INTRODUCTIONby R.C. Harvey

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PREFACEby Allison Currie

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AT LONG LAST,The Carnival’s Come Back!

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EARLY WORKSand Illustrations

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PULPS, POEMS, and PIXIESJohn Martin’s Books

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CARLSON’S SCHOOLof Nonsense

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JOLLY BOOKS129

TUTORIAL CARTOONINGand Art Instruction

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SONGS, GAMES,and Other Pastimes

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TRAINSand Transportation

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PORTRAITS,Presidents, and Personalities

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ADVENTURESin Advertising

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ORIGINAL ART,Lost Works, and Forgotten Frolics

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THE PIE-FACE PRINCEof Old Pretzleburg

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JINGLE JANGLETales274

LAUGHTER, PUNS, and SPEED

Mr. Carlson compares his studio to a laboratory where he is always concocting some idea or feature to interest the young readers. As a chemist who will experiment with several chemicals to get the right element, the artist takes an idea here, a thought there, a method here, and combines them all to get across what he has in mind.

— The Fairfield News,12 February 1937

By 1923, George and Gertrude had married and settled into a “mod-est little home” he commissioned at 80 Redfield Road in Fairfield, Connecticut. It would be the first of three Carlson family households in and around Fairfield. With John Martin’s Book, The American Girl, and Reg’lar Fellers providing steady work, he enjoyed the consistency and stability of the reliable (but largely unrecognized) commercial artist. The heady soldiering days of Hooverized Pilsner and “Haigh and Haigh” behind him, Carlson commuted daily to an office he kept in Manhattan, the better to be close to his clients.

As one 1940 newspaper biography confirms, “Four days a week he is in New York, almost tied to the drawing board trying to satisfy the demand of book publishers who want illustrations and want them quickly. The three other days he is at home, with his wife and two chil-dren — from the later two of whom he admits he gets an occasional idea for a corker of caricature.” Carlson’s eldest daughter, June, also recalled that even during his nights at home, he was devoted, like so many industrious cartoonists and illustrators, to retiring early from family life and plugging away at the next day’s deadlines and assignments.

For most of his career as a cartoonist, Carlson and his family lived a fairly unassuming middle-class life in Fairfield. For 40 years, George Leonard and Gertrude Jorth Carlson raised their two daugh-ters, the elder June (christened Dorothy Ellen) and the younger Alice, on the tight budget required of the often-unpredictable income of two professional artists (Figures 31). Gertrude was a classically trained pianist who performed in solo concerts and student recitals each year. She also gave private lessons from home, occasionally taught

II. THE WHIMSICAL WIZARD OFFAIRFIELD, CONNECTICUT:

Family Life and Commercial Art in the 1920s and 1930s

FIGURE 31 A dapper George Carlson in the early 1930s with daughters Alice and June. Courtesy of the Bishop and Morgan families.

FIGURE 32 Carlson’s striking design for the Bridgeport Temple Beacon, the weekly bulletin of the First Swedish Baptist church where he and his family were active members.

FIGURE 33 Carlson also designed the official seal of the Fairfield Tercentenary.

FIGURE 34 Carlson’s 1935 over-sized linen book, Ships Old and New.

FIGURE 31 FIGURE 32 FIGURE 33

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grade school, and operated the local stationary outlet, Carlson’s Card Shop, in nearby Southport. Family members recall that George and Gertrude enjoyed a happy collaborative marriage, though money was consistently a concern, especially after the Depression caused the col-lapse of John Martin’s Book in 1933. Nevertheless, the Carlsons perse-vered, thanks to Gertrude’s emphatic sense of thrift and her continual encouragement of her quiet, industrious husband.

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the Carlsons were involved in the Fairfield arts and political communities, each receiving numerous notices in the Fairfield News and Bridgeport Telegram concerning their activities and interests. The entire Carlson family were regular members of the First Swedish Baptist Temple of Bridgeport at 360 Colorado Avenue, and George cartooned for the Bridgeport Temple Beacon, putting his talent to work for a wide variety of church activities, including piano and organ recitals for Gertrude’s students (Figure 32).

