Thoughts on The Collected Doug Wright

The Collected Doug Wright, Vol 1 by Seth & Brad Mackay, Drawn & Quarterly, 2009

I was looking over some old posts and was shocked that it has been nearly four years since I wrote about Doug Wright and his cartoons in Model Railroader magazine. The pandemic has definitely screwed up my perception of time.

I thought, fine, I wonder if I can find a copy of The Collected Doug Wright: Canada's Master Cartoonist. I tried back in the fall of 2020 when I wrote the post, but found that new copies were long sold out from the usual sources, and used ones had prices that were too rich for my blood. It was published in 2009, so I guess by 2020 it shouldn't be surprising that it was hard to find.

As it turns out though I'm having good luck this summer finding long sought after books at reasonable prices. Some I've discussed here, others are waiting in the wings. It turned out there were two new copies at Amazon for $39.95CDN with free shipping. The one they shipped had the cover banner torn off and some dents in the cover, but inside it was just fine. 

Apparently, this is the first volume of a planned two volume series. It covers Wright's cartoons and illustration work, in particular The Nipper, from 1949 up until the end of 1962. To the end of '62 you say? Wright's first MR cartoon appeared in the Dec '62 issue and was a reprint of one that appeared earlier in the Montreal Star. I'll cut to the chase, no it isn't in the book. On page 75, Seth has this to say by way of explanation,

"Wright did a great deal of work for the Montreal Standard, the Weekend magazine, and the Montreal Star throughout the 1950s and 60s. Alas, most of that work is very hard to find today - hidden away wherever great piles of yesterday's newsprint goes to hide. Even Wright's personal files only provide a scattershot collection of tearsheets - many of them torn or stained with aging glue."

So, I shouldn't be surprised the original cartoon wasn't in the book. Maybe those MR scans are the only remaining images of his model railroading oriented cartoons: there were 6 published in MR between Dec '62 and Oct '69.

And, no, there weren't any other model railroading cartoon surprises in the book - no mention of model railroading at all even though MR had noted Wright's interest in the Dec '62 story. Although there is a hilarious cartoon involving a PCC streetcar and the Nipper and his girl friend on page 94. 

But, on page 30 Mackay notes that Wright had a love for any sort of moving vehicle, especially cars, and had a passion for drawing them anytime he could. The book's pages provide ample evidence of his mastery. Mackay notes that at one time Wright did a car culture cartoon strip called The Wheels. This makes me wonder if any Wright cartoons appeared in CARtoons magazine, a car culture comics magazine that began publishing in 1959? If he sold cartoons to MR, it doesn't seem like much of a stretch that someone who was crazy about cars, and who could draw cars and cartoons like he did, would try to sell some to CARtoons. 

It's also mentioned Wright sold prints of his drawings of steam engines via mail order, which corroborates the statement in the Oct '64 MR about Wright selling steam engine prints.

Model railroading aside, the book is excellent and quite a bargain. I remember Nipper cartoons from the late '60s and '70s when the strip was called Doug Wright's Family. Frankly, back then it made little impression on me, possibly because it seemed to be oriented to adults and not children. The cartoons in this book are before my time, but reading them now, decades after they were published, well, I can't put them down. They are great. My favourites? The one from 9 August 1958 on page 185, and the one on page 194 from 13 June 1959. 

The book says it's the first of a two volume set. I've seen no sign of a second volume covering the last half of Wright's career. Given the first volume was published in 2009, and since it's 2024, maybe there'll never be one. That would be unfortunate.

The Haunts of George Sprott

I finally got around to buying a copy of Seth's book, George Sprott 1894-1975. I don't know why I put it off for so long given how much I enjoyed Clyde Fans. And I can't believe it's been four years since I bought Clyde Fans - the pandemic temporal distortion field at work no doubt.

Seth has an uncanny ability to capture a feeling of how Ontario and many of its citizens were in the second half of the 20th century even though his graphic novels are full of send ups, caricatures, and wild extrapolations. But, maybe they are the reason his work hits the mark.

