So here’s a comic I acquired in a collection recently:
I’ve never seen What Changed Mr. Grumpy? before, I’ve never heard of it, there’s no listing of it in the Overstreet Price Guide (in either the main listings or the Promotional section).
Searching the internet doesn’t bring up a whole lot, and what I did find took a little digging.
First thing I found, which was at the time one of the only three Google results for this comic (one of which is me, from my Bluesky account) was this catalog listing I found on Archive.org:
Interestingly, this gives the book a 1955 date, when the copy I have on hand is copyright 1979. So, to make sure we’re talking about the same book here, I looked up “Hal Allen,” the credited author.
Now, the Mr. Grumpy comic, since I haven’t said yet, is a comic that explains to young newspaper carriers the proper methods of doing their jobs. Here is a sample interior page, where we see our hero, newspaper boy Homer, and one of his encounters with our titular Mr. Grumpy:
First, looking at the artwork, it does feel a little 1950s-ish, particularly in Homer’s design, which had me wondering about that 1979 date on my copy.
I wasn’t able to find too many other examples of Mr. Allen’s artwork online, but I did find this poster on Facebook, part of which is excerpted here:
And yes, that art and the art i the Mr. Grumpy book look like the same artist.
I also found this short article about Mr. Allen, from his old stomping grounds of Oregon, talking about his cartooning life (and revealing that he passed away about 1999). It mentions that he published a book of his cartoons in 1973, and that he worked for Disney after World War II, among other interesting bits.
Remember those three Google results for the title of the book? The third (which doesn’t seem to show up now) was for a listing on Worthpoint, where someone actually had one for sale. I think they got the date wrong, unless there was a 1977 edition. Anyway, you need a login to get the price it sold for, so if anyone has one and can let me know, I’d appreciate it! At the very least you can see more interior pages there.
This is one of those entries where I hope it helps out someone down the line who gets a copy of this same comic and has questions about it too. I hope the info I gathered together here is of some us, theoretical future comics researcher!
I can definitely see that as the kind of thing newspapers might license and print for their young carriers (before newspaper delivery became a guy-with-car thing) as a bit of training material.
As such it’d be an evergreen and might have been reprinted for many years. How that’d effect the copyright date, I don’t know. I imagine they could get sloppy with it and just keep the artist’s name and update the year to the year of printing.
(I suppose they also could have bought stacks of them from Hearst and Hearst would do print runs every so often.)
Wouldn’t surprise me if it git an eventual reprinting. Seems like a normal thing for an “educational” comic.
There are almost certainly an unknowable number of comics like this that existed and will never be in Overstreet or on GCD.
I cannot believe I read through that entire post and you never told me what exactly changed Mr. Grumpy.
I’m guessing it’s whatever’s in his cigar.
“I cannot believe I read through that entire post and you never told me what exactly changed Mr. Grumpy.”
Quality time in the Sauna.
The friends we made along the way?
My apologies…what changed Mr. Grumpy into Mr. Not-Grumpy was having a newspaper carrier that was good at this job and communicated with the customers about their concerns. A lesson from which many folks can learn!
Oh well, mystery solved; the suspense was killing me.
I thought for sure dope or some Earth-3 type switcheroo shenanigans were involved.
Might be some trouble if anyone tried to reprint this now, I hear the Roger Hargreaves estate is pretty litigious.