He and Gertrude also contributed to local art exhibitions and collaborated on community theater productions and variety shows at the Greenfield Hill Grange. Carlson conceived of the elaborate holiday displays that illuminated the windows of his wife’s card and station-ary store, and frequently volunteered his services for community and charity events.

In 1937, the Bridgeport Sunday Post commended Carlson for developing a bevy of “fantastic demons that threaten to invade Fairfield unless” locals gave generously to the Fairfield Community Chest to save it from the clutches of his vicious personifications of “hunger,

poverty, sickness, and juvenile delinquency.” Carlson also contributed designs to help advertise the construction of the upgraded Fairfield City Center in 1934, and in 1939 he received special commendation from the Fairfield Connecticut Tercentenary Committee for developing their official seal, letterhead, and anniversary directory (Figure 33).

Of course, the majority of Carlson’s civic contributions were focused on children, and he was often called upon to provide special art and holiday projects for the little folk of Fairfield, Westport, Southport, and Bridgeport. These included crafting four scenes for a Father’s Day coloring contest, which he also judged in June 1938. Carlson found himself jurying many such events during his four decades in Fairfield, and whenever his contributions were mentioned in the local press, he was consistently celebrated as a “nationally known illustrator and designer” with “wide experience in the field of art for children.”

On a national scale, Carlson’s artistry was barely noticed during his lifetime, but within the close-knit communities of his Connecticut home, he and his family enjoyed some small celebrity and appreciation. As early as April 1927, the Bridgeport Herald celebrated George Carlson’s local reputation as “a well-known and popular cartoonist of Fairfield.”

Again, George Carlson’s nondescript reality seems in great contrast to the wild visions that led readers like Harlan Ellison and Franklin Rosemont to conceive of the artist as a revolutionary satirist. On the contrary, Carlson himself decried the notion of the pure, ide-alized, or high-minded artist in a 1937 interview with Sidney Marcuse for The Bridgeport Sunday Post:

Mr. Carlson sees a good future in his field. The day of the long-haired, dreamy artist is past. He says the successful present day illustrator must be a modern and up to date businessman. He must keep his eyes open, be observant and must not be afraid of work. The most important thing an illustrator or cartoonist must be able to do, according to Mr. Carlson, is to visualize the finished job before he begins to work on it. Carlson’s competitive attitude suggests his intense commitment to quality and industry, but these beliefs were hardly limiting to his professional output.

Though he was reserved and self-effacing in private, Carlson tire-lessly solicited new contracts. Aside from lengthy stints with John Martin’s Book, The American Girl, Eastern Color Publishing, Platt & Munk, Treasure Chest, and Apex Tools, he never stopped developing novelties, games, and cartoonish amusements for the ever-shifting children’s market.

For years he kept his New York office, from which he secured a number of freelance contracts involving textbook design, coloring books, riddle anthologies, and book jackets — one of which would become his most famous, though anonymous, work: the cover for the first edition of Margaret Mitchell’s antebellum epic Gone with the Wind.

All together, the Carlsons moved three times within Westport and its environs. By the mid-1930s they had established their second household at 21 Ludlowe Road in Fairfield itself, another “homey two-story colonial residence,” always alive with fanciful sounds and visions. Visitors like Bridgeport Sunday Post reporter Sidney Marcuse were often surprised by the “reception room of Mr. Carlson’s home,” made vibrant and “colorful with framed pieces of his work … some made

FIGURE 34

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FIGURE 35

by him years ago while others are of more recent origin.” Family and newspaper accounts both celebrate how the Carlson daughters would

“sit patiently to listen to their mother play or watch their father in the studio” on any given afternoon.

The Ludlowe home also included a modest upstairs studio where “three walls were lined with reference books and old prints,” including Carlson’s mother’s framed citation from President Grant. It was there that Carlson maintained a “huge file of thousands of clippings” and studies. The usually succinct and studious Carlson loved to regale reporters with tales of how his copious research both at home and the New York Public Library emphasized his commitment to verisimili-tude and historical accuracy.