I'm hopelessly biased and seem to subconsciously look for connections to model buildings - and E. L. Moore if I hear the gong :-) - in anything I'm reading. It turns out there is a strong connection in George Sprott.

George Sprott and the Melody Grill - you'll need to buy the book to read the story

To tell Sprott's story the book has a few two-page spreads like the one shown above where a model of a building is presented on one page, and a cartoon story about it and its relation to Sprott is presented on the other. I've discussed before Seth's sideline of creating a city of model buildings - called 'Dominion' -  like the Melody Grill shown above, but I think this is the first time I've seen those models directly woven into a graphic story. For me this adds an interesting dimension to the book, and I recommend that anyone interested in making model buildings read it if you think your models should be more than generic props. While you're at it, consider comparing Seth's approach to storytelling with Paul Michael Smith's in his book, Elgin Park, which also makes use of model buildings.

Well, whether you buy it for the excellent graphic novella, or the interesting approach to integrating model buildings and storytelling, I don't think you'll be disappointed.

The many faceted coincidences between Wimbledon Green, Lester Moore, and E. L. Moore

Recently I’ve been rereading some graphic novels by Seth. I feel an affinity with his style of illustration and his stories, so whenever I need some sort of pick-me-up I crack them open. 

Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World has had my attention for the last week or so. In the introductory note Seth says he doesn’t think this is one of his best works, but drawing and writing it was a compulsion. It’s a compulsion for me too. When I’m looking for some light escapism I feel compelled to read it. There’s something wild and manic about it, what with its eccentric cast of characters, autogyros, speeding trains, wild Ontario locations, chases, heists, discoveries, shady deals, and on and on. It’s a series of interconnected stories, cameos, comic reviews, monologues, and interviews all linked together to tell the story of Wimbledon Green.

There’s one story in particular I always come back to, Fine and Dandy: A Short Talk by Wimbledon Green. Why? From the first time I read it, it seemed to have strong parallels, at least in my mind, to E. L. Moore’s life and work. I’ve always marvelled at the coincidence. Now, don’t get me wrong as you read further, what appears in the story is all fiction, and all coincidence.

In the talk Green tells the story of cartoonist Lester Moore and a comic book he created called Fine and Dandy that ran for 36 issues between 1946 and 1951. So literally right from square one - most of the comic is a grid of squares! - we have Lester Moore, aka L. Moore, aka LM, which immediately strikes the E. L. Moore gong in my brain. If I was a conspiracy theorist I’d think this was the beginning of a coded message :-) 

Ok, so name similarity aside, what else? Well, Green then tells us LM entered cartooning rather late in life. LM was in his 30s, which isn’t that old, but apparently was for starting as a publishing cartoonist. ELM entered his field late too. He was in his late 50s when he published his first item, a photo in Model Railroader. Green notes prior to cartooning LM held a variety of jobs and he “tramped about in the 30’s”. ELM held a variety of jobs in his early life and was a self-described “vagabond” in the 30’s. Green notes LM may have used some of his hoboing experiences in his comic; ELM appears to have.

Fine and Dandy chronicles the comic adventures of two hobos, Fine and Dandy, as they tramp the backroads and rural areas of Depression era America. There’s a recurring cast of characters. Green mentions just three: Li’l Tiny, a child hobo (reminds me of ELM’s Baby Spumoni); Boxcar Pearl, a woman hobo (reminds me of ELM’s Ma Spumoni); and Gran’pa Stretch, the world’s oldest hobo (reminds me of ELM’s Grandpa Bunn). ELM had his cast of characters too - examples I’ve noted in ()s in the previous sentence - with many recurring. Fine and Dandy often found themselves in jail for ‘liberating’ chickens; ELM hints that he too may have spent sometime in lockup for something similarly trivial. 

And LM and ELM both feature trains in their work.

Green ends his talk by saying, “”Fine + Dandy” fit easily into the elite group of comic characters who live off the page. Moore breathed something of himself into them —so that they had a felling of inner depths. Even now, some 50 years later, I can still feel their presence in the world.” With some minor rewording, the same could be said of ELM and his legacy.

