#Toonerville Folks

[tomoleary]

Fontaine Fox “Mickey (himself) McGuire” Toonerville Folks Daily Comic Strip Original Art (McNaught Syndicate, undated)

[gordoymas]

Some of the comic strips which were significant influences on Arriola as a working cartoonist included Fontaine Fox's Toonerville Folks, Al Capp's Li'l Abner, Walt Kelly's Pogo and Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy, the latter of which earns a cameo in this self-referential strip from February 10, 1952.

[laughingblue12]

Toonerville, a Place I Once Lived In

There is a place so like the place where my heart and mind were born that I feel as if I have always lived there.  That place is a cartoon panel that ran in newspapers throughout the country from 1913 to 1955 (a year before I was born in Mason City, Iowa).  It was called Toonerville Folks and was centered around the famous Toonerville Trolley. Fontaine Fox was born near Louisville Kentucky in…

[7whistlepig7]

Clang, clang

Toonerville Trolley (Toonerville Folks) was a newspaper comic strip from 1908 to 1955. It was created by Fontaine Fox of Louisville. It is said to be inspired by the Brook Street trolley, which was a short line often getting used or shabby equipment. Brook Street runs parallel to I-65, on the east side of northbound I-65. This trolley ended in 1930.

[arkholt]

Toonerville Folks, by Fontaine Fox, from December 26, 1923.

More on the blog: http://blog.arkholt.com/toonerville-folks-2

[thebristolboard]

Comic Strip Classics postage stamps, 1995. 

[vastimpersonalforces]

African Canadian in Union Blue

by Michael Fraser; winner, CBC Poetry Prize, 2016 I was AWOL, an unpaid ridge runner, hawking distance from the coal-shaded Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, pulling fleet foot through night brush, my feet bramble-clawed and day-sore yowling for a pair of spendy cruisers. Bounty men near caught me in tamarack larch. I saw their smoothbore guns day clear, their eyes haired-up and owly. I was hanging by my eyelids and angled abeam through light-blazed meadow balm, jumping log cob and bull stumps, moss-bitten rot-hole fallers, deploying all the natural speed my buck-bred seed-folk gave me. I was baseborn in Chatham, mammy giving life to six pin-baskets in a rickety pushcart. If I were to see him now, I'd ask daddy why he heeled-off before eyeing me wrapped in scrapped yarn. His master named him John, echoing the new testament, and what mammy's broken water branded me. Whitney's cotton gin nearly snapped his hamitic saddle-brown back half open. Some days he bleated raw like a crushed side-born calf, sliding away from full breath. Heard he upped and skyrooted through Virginia pine faster than whiskey jacks whistling over feed camps, and sparked mammy's teenage mind before stone-rolling to his novel life, a rail toad booming around rusted aged jimmys and ragshag toonerville trolleys. I continued dim-moon travelling west through puckerbush, sledge, and prick-filled tanglewood, lodging with other lucked-out negroes beside slick calm finger lakes, hauling soaked rick to hem-load tipcarts. We'd light down to chew tuff cow-greased pone before snacking tobacco ropes, our smoky tea-skinned black bodies day-whipped and legged out. White clodhopper abolitionists and schoolmarms let me sleep on shakedowns and boil-up my battered threads out back, stooped over hose bibbs, rubboards, or wind-turned mill wash. A swamp Yankee and his jake leg wife above Rochester stodged up scrapple, fire-burnt tunkup, and slack salted Pope's nose. We popped it down with overproof lamp oil and everyone was all in, plow shined. My mind was so jag skated, I talked all my closed business like I was up a redwood tree. Can't extract when my head clunked the sewed-rag shuck bed. I night-woke bedfast with scarlet runners beetling my bare flesh. Sweat runnelled and rilled either side of my chest hillslopes. Heard hushed words and realised they were studying to forlay me to sellers. Morning I pretended to smudge along, then lit out crow-quick past tumps and shadebark glades of knurled hickory. On the final night, I met bullhorn thunderheads throwing froth-smurred gulley washers and stump-mover skies. I squinched and child-stivered through teeming chizzly freshets that sizzled and gaffed me, the mud water pooling the path's apron. Almost done in, I saw America's back forty sproutland, sun-glimming and drying after the rains had sugared-off. I went down the ravine scoop smiling towards birlers and their floaty Niagara chuck boats, waiting to river cross into Canaan.

[fortunecookied]

Comic Strip Classics, 1995

Commemorative set issued by the US Postal Service to celebrate the centenary of the newspaper comic strip

[laughingblue12]

Art Day - Book-shelf Town

My model railroad layout used to feature a model town I called Toonerville. The town continues to exist as models I have built and/or painted sitting on book shelves and tables. The streets of Toonerville are narrow, but basically book-shelf straight. Some folks who live there are poor. The old woman who lives in a shoe is one of those. The residents of the big house on Mel Gibson Street are…

[laughingblue12]

Toonerville, a Place I Once Lived In

There is a place so like the place where my heart and mind were born that I feel as if I have always lived there.  That place is a cartoon panel that ran in newspapers throughout the country from 1913 to 1955 (a year before I was born in Mason City, Iowa).  It was called Toonerville Folks and was centered around the famous Toonerville Trolley. Fontaine Fox was born near Louisville Kentucky in…

[laughingblue12]

Toonerville, a Place I Once Lived In

There is a place so like the place where my heart and mind were born that I feel as if I have always lived there.  That place is a cartoon panel that ran in newspapers throughout the country from 1913 to 1955 (a year before I was born in Mason City, Iowa).  It was called Toonerville Folks and was centered around the famous Toonerville Trolley. Fontaine Fox was born near Louisville Kentucky in…

[laughingblue12]

Toonerville, a Place I Once Lived In

Toonerville, a Place I Once Lived In

There is a place so like the place where my heart and mind were born that I feel as if I have always lived there.  That place is a cartoon panel that ran in newspapers throughout the country from 1913 to 1955 (a year before I was born in Mason City, Iowa).  It was called Toonerville Folks and was centered around the famous Toonerville Trolley. Fontaine Fox was born near Louisville Kentucky in…

[laughingblue12]

Toonerville, a Place I Once Lived In

Toonerville, a Place I Once Lived In

There is a place so like the place where my heart and mind were born that I feel as if I have always lived there.  That place is a cartoon panel that ran in newspapers throughout the country from 1913 to 1955 (a year before I was born in Mason City, Iowa).  It was called Toonerville Folks and was centered around the famous Toonerville Trolley. Fontaine Fox was born near Louisville Kentucky in…