For example, one 1937 feature from the Fairfield News observes:

Mr. Carlson says you never know from what quarter someone will violently criticize a small detail of your drawing. Some years ago, he said, he drew an ostrich on his puzzle page. Shortly after came an urgent letter from a girl in California, indignantly saying that the animal he drew did not have the correct number of toes. The lesson he received early in his career taught him to be careful to the last

degree. …Such things as an order to draw Longfellow’s chair, reput-edly made from the wood of the “Spreading Chestnut Tree,” require long and tedious research. Once, he recalled, he had to call up the Bronx Zoo to find out how many toes an Elephant has.

Concerns with zoology and anatomy aside, Carlson’s commitment to accu-racy made at least one subtle change to the annals of American illustration. In the mid-1930s, Carlson became “one of the few artists who have made a correct picture of Mark Twain’s beloved Tom Sawyer whitewashing a fence” for a Noble & Noble edition of the American classic: “Most artists have represented Tom with a short handled brush applying whitewash to a fence that is just about his height. Mr. Carlson agreeing with Mark Twain’s explicit description of the event, gave Tom a fence over nine feet high to whitewash and a long handled brush to work with.”

The same attention to technical precision and exactitude would also energize Carlson’s passion for celebrating marvels of industrial design and mechanical engineering. Alongside the far-flung fairies, funny animals, and majestic myths he loved to render, Carlson pro-duced a parallel series of realistic homages to the power and grandeur of modern science, advanced technology, and contemporary machinery.

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EARLY WORKSAND

ILLUSTRATIONSCarlson’s early career comprised a fascinating balance of intricate book and magazine illustrations on a wide range of subjects. The following chapter introduces some of Carlson’s finest work as an illustrator, visual adaptor of myths and classics, and creator of more whimsical, cartoonish works for small children. The diversity of styles and techniques is incredible, as are his inventive manipula-tions of familiar characters and contexts. These opening examples are culled from Carlson’s ongoing series of illustrated Greek myths. Each installment was serialized in John Martin’s Book throughout the 1910s and early 1920s. Carlson was credited with both the writing and the Neo-Classical design.

Greek Myths

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Greek Myths

The inevitable fall of Icarus from JMB (March 1926) and Pluto and Proserpine from the JMB Big Book Collier reprint (1934).

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“Bellerophon on Pegasus” from JMB (December 1921)

“The Story of Narcissus” frontispiece from JMB (July 1913)

“Prometheus” from JMB (promotional edition 1913)

Greek Myths

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Aesop’s Stories

Along with his extensive adaptations of Greek mythology for JMB, Carlson illustrated a number of fables from Aesop, many of which were collected in the JMB hardback special of 1924. This example must have been a reader favorite because it appeared in numerous editions including the Big Book Annual, and the later Collier reprints, as well as the 1934 Collection. The first version appeared in the October 1921 issue of JMB.

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PULPS, POEMS, AND PIXIES:

JOHN MARTIN’S BOOKS

Before his Jingle Jangle Tales and Pie-Face Prince caught our attention, George Carlson served as lead designer, puzzlemaster, and spinner of graphic gimmickry for the kiddie pulp John Martin’s Book from 1913 until 1933. John Martin’s and its host of spin-offs, give-away premiums, annuals, anthologies, and ancillary offerings were among the most sophisti-cated and elegant of their time. Every new installment was loaded with vivid pictures and rollicking verses that celebrated seasons, holidays, and generally fun frolics of every stripe. Carlson and John Martin (Morgan Shepard) himself were the magazine’s defining creative influences and their collaboration on games, puzzles, verses, stories, lessons, and non-sense verses were always fresh, fun, and visually fascinating. Carlson produced close to 50 cover designs and also took the lead on most of JMB’s uniquely contrived advertising features. It was the very rare issue of JMB, or its Wannamaker’s Department Store corollary, the Wannamaker Jolly Book, that did not explode with excitement. Nearly every page was adorned with pleasant tales and distracting visions. Here is a very small sampling of its finest offerings.