No doubt the similarities I see are simply due to Seth creating an excellent simulation of a genre of cartoon storytelling that was popular in the first half of 20th century America. Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville Trolley is a good example of the type. It was popular because even though fictional, readers could identify with it, and many perhaps even lived some of it. No doubt ELM was soaked in it and admired it, both the times and the genre, so he too was a stylist in the genre even though the medium was different. My rational mind knows why the coincidences between LM and ELM are there, there’s another part of my mind that enjoys the fantasy of revelling in “what if there was a link” whenever it hears the gong :-)

Little Emma

I was getting caught up on some serious reading and was quite surprised to find this railroad cartoon shoehorned amongst Chilly Willy, Sugar Foot, and all the gang. I guess in 1957 when that cartoon was first published, tossing in a story about narrow gauge railroading to fill space didn't seem unusual as it does today.

Now, excuse me as I get back to finding out what Space Mouse is up to.

Violating the laws of time travel

I sneaked the time machine out of the garage early one morning last week and set the controls for 355 Lexington Avenue, N.Y., N.Y., May 1975.

I thought I'd try and disrupt the flow of time.

It only sort of worked. 

There are still a lot of kinks to be worked out with the whole time travel thing.

Skipper: Trolley & Sax Man

Left: 1st published 1972 | Right: 1st published 1935

I bought these two cartoon compilations in the summer and dipped into them now-and-then whenever I needed some laughs - which was often. I still frequently pull Toonerville Trolley off the shelf for emergency use :-)

Railway Ribaldry was the first one I bought. It's a 2014 reprint of cartoonist William Heath Robinson's 1935 book that was published to commemorate the centenary of the Great Western Railway. It's full of debonair and droll railway boffin humour. I especially like the ways Robinson often used the page as a design element.

Skipper wails on his sax

And then there's Fontaine Fox's Toonerville Trolley! It's completely wild and crazy. Feral maybe? It's a bracing contrast to Railway Ribaldry.

The internet tells me that what I think of as the Toonerville Trolley cartoons were actually called Toonerville Folks, or at times, alternatively, The Toonerville Trolley That Meets All The Trains. Whatever the name, it ran in the Chicago Post and in syndication from 1908 to 1955 when Fox retired.

Skipper and his trolley were prominent characters of course, but the cast of characters was vast. The table of contents lists 86!  

The antics of children in the wilds of what was then thought of as an emerging U.S. suburbia - which looks more like the country from where I sit in the over developed 21st century - are prominently featured. 

Remember when vacant lots abounded in our land and kids played on them the year round? Remember when trolley cars crisscrossed every street and some lines ended in the "country"?... Remember when suburbia could be located only a few miles from downtown?

Some introductory thoughts from 1972 to Fontaine Fox's Toonerville Trolley by co-compiler Herb Galewitz.

Ok, this is 30Squares the last I looked, so let's get some highly speculative E. L. Moore connections out of way before I bust. Mr. Moore also had a large cast of characters in his articles. Was that in anyway influenced by the large cast of Toonerville Folks? Not to mention his character naming convention has a Toonerville vibe. And what about that name, Toonerville Folks? Mr. Moore's photography studio, which focused on child portraiture, was called Little Folks Studio. Coincidence? Completely unrelated? The most likely answers are Yes and Yes. But, still, I keep these sorts of things in the back of my mind, and let me tell you they itch back there :-)

Toonerville Folks reached the end of the line on February 9, 1955, when the seventy-year-old Fox retired to Florida. Wisely, neither the Syndicate nor Fox sought a replacement. The "vacant lot" era of American life was disappearing. It was beaten by the population explosion of post-Word War II, suburban developers, and urban blight. Today, seventeen years later, we have "progressed" to professional Little Leagues, artificial grass, and the disappearance of street life. It is enough to make a grown man cry.

Herb Galewitz wraps up his introductory comments on a downbeat.

At least the '70s didn't usher in the end of the saxophone ...

... and I got to wondering, was there any Skipper-style Toonerville Trolley music out there?

