Percy the Robot - 4 Pagine e strisce di giornale - 1912

Rare surviving episodes from various Sunday Comics sections of Percy by Harry Cornell "H. C." Greening on one each single full page. This is the first comic ever with a robot !

Published in 1912.

On the back: "Brick" Bodkins' Pa, Uncle Mun,...

Percy, the "mechanism man," entered the world on October 1, 1911, always smiling, serene, silent, eager-to please, and thereby doomed to wreak havoc on everyone nearby. His inventor was a 35-year-old veteran comic artist, Harry Cornell "H. C." Greening. Greening, we know thanks to the research of comic strip historians like Allan Holtz, Paul Tumey, John Adcock, and Alex Jay, was born in Titusville, PA, on May 30, 1876, getting a job on the New York Herald as a cartoonist when he was a mere twenty, staying with them for most of his career. He published in most of the major comic magazines, illustrated books, and put out a huge number of comic strips. The Herald syndicated many of his those strips to newspapers around the country, although he worked with other, sometimes superior, distributors as well. The strips' names evoke another era: Joco and Jack, The Wishbone Man, Uncle George Washington Bings, The Woo Woo Bird, Prince Errant, and Majah Moovie.

Percy appeared every Sunday, a huge splash filling a page with color in the days when almost all print works were limited to black and white. Newspapers then took up space of their own, printed in what was called broadsheet size, approximately 15" x 24". Percy is as formulaic as a Punch and Judy show; it has one joke, endlessly repeated, as expected as the squirt of seltzer in the baggy-pants comic's vaudeville routine. Greening laid it out for readers, whole and immutable, in the very first strip, reprinted above, nine large panels plus a title banner. In this first panel we meet the inventor, a caricature of the Germanic egghead who is brilliant but has no common sense. Never named, but obviously an academic (called Professor in a few later strips), he speaks in the broad dialect that convulsed audiences in the pre-WWI era. (In the early days of the Marx Brothers' act, Groucho appeared as a German dialect comic to brother Harpo's mute, havoc-wreaking fool.) "My inventioning is completioned, a mechanism man," he exclaims. "No more strikings! No more servants example!" With modern simplicity Percy can be instructed to perform a task merely by punching one of the buttons on his back. That's right: Percy was pre-programmed with an astounding variety of apps. So simple that anyone could set him in motion, even by accidently pushing the wrong button, which happens with astounding frequency.

The pages are in good condition, although wrinkles, tears, flaking and missing pieces may occur.

The lots in this auction can be shipped combined. This is taken into account up to a weight of 5 kg. If packages need to be split due to weight, an additional charge will apply. In this case, we will contact you.

Will be shipped with track&trace.

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