John Martin’s Book Covers

The diversity of Carlson’s JMB covers is extraordinary, encompassing multiple styles, themes, and subjects. Folktales, nursery rhymes, and seasonal themes were frequent as were storybook standards like castles, knights, and fairies. He could also produce vehemently mod-ern designs involving dirigibles, steamships, and airplanes to attract youngsters with more contemporary tastes. These examples provide

a cross section of his differing techniques as well as his fondness for amiably animated architecture like smiling houses, windmills, and churches ever-eager to break into smiling song. Carlson’s back cover advertisements were equally evocative and playful, as the 1926 “Old Man o’ the Moon” Colgate ad illustrates.

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John Martin’s Book Covers

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John Martin’s Book Covers

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John Martin’s Book Covers

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CARLSON’S SCHOOL OF NONSENSE

Perhaps Carlson and Martin’s greatest JMB creations were the voluminous nonsense games, rhymes, and riddles they developed to amuse young minds. Again, Carroll, Barrie, and Lear are never too far away from the joyful corruptions and contortions, but Beckett, Ionesco, and their ilk weren’t looming that far off in the future either. Looking at the surreality of these bizarre creatures and conflicted conundrums from almost a century away, it’s hard to fathom why both Martin and Carlson were not more celebrated auteurs of fantasy, irony, and satire in their time. The remarkable “Snugger Roo,” for example (following page), comes to us from the September 1927 issue of JMB.

Nonsense Lessons

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The perversely worded “Plain Principles of Perfect Pronunciation” series appeared in JMB through-out 1924. As a slick, silly revamp of old fashioned primers and alphabet books, there is much to love about the mockery of the rollicking verse and the faux woodcut technique Carlson often employed to emphasize JMB’s connection to the children’s periodicals, budgets, and readers of the past. We present A through H here for the giggly enjoyment of 21st-century readers.

Nonsense Lessons

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Carlson loved to invent mysterious oddities in the spirit of 19th-century Jabberwocks and curious playpals like Johnny Gruelle’s Snitznoodle. His bestiaries, however, are more closely attuned to allegories on the everyday joys of ludic language and aimable art. The “Sulks” were an early Goop-like example appearing in the July 1913 issue of JMB. The Sunny Bunnys and Pricker Stickers arrived in 1924, but the menagerie of weird critters to follow, especially in Carlson and Martin’s long-running “Johnnie Jingles and New Ninnie Nonsenses” feature, is a truly feral host of amorphous animal anomalies.

Strange Creatures

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Strange Creatures

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Strange Creatures

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JOLLYBOOKSJohn Martin’s often collaborated with department and specialty stores like Howland’s and Wanamaker’s on cross-promotions, and the ephemeral Jollybooks were some of the most visually arresting offspring from these canny experiments. A few years before comic books were fully fledged, these little forgotten wonders of fun set the stage for later successes like the March of Comics.

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Carlson’s wrap-around Jollybook covers were rich, imaginative celebrations of childhood’s bounty, bursting with toy soldiers, fluttering fairies, dancing candies, splendorous castles, laughing animals, and most importantly, lively children.

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LAUGHTER, PUNS, AND SPEED: THE

WHIFFLESNORTING THRILLS OF GEORGE CARLSON’S EASTERN

COLOR COMICSby Daniel F. Yezbick

A t last, ladies and gentlemen, we arrive in Pretzleburg. Welcome to our hokey little hamlet bordered by the equally erratic king-

doms of Soupbonia, Schnitzelwoof, Yatagonia, and Bunkum. Stroll along the hot buttered roads, contemplate the calls of the Killie-loo birds, and stand awhile in thought beneath the Yum Yum trees.

Pretzleburg’s comicscape is home to George Carlson’s most beloved creation, the Pie-Face Prince Dimwitri, who rambled through nearly 40 bimonthly adventures as a recurring feature of Eastern Color’s kiddie comics anthology, Jingle Jangle Comics, between the winters of 1942 and 1949.