I found this piece recorded sometime in 1944 or 1945 by Raymond Scott and his orchestra:

The time period's right, but it sounds a little too smooth. I imagine Skipper belting out something more raucous.

I kept looking and found this 1967 song by The Electric Prunes whose lead singer was ....

... James Lowe. At this point music searching stopped dead as I pondered this strange coincidence. This James Lowe parts his name in the middle. His full name turns out to be Thaddeus James Lowe, a descendent of none other than Thaddeus Lowe who built the Mt. Lowe electric railway, which we've discussed here in the past.

These coincidences are making me dizzy. I think I'll go lie down. Ask Katrinka to wake me when the trolley gets here.

The trolley is actually a mobile jazz club. I wonder if it stops at Baker St.?

A Toonerville Trolley Triple Bill

Writing about the 'Jigger' got me thinking about another famous jigger, the Toonerville Trolley. After some digging in YouTube I found these three animated shorts from 1936. While he was adamant that he wasn't a trolley fan, these films have sort of an E. L. Moore story vibe about them.

It's a good thing The Skipper has Katrinka because without her the line would have fallen apart years ago :-) Who would fix things?

Making electric cool the Cartoons way

In the spring I was pleasantly surprised to find that one of the hobby stores on my styrene road was carrying the new incarnation of Cartoons magazine. When I was a kid there were a few brief years when I eagerly awaited its newsstand arrival and greedily read whatever issues I could find. Today's downside though is I get strange looks at the cash desk when it comes time to buying the thing :-) I guess it's not considered something for 'serious' modellers. They couldn't be more wrong.

I can't account for their response. The magazine's just some simple fun and helps take my mind off things for awhile by sending me back to another time. Yeah, the stories are straightforward, but the drawings and overall vibe are great: humorous stories about all sorts of people building exciting custom cars, driving them, racing them, living with them, not to mention in-depth interviews with legendary automotive cartoonists, all wrapped up with positivity and fun. Yes, I've mentioned fun twice, but what's wrong with that?

I picked up the October / November issue on a recent styrene road loop. It's the all-electric car issue. Regulars like Trosley's Krass & Bernie make an appearance, but so do Don Garlits and his electric dragster as well some humorous fictional speculation on Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla. Not to mention some intriguing cartoons on converting a Karmann Gia to electric and drifting an electric car. Surprisingly, I learned a lot amidst all the fun. I for one am looking forward to the electric hot rod revolution.

Carstens' '52

Aunt Teek's from RMC May 1952

1952 was a big year for Railroad Model Craftsman magazine. The May issue was volume 20, number 12, the end of the magazine's first 20 years. Well, ok, the magazine started life as The Model Craftsman and covered a wide range of model building subjects, not just model trains, but 20 years in business is an accomplishment, especially when those 20 years spanned a great depression and world war. 

The RMC team took the May '52 anniversary as the opportunity to begin introducing a series of changes to up its model railroading game. Among other features, '52 saw the introduction of Frank Ellison as a regular contributor with a big series on the fundamentals of model railroading, inclusion of a monthly blueprint supplement, Lloyd Giebner started his long run as RMC's de facto structures writer, and Harold H. Carstens, aka Hal Carstens, first appeared in the May issue's masthead as Associate Editor.

Mr. Carstens, who years later would buy the magazine and become its publisher, had written articles for RMC prior to joining the staff, so he wasn't an unknown quantity to readers. Of all the pieces he published in '52, two of his structure articles made me sit up and take notice: Aunt Teek's Furniture Factory, in that May '52 issue, and The Home of Shake's Beer in June '52. It wasn't so much the projects that caught my interest, but how they were written up: both included background stories in which I heard echoes - echoes from the future :-) - of E. L. Moore.

Here's the preamble to Aunt Teek's Furniture Factory:

Ephaim and Ezekial Teek didn't have an easy time of it when they first set up their wood working shop in the hinterlands of Paramsippus. Indeed, if it hadn't been for the kind words of their plumpish aunt, Obediah Teek, they may well have given up and gone westward. As it was, Aunt Teek was hard on her furniture and required new chairs so often that the two nephews were kept almost constantly busy. While this kind of business was fine for experience, it was hard on profits.

