Thursday, March 28, 2019

Opening Day Special: WILL EISNER Plays Ball with "Rube Rooky" (1949)


In a perfect world, I'd be celebrating Opening Day at Target Field in Minneapolis, scarfing down hot dogs and watching the Twins beat the Cleveland Indians. But since I'm fourteen hundred miles away, and can't even get the game on TV without coughing up a hundred or more bucks, I'll settle for reading this story from Will Eisner's Baseball Comics #1. 

Back in 1949, Eisner decided to publish a couple of comics under his own imprint. Only two appeared, this one and an infantile thing called Kewpies. If Kewpies contained any work by Eisner himself, it's not readily apparent, and the mag is best forgotten. Baseball Comics, though, is very nicely done, and, aside from a few pages of filler material, is Eisner through and through. He even drew the ads, which you see after the story.

As one those ads tells us, a second issue was planned, but lousy distribition sounded the line's death knell. Baseball Comics #2 had already been completed, though, and was finally published by Kitchen Sink in 1992.

This ish comes to us courtesy of ComicBookPlus.com and the scanner known as "Yoc."



























4 comments:

Evan Lewis said...

Twins 2, Indians zip. The season's off to a good start.

Art Scott said...

Ok, I'll ask, why the Twins?

Evan Lewis said...

Lived in Minnesota when I was ten and eleven, my formative baseball (and football) fan years.

TC said...

IIUC, Eisner's 1949 plans for publishing comics under his own imprint included a strip called "John Law, Detective." It was shelved after the failure of Baseball Comics and Kewpie, but the stories were rewritten into Spirit stories and published in that strip in 1950.

The original "John Law" version was published as a one-shot comic book by Eclipse in the early 1980s.