Not too much farther away from Dimwitri’s domain, in another part of the title’s freaky forest, are Carlson’s greatest innovations, the raucous Jingle Jangle Tales themselves. These feral fairy tales and the characters they celebrated were fresh, funny, and unique works that anticipated the postmodern satires, underground slan-ders, and idiosyncratic auteurs of many midcentury countercul-tures yet to arrive.

They also revamped the contexts and conventions of the past, including the forms and tenets of early 19th century visual culture which Carlson had helped to invent and refine. Both series were aimed squarely at early readers and their parents, but Carlson’s non-sensical use of exaggeration, contradiction, and confounding conti-nuity now found new narrative depth and sequential complexity.

If only it were possible to present all of Carlson’s Jingle Jangle Comics output here. First, we had to do justice to his neglected legacy in several other formats. His work at Eastern Color — more than 700 pages — deserves its own lavish relaunch. Perhaps some day. For now, we have trolled the Jingle Jangle Comics archives to resurrect and remaster several samples to savor during the final course in our feast of nonsense.

The resulting bouquet of buffoonery borrows the Pie-Face Prince of Pretzelburg tales from Jingle Jangle Comics #1 (February 1942), #11 (October 1944), #15 (June 1945), #16 (August 1945), #20 (April 1946), #35(October 1948), #36(December 1948), and #41 (October 1949).

We then salvaged from obscurity several of Carlson’s most beguiling Jingle Jangle Tales, including the trippy “Moon-struck Unicorn and the Worn-out Shadow” (#13, February 1945), the pro-to-feminist “Straight-shooting Princess and the Filigree Pond-lily” (#22, August 1946), “The Musical Whifflesnort and the Red-hot Music Roll” (#23, October 1946), “The Rocketeering Doodlebug and the Self-winding Horsefly” (#25, February 1946), and “The Half-champion Archer and the Double-dipped Arrow” (#38, April 1949).

We had to include two of Carlson’s outlandish lampoons on American classics: “Skip Van Wrinkle, the High-hatted Hunter” (#28, August 1947), which riffs hilariously on the cherished Washington Irving tale, and “Sleepy Yollo, the Bedless Norseman” (#31 February 1948), which is as much a meditation on the car-toonist’s Scandinavian American roots as it is a wild Viking yarn.

Much of the charm of Carlson’s contributions to Jingle Jangle Comics arises from his good-hearted heroes, especially the do-gooding Prince Dimwitri, a comic book clown of immense cha-risma. Ever the oblivious innocent, our Everyprince’s unabashed goodness, unending sincerity, and sporting spirit make him immune to the vices and perils of his scheming antagonists.

Prince Dimwitri’s rogues gallery boasts a keen blend of story-book standards (the Green Witch, his “favorite enemy”), modern

miscreants (Second Story Sam, Pretzleburg’s “most popular bur-glar”), and exotic adversaries (the nefarious rajah of recklessness, Sir Razzo Razzhberri). Ironically, while these opponents each conspire against Dimwitri, most of the time he never even realizes he is the target of their pathetic plotting. Dimwitri’s endless enthu-siasm and perpetual movement precludes him from ever being long at rest before yet another chase, race, or challenge pits him against more oddball obstacles.

In fact, the Pie-Face Prince might be the busiest character in American comics. Superman and the Flash should marvel at his endless ordeals involving over-wound rowing machines, “very fashionable pirates,” and Schnitzelwoofing hornettes. He is the “very royal” antithesis of cluelessly conventional all-American Archie Andrews and a blissfully ignorant precursor to the king of comic book boobs, Alfred E. Newman. His ever-more maddening quests also intimate sly connections to a cultural legacy that runs the broadest of goofy gauntlets from Krazy Kat and Mutt and Jeff to Scrooge McDuck and Spongebob Squarepants. In one particularly raucous tale included here, he and King Hookum are saved when a well-placed marble bust belonging to “Ignatz Smear” beans the villain with all the gusto of a well-thrown Herrimanian brick.