Nevertheless, their business grew as news spread that even Aunt Teek couldn't collapse their new rugged Teak Wood furniture and soon they had to look for larger quarters. They found them in the hastily vacated stone building of Colonel Bourbon Carstairs (no relation to the author although they might possible be from the Scotch side of his family). After the government revenue agents took the Colonel away the boys moved in. The Hudson River Traction Co. laid in a freight siding and the fame of their wares spread far and wide. In fact, their products became so well known that an extra win had to be added. It is this factory that we see in the photographs and which will be described in this article.

And if that weren't enough, The Home of Shake's Beer, a brewery project of course, includes an extra dose of bad puns and cornball wordplay:

There were tears of rejoicing as Colonel Bourbon Carstairs greeted his old buddy, Bacchus Shakes, whom he hadn't seen since they once sold Indian Kickapoo Joy Juice years before in the West. Old Bacchus had sent for the Colonel in hopes that the Colonel could do something to pep up business for Bacchus' Mineral Spring Water Co. Things were in a sad state indeed. Old Bacchus had done his best, floated bonds, watered stock; anything to try and boost sales and increase revenue but, alas, it seemed as if nobody cared to drink water anymore!

But the Colonel had an idea. The water here in Boiling Springs was excellent but why waste it just to drink. Make beer out of it and they'd both clean up! Quickly they formed plans for the new company. A partnership was formed called the "Great Pard Brewing Co." and their product was to be named in honor of old Bacchus, "Shake's Beer".

There's more, including a story about Bud the brewmaster having a barrel of beer fall on him that didn't cause injury because it was full of light beer, but you probably get the idea.

Including these sorts of tall tales in what today would be a serious and pragmatic article wasn't unknown back then, but given the extensive and good natured correspondence between E. L. Moore and Hal Carstens in the years to come it made me wonder if E. L. Moore imitated Carstens' style to get noticed, or maybe adopted that style because he liked it. Or maybe there was nothing premeditated because he and Carstens' were simpatico, and their writing styles were just examples of that - Carstens maybe just recognized a kindred spirit when he came across E. L. Moore. Of course, maybe this is all just a coincidence, and I'm reading things into commonalities of the past that just aren't there. Nevertheless, it's interesting.

Left: Shake's Beer RMC June '52; Right: GNBCC HQ by Seth

One last thing. It seemed like the techniques Carstens used to build his O-scale Shake's Beer produced a model that looked rather similar to the models Seth builds for his city of Dominion. While reading though RMCs from 1952 I was also reading Seth's The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists, and his model of the Brotherhood's club HQ seemed similar, in style and technique, to Shake's Beer. Both are built from heavy cardboard; both are decorated with inked on wall blocks; both have doors and windows drawn on card or paper and pasted to the structure; both are more caricature than 'fine-scale' . They aren't identical of course, but Seth's Dominion buildings do have the vibe of how models of this sort were built in the '40s and '50s, as well representing buildings of that era and earlier. I'm not saying Seth knowingly used methods of the Carstens' era, only that the similarities are nevertheless interesting - although there are probably a limited number of ways to build structures from cardboard.

E. L. Moore's Cabinet of Curiosities: Comic Book Edition

It struck me that a few 9" x 27" displays could be stacked in a cabinet and the overall view would look a lot like a cartoon. Each 'panel', each shelf, would tell a little bit of the story, and one panel might narratively lead to the next. So, overall, the cabinet is a life-size E. L. Moore story in cartoon form.

Maybe the story would be a variation on The Adventures of E. L. Moore, Train Photographer, where each panel contains a scene where Mr. Moore's icon anchors the viewer's attention and the buildings fulfill supporting roles. Or maybe it's a remix of The Adventures of Baby Spumoni? Stories were a big part of E. L. Moore's mythos, and maybe story-centred dioramas / panels / shelves are the way to bring the models to life. And lighting. I can't forget lighting. 

Galen tells me Weston figures command high prices these days, so if I'm going to go the story route I'll need to be mindful of the costs associated with all those figures. Luckily E. L. Moore's photographer doppelgänger was a custom item he made, so that one I can probably cobble together myself.

