I'm assuming the word predates the comic, and the comic helped popularise it, as John Ryan suggests: Boofhead brought back into common usage the term 'boofhead' in describing a simpleton or fool.

▶︎ Comics from The Argus

Another comics page: this is from the Melbourne daily The Argus, 7 February 1952, the edition that announced the death of King George VI.

The Argus was a well-established morning paper that was closed in 1957 after it had been bought out by The Herald and Weekly Times, publishers of the rival Sun.

Our family took The Argus, and when it folded my main concern as a 6- or 7-year-old was the comics page. I remember being pleased to see that some of the Argus strips had migrated to our new paper, The Sun.

One of those was Carl Grubert's family sitcom strip The Berrys, which ended up running for years in The Sun. (At ComicStripFan.com there is a large page of Grubert's original artwork.)

Apart from the animated cartoon spin-off Tom and Jerry, some of the others on the Argus page are lesser known, at least to me:

Jimpy was a short-lived British fantasy strip for children that ran in the Daily Mirror from 1946 and folded in 1952. Maurice Horn (World Encyclopedia of Comics) believes it may have been a victim of opinion polls which consistently gave Jimpy a low rating but failed to ask children, its target audience. Jimpy's creator was Hugh McClelland.

King is King of the Royal Mounted, a US adventure strip created in the 30s by Western writer Zane Grey. At this time it was being drawn by Jim Gary. Bill Hillman has a fabulous page of King of the Royal Mounted covers from the 30s to the 50s at his Zane Grey Tribute Site.

Wizzer was an Australian comic strip about a public schoolboy inventor, Hermon Wizzer of Merryville College, surely one of the most obscure comic strips in the universe.

As far as I can see, Hermon Wizzer of Merryville College is mentioned only once on the searchable Internet (apart from some eBay listings which misspell it as Herman Wizzer), in spite of the numerous comprehensive comic strip sites to be found. It is only a mention, too, in a Michigan State University library catalogue, but it usefully points to John Ryan's Panel By Panel, which has a paragraph about it and reprints a daily strip from 1950.

Hermon Wizzer's home was The Argus, and it ran from 1949 till 1957, created by A. D. Renton and W. J. Evans, about whom, John Ryan says, little is known.

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Little Sport and Pop plus The Potts at the Coronation

Here's a comics section I scanned from the Melbourne (Australia) morning daily The Sun, June 3, 1953.

I believe Little Sport was usually a back sports page strip, but this was a special edition for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, so Little Sport was bumped to the main comics section. There's a note on the back page directing readers to Little Sport inside the paper.

Allan Hogg, over at his excellent comic strips blog Stripper's Guide has a Sunday Little Sport in colour. It was an American strip, drawn by John Henry Rouson from 1948 till 1976. Rouson died in 2000 , aged 91. Like Presto, over at the evening Herald, it was an institution in the comics pages when I was a kid.

The other strips include Pop, a British strip, 1921-1960, created by John Millar Watt (J.M.) and taken over later by Gordon Hogg (Gog).

Jim Russell's The Potts, who on this day are in London for the Coronation, was a mainstay of the Australian comics pages for decades. It was created by Stan Cross, and first appeared in Smith's Weekly in 1919 as You and Me, later Mr & Mrs Potts. Jim Russell took it over in 1939 and it became a syndicated daily newspaper strip in 1950 as The Potts.

Suzy was another Australian strip, by Ian Clark. It ran in Murdoch newspapers from the late 40s until 1966.

Hopalong Cassidy was by Dan Spiegle, hired by Hopalong Cassidy actor William Boyd to create the strip in 1949. The strip ran until 1955.

One quaint feature of the comic strip in those days, along the top, was the little chapter heading, or teaser or... what was it called?

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References:
Maurice Horn (ed.), World Encyclopedia of Comics (1976)
John Ryan, Panel by Panel (1979)