Palookaville is a semi-autobiographical comic created by Seth, the pen name of Gregory Gallant. Part of the story here is his search for a fictitious New Yorker cartoonist named Kalo. He has just discovered Kalo's real name, and when he shares this information with this friend and fellow cartoonist Chester Brown, Brown hands him a surprise - a 1978 issue of Popular Cartoons with a Kalo cartoon in it!
From Palookaville #5 (May 1994, Web-Ed's collection). Copyright 1994 Seth.
Brown also confesses that he bought the magazine for the Bill Ward cartoons (as indeed many people did). Seth responds,
"Bill Ward! Ha-Ha! The guy who draws the torpedo tits?"
Yep Seth, that's the guy
! (Perhaps Seth was at that time unfamiliar with Ward's comics work during the Golden Age, or perhaps Ward through his own fault will always be remembered as the guy who took big boobs to ridiculous extremes). Seth also mentions Wenzel and DeCarlo, realizing that their work in the magazine must have been reprinted from the '50's.Now while this series was coming out (20 years ago already - sheesh!), some of us thought there really might be a New Yorker cartoonist named Kalo - Seth did not reveal until later that he had made the name up. I didn't bother to research it since no spanking was involved, but now I have to wonder: this story seems pretty authentic - is it possible Seth merely changed the name of the cartoonist? After all, he uses a pen name himself. Off the top of my head, I can't name every New Yorker cartoonist who may later have sold to Humorama, but one man who definitely did was Kirk Stiles (39 M/F Stiles spanking cartoons in Humorama are currently documented).
There is some resemblance: Kalo was supposedly Jack Kalloway, and Kirk Stiles signed his work "Kirk". I've never met Seth but if I do I'll be very tempted to ask him. In any case it was fascinating to run into this reference to Humorama.