Walls and Windows and CURRENtoons

In the last instalment of the 30Squares HQ build I stopped at the point where I needed to think a bit about how to proceed with the interior.

I thought and thought and thought.

Eventually I settled on a two floor arrangement with an elevator between stories. 

Picking up where I left off, the next step was to glue a styrene ledge on the walls to support the second floor. For this I used 2mm x 4mm Evergreen styrene strip.

The ledge was set 2 scale feet below the second floor window sills. I think this makes the windows a little too close to the floor, but there isn't much room as some space needs to be left for gluing the first floor window frames to the walls. 

Once the ledges were installed, 0.125" square styrene verticals were glued to the inside of the wall pilasters to give some dimensionality to the wall surfaces. Verticals will also be installed on the second floor after the second floor is glued in place. 

One thing to note about the vertical pieces is that the surface that abuts the wall needs to be slightly notched so the vertical will fit into the base when the wall is glued to the ground floor.

The second floor is cut from a sheet of 0.040" styrene. 

The square grid I've penciled on the piece is a projection of the grid formed by the wall pilasters. I used them to help me think about where to place the elevator shaft, which will be a square section column placed in the opening. 

The elevator shaft will only fill the back half of the opening, and will leave a square opening in the floor so that persons on the second floor can see down to the ground floor - and vice versa of course :-) I'll need to add a second floor railing for safety's sake.

At this point I decided to move on to painting the walls.

The insides were painted with Tamiya XF-76, Gray Green.

The floors were painted with Tamiya XF-80, Royal Light Gray.

The outer wall surfaces were painted using a procedure similar to the one I used last summer on the Weekly Herald project.

Although, I did make a couple of modifications to the process. 

First, on the Weekly Herald I primed the walls with a spray of Tamiya's white surface primer, but I didn't do that here. This kit's walls are a light brown colour instead of an acid yellow, so I thought it was ok to work directly on the pieces (recall that I had washed them in the last instalment in order to remove any traces of mould release). 

Second, I mixed the brick colour using Revell Aqua Colour instead of Model Master acrylics. As you may know, I'm trying out new acrylics since Model Master paints have been discontinued.

The brick colour mix I used was Revell's 36137, Reddish brown, and 36162, Mossy green. The green is to dull the brown to a more weathered bricky colour. I mix the paint on my palette to keep the colour loose, and the ratio is about 3 reddish brown to 1 green. Once the base brick layer colour was painted on, some thin washes of gray, reddish brown, and flat black were applied for further weathering. The result isn't superdetailed bricks, but something more impressionistic. 

I haven't trashed my remaining Model Master paints. I used their Aged Concrete Flat for the window sills. I use this paint a lot in my practice and bought what my local hobby store had left. I'm sorry to see it go, but I think I can mix a substitute from Revell's 36189, Beige. Who knows, it might be even better than what I've been using!

Finally, the window frames were sprayed with Krylon Colormaster Hunter Green Satin. I don't know if that product is still available. I had a can on the shelf, and when a 10C day presented itself, I gave the window frames a spray. The thought of brush painting them all seemed a little too masochistic. 

Speaking of windows, the kit comes with clear pieces that have moulded on window mullions. These are good pieces, but I thought the mullions were a little too closely spaced for an HO-scale model, and once painted, they would obscure the views inside, which sort of defeats one of the main features of this project. 

I decided to replace the kit's windows with ones cut from some clear plastic sheet I had on hand. I don't recall the plastic's specifications other than its from a huge sheet I bought in 2019 at an art supply in Syracuse, New York, when John, Gail, Debra, and I went to the city's train show that year. Little did we know it would be the last train show for who knows how long. At the time I thought the giant sheet would last the rest of my life. I've used more than half of it, so either the reaper is nearby, or I need to get more - I think it's the later :-)

To each piece of 'glass' I inked in a border with a Sharpie pen. The border helps to neaten the interior, and hide the bond to the window frame. They were glued to the frames with Weld Bond.