Across the dozens of Pretzleburg episodes Carlson concocted, the ebullient Dimwitri remains at the furious center of the game. With every new beginning, Carlson’s oversized introductory pan-els perpetually draw our attention to his hero’s slim, smiling frame. Carlson also commences each Pie-Face adventure in medias res, emphasizing the random absurdities and eponymous circum-stances that so frequently whip our lives into frothy frustration. In every case, the ensuing shenanigans generally arise over some odd new MacGuffin that ignites the next fracas. Thus, Dimwitri finds himself wrestling with an endless parade of cacophonous contraptions including jet-powered kites, royal tool chests, yeast-bound automobiles, million-dollar bills, jet mobiles, “almost gold-plated” blunderbusses, and nearly nuclear soda pop. Added to this litany are all manner of oddball unguents like headache powder, sneezing dust, bubble wax, and of course, Pretzleburg’s primary power source: high octane, ultra-explosive schmaltz.

Despite all this perverse paraphernalia, the Dimwitri adven-tures did not appeal to all tastes when they arrived in the midst of World War II America. The Prince’s pie-face puss graced only one of the 42 covers of Jingle Jangle Comics and over time his stories became shorter and less fulsome, merely bringing up the rear of the Jingle Jangle Comics anthology.

Perhaps the complex address of the Dimwitri stories was just too novel to gain much traction against more familiar corporate characters of the Dell-dominated kiddie comics market. Dell’s lucra-tive licensing delivered its own masterpieces in Animal Comics, Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, and other titles, but newcom-ers like Dimwitri stood little chance against Hollywood icons of animated mirth like Mickey, Felix, Woody, and Bugs. Still, none of Dell’s celebrity-laden series could equal the outright anarchy and infectious confusion of Carlson’s slippery trippery treasures.

At its best, Carlson’s work in Jingle Jangle Comics subsumed all manner of cacophonous sources into one big combustible hodgepodge. In any given episode, readers will recognize scraps and patches of Old World fairy tales, studio cartoons, vaudevillian

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farce, musical standards, radio gags, and screwball comedy ran-domly glued together with Carlson’s finest pictographic punnery and nonsensical narrative.

His compositions brim with teasing tricks and taunting trim-mings mastered over a lifetime of children’s illustration, crossword puzzle design, and riddle making. Never before in his tenure as a cartoonist had he so brashly wedded intersecting sequences of loopy circles and irregular rectangles with sidebar captions, cajoling arrows, and harried zip lines. It’s as if Mother Goose and Grimms’ Fairy Tales were smelted together with the snide sat-ires of Mad magazine, The Simpsons, and Adventure Time. The alchemical result leaves us with something truly unexpected and deliciously off-kilter: innocent and timeless (yet still topical) chil-dren’s stories with enough dazzle and slapstick to dismantle our reason and fracture our funny bones. Everything in Pretzleburg seems like a surreal surprise, as each intersection in Carlson’s cheeky world brings forth funny, fitful visions.

Carlson’s Pretzleburg milieu itself might be the most animated in comics history. Every cloud, shrub, doorjamb, broomstick, chimney, and lamppost smiles or comments on the passing show in a crazed fusion of old-fashioned implements and newfangled conveniences. There are flower-phones and oaken postmen, nearly royal radios, and “very nice” thumbtacks among other marvels of personification.

Like the spectacular fancies of Winsor McCay, Carlson’s comics-borne reality seems to abide by its own peculiar physics of time, place, and confusion. McCay is grandiose, stately, and proud where Carlson is folksy, screwy, and utterly without airs. Carlson’s intangible worlds and fleeting scenarios morph in and out of each other, and every topsy-turvy plot beckons us further toward the sublime anarchies of the ridiculous. Yet, Carlson’s dream worlds bear the signature traits that define his work across five decades: a never-ending emphasis on the joy of intrepid discovery, an endur-ing respect for gripping imagery, and the playfulness of living languages — pictorial and linguistic.

