#upside downs

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Edit: Me

Gustave Verbeck had a short lived newspaper strip in 1904 for the New York Herald called “The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo”, where the second half of the strip's storyline was the first half of the strip turned upside down.

Born in Nagasaki, Japan, he left to study art in Paris, and started his cartooning and illustration career working for several European newspapers. Drawn towards the Cabaret du Chat Noir, Gustave Verbeck designed a shadow play titled “Le Malin Kangourou”, and in 1893/1894, he created several illustrations for the newspaper Le Chat Noir.

Lambiek notes he moved to the United States around 1900, doing illustration work for McClure's, Harper's, American Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post, before joining the staff of the New York Herald. “The Upside Downs of Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo”, published between 1903 and 1905, is the best known, an ingenious strip comprising a twelve-panel story in six panels. Ater six panels, the reader turns the page upside down to see the other half of the tale.

The storyline, often bizarre and edged with dark humour, hardly seems to suffer from the rigid form Verbeck imposed on it; the strip retains a fresh and surprising element, even for modern-day readers.

His other strips were “Terrors of the Tiny Tads” (1905) and “The Loony Lyrics of Lulu” (1910), about the monster-hunt of a crazy professor and his niece, Lulu.