The individual window panes seem a little too big for HO-scale, but they afford good views to the inside.

After painting, and then gluing in all the window components, I really wanted to see how this thing looked. So I decided it was time to get hammered!

No, not that, this: I glued the entrance wall to a side wall, and then glued that assembly to the ground floor, using strategically applied hammers to hold the thing while the glue dried. 

Once dry, it was time to glue on the back wall. 

I don't use these old ball-peen hammers for hammering much these days. They're relics from my father and grandfather, but they come in handy at times. Although I wouldn't recommend this technique if animals or small children are running around, as these are precariously balanced.

Left: A stack of '70s CARtoons; Right: A few of today's CARtoons

While glue was drying I popped out to a hobby store I hadn't visited since well before the pandemic began. Restrictions had eased back a bit, and I wanted to get out. I found an AMT '72 GMC Jimmy kit that looked like a full sized restoration of a GMC pickup a friend has underway, but the biggest surprise was seeing the new incarnation of CARtoons on the magazine shelf. 

For awhile in the '70s I bought it and its sister publication, Hotrod Cartoons, almost as frequently as Model Railroader. CARtoons has been modernized - in a good way - but it still strikes a chord. Looking back, I think it's because a lot of its stories have to do with people building cool custom cars from junk and seemingly odd combinations of stuff. I was a plastic car modeller, influenced by CARtoons and Car Model magazines, well before model train stuff grabbed me, so I think that the 'kit-mingling' and 'make stuff from odd components' vibes, which were themes of those publications, followed me into model railroading. Maybe there needs to a CURRENtoons magazine to honour the master of kit-mingling, Art Curren :-)

Anyway, once the glued had dried on the walls and ground floor, I slipped in the second floor to see how it looked. I didn't glue it in place just yet. 

The fit is pretty good. 

I then carefully press fit the fourth wall onto the base. No glue was applied, I just wanted to test the fit and see how things looked. 

I was happy that it fit quite well. The kit is precise and well moulded, so maybe this shouldn't be a surprise. 

Ok, the roof isn't on, the place is filled with light, but the views inside are quite good. There'll be lights installed, so even when the roof's on, you should be able to see inside rather easily.

Although, one thing I realized I could have done better was the arrangement of doors on the back wall.

For awhile I thought the building would house two tenants, so I'd have two delivery doors, one on each side. But, when I changed it to one tenant, I should have placed a single delivery door in the centre, with brick inserts on the sides. And I should have left the door open, or at least made a moveable one. That way a pickup could drive inside and back up right to the elevator in the centre of the building. That would have added the potential for some interesting scenes. Oh well, maybe on the next one :-)

You can see the doors and associated openings are big enough to drive in automobiles or pickups, so there's potential for a variety of businesses to be supported by other minglings of this kit. 

That's it for now.

Next up: detailing the interior.

Godzilla vs P-38 Lightning

I'm working away on the Revell P-38 kit. I suspect this isn't considered one of the best models of that airplane. Part fit is not that great, and I can see a lot of filling and filing and fitting on the horizon. You can see many issues in the photo. I'll need to make a decision about how far to go with that work.

Although it's not the greatest kit, this project is sort of a sentimental journey. The P-38 was one of my father's favourite planes, and in a post at the long defunct retroDynamics from back in 2009 I included a scan of one his P-38 postcards in a story about Godzilla and disk planes. It's a little hard to explain, so here's the old post.

From 29 April 2009:

Early last summer I stumbled across the comic book reprints offered by DC and Marvel in their DC Showcase Presents and Marvel Essentials series. Basically, these are 500-page volumes of reprints of selected comic books in black-and-white form. Well, I dove in and bought and read a number of titles that I either was forbidden to read as a kid or missed entirely. I readily admit there was no intellectual value in this comic reading extravaganza, but it was fun. Godzilla: King of the Monsters in the Marvel Essentials series is a one-volume collection of all the comics in Marvel’s Godzilla title published in the late ‘70s. All I can say is that it is one weird, absurd and hilarious read. The storyline does appear to run out of steam near the end of the series, but it was probably tough to dream up things to do for two years for a character whose main attributes are stomping around and breaking big things.