Several stories included here hinge on the same visual games he perfected with John Martin’s Book and the Fun-Time pamphlets. His monumental treatments of locomotives and steamships are echoed in the cantankerous contraptions that fizzle, spark, and explode all day long in Pretzleburg. Even his lifelong enthusiasm for lingual fission inspires moments of hilarious wordplay involv-ing English, German, Swedish, Spanish, and Yiddish slang. No matter how weird, whimsical, or random his scenarios become, we end with a genuine emphasis on friendship, kinship, learning, and laughter.

These themes are especially rampant within Carlson’s true comic book triumphs, the Jingle Jangle Tales, which ran alongside Dimwitri’s Pretzleburg exploits. These delirious deconstructions are so insistently manic and mutable, few contemporary readers noticed or cared about the metamorphosis taking place in Carlson’s self-conscious comics. Light, loose, zany, and free, Carlson’s fairy-tale farces seemed to organically exude comedic contradiction and parody in their hysterical pursuit of happiness. Here we find, at long last, Carlson’s fully conceived equivalent to Carroll’s Wonderland and Baum’s Oz. His Jingle Jangle realm is stuffed to busting with duckless duck ponds, red-hot trails, fan-flashing

filigrees, giggling gewgaws, and groovy gimcracks. As one story proudly announces, it includes “all of the latest goldfish.” From moon-drunk unicorns and self-winding horseflies to pistol-pack-ing princesses and fractional archers, the Jingle Jangle Tales portray some of the most original heroes in the annals of kiddie lit. Amidst the chaos, there is also poignant continuity. Carlson’s signature species of wild game, the Whifflesnort, rampages ridicu-lously through his wonderlands with the same random frequency as Lewis Carroll’s jabberwocks, jubjubs, and bandersnatches. Many of the wackiest happenings also occur in and around the ever-evolving Apex factory that manufactures all manner of props, depending on the season, including glue, steam, and jellybeans.

Here Carlson, the master cartoonist, mocks his own predic-ament of working on dreary, conventional design projects for Apex Tools to meet the practical needs of his family. Other notable autobiographical flourishes abound in the Jingle Jangle material. At one point, the Pie-Face Prince fails to master painting after consulting an “Art in Six Easy Lessons” program reminiscent of Carlson’s many primers and instruction guides.

Both Pretzleburg and Jingle Jangle folks expend an awful lot of energy fussing over apple dumplings in a sly homage to Carlson’s Uncle Wiggily works. And, of course, the Skip Van Wrinkle and Sleepless Yollo tales are mocking regurgitations of his Washington Irving illustrations for John Martin’s Book. Yollo is especially intriguing for its emphasis on Scandinavian culture including gags involving “Double Cross Tooki” and “Eric the Raven” across a land-scape dotted with “nutty pines” and rough seas crossed in rehashed Viking vessels. Remember all of those nautical drawings?

These and other traces of self-satire suggest that the Jingle Jangle Comics were as personally pleasing to their creator as they are for us, so many generations later. If only those children in between could have so savored the song of the Whifflesnort’s one-string whang-do. As you are about to discover, the few fantasies we have foraged for inclusion here are rich in allegorical assaults on human folly and the fragile social systems that attempt to contain them. Language, music, art, engineering, and commerce bend, break, and mend themselves from moment to moment in the hands of the riddle-driven cartoonist so poignantly aware of the dissonance among words, pictures, and the spaces in which they negotiate meaning. Ultimately though, the Pie-Face Prince and Jingle Jangle stories are figures of fun and frolic. Carlson’s creations encourage the joyous appreciation of imagination and invention. His craftily carbonated world resounds with the fury of steam, diesel, gunpowder, hot air, and — in at least one tale — super-conductive “Oomph Sauce.”

So snuggle into your smiling sofa and fetch your favorite schmaltz-flavored snack. (It was originally chicken fat, after all.)

Your super-deluxe armchair tour of Jinglejangleland awaits.

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