[The cockpit is huge]

There’s an incredible collection of strange flying machines in Godzilla, but the ones that caught my eye were the seemingly circular wing interceptors used by S.H.I.E.L.D. From my haphazard reading of comics, it seems that flying things whose primary feature is a disk are usually some sort of alien spacecraft: classic flying saucers. Atmospheric airplanes flown by human beings whose wing is a disk or circle seem almost nonexistent, so I was surprised to see these.

[The wing planform looks elliptical - that's gotta hurt !]

When I was looking up the pictures for this post, closer examination suggested that the wing may be actually a rather fat ellipse and not a circle at all. I think I jumped to the circular wing conclusion because I was biased that way, and I figured the perspective views of the planes were just distorting the circular planforms into ellipses, but they really do look like rather fat elliptical planforms when you study the drawings more carefully.

[A P-38 postcard, from the 1940's I think] 

As well, their twin boom design and large cowls instantly reminded me of the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. However, unlike the P-38s, these S.H.I.E.L.D disk-planes can also hover. How they might do this is obviously a quirk in the physics of the Marvel universe.

[It can somehow hover - and no downwash!] 

Mr. Herb Trimpe and Mr. Tom Sutton are attributed as the Pencillers or Artists in this series, so I assume they invented these airplanes. They did a great job; the planes have a ring of truth to them.

The model railroad cartoons of Doug Wright

Snipped from July '64 MR Doug Wright cartoon - his drawing style is unmistakeable.

I wasn’t kidding when I noted that one thing leads to another on this journey through the pages of old model railroading magazines. Looking for Gil Mellé cartoons lead to finding Bill Baron cartoons, which has lead to finding Doug Wright cartoons. And it happened quite by accident. I was chatting with Vince on the phone while scrolling absentmindedly through some pages in the Model Railroader archive, and bingo, a cartoon with Doug Wright’s signature, and just as importantly, his signature style.

Why it was so surprising to me is that Wright is one of Canada's most famous cartoonists, and inspiration for many significant Canadian cartoonists. There’s even a cartooning award, The Doug Wright Awards for Canadian Cartooning, established in his honour. I remember reading his strip, Doug Wright’s Family, in the Toronto Star back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but I didn’t know he had this connection to model railroading.

Here’re the cartoons I’ve found so far. As always, I’ll keep the list fresh if new items are found. If you see anything wrong or missing, please contact me and I’ll make appropriate updates.

MR = Model Railroader

1962

Dec: 1 single panel cartoon (MR) [reprinted from the Montreal Star]

1963

Feb: 1 single panel cartoon (MR) [reprinted from the Montreal Star]

Dec: 1 single panel cartoon (MR)

1964

Feb: 1 single panel cartoon (MR)

Jul: 1 single panel cartoon (MR)

1969

Oct: 1 single panel cartoon (MR)

Model Railroader also ran a little note about Doug Wright in the Bull Session column of their Dec ’62 issue. In it our pseudonymed columnist, Ray L. Rhodes, mentions that the cartoon they were running that month first appeared in an August ’62 issue of the Montreal Star to coincide with the Montreal NMRA convention, and to celebrate Montreal resident Dr. Roy Dohn’s layout, which was featured in How we rebuilt the Victoria Northern in the Aug ’62 issue of MR. At the end of the note they quote Wright as saying he found Bill Livingston’s article, My railroad just growed in the Sept ’62 MR, inspirational, and he planned to build a 5’ x 1’ scenic module over the winter. 

Did Wright build that module, or any sort of model railroad? Is it well known that he had an interest in model railroading, and maybe it’s just me who’s the last to know? The Off The Train Wire column in the Oct ’64 MR notes that Wright was selling colored prints of CN 4-8-2 No. 6065, one of the “bullet-nosed Betties”, available for decorating the railroad room or den, so it looks like his interest in railroading things continued, but did it continue in model form as well? Seth has written a book about Doug Wright. I need to get a copy and see what it has to say. Stay tuned.