A NEW SKIPPY BOOK

A news release from Rosebud Archives, whose stated goal is to breathe new life into the rich history of comics and graphic arts, announces a forthcoming expose, Skippy vs. the Mob: The Fight for Vesey Street and the American Soul. Authorized by the Percy Crosby Estate and Skippy, Inc., the book reprints a three-month 1930 sequence in Crosby’s strip in which he, through his juvenile hero Skippy, took on organized crime. Unhappily, according to Crosby’s daughter Joan Crosby Tibbetts, the episode proved the beginning of the end for the cartoonist.

Crosby was about to be embroiled in what has become a debilitating fight with the Skippy peanutbutter people to be compensated for their unauthorized use of his character’s name. (The whole sordid mess is detailed at some length in Harv’s Hindsights for April 2004.) Tibbetts has been carrying on the fight for the last 40 years.

Unbeknownst to her father in 1930, organized crime had corporate ties, as Tibbetts maintains in an introductory essay for the book, apparently with the people who stole Skippy’s name. Her contention, from what I’ve been able to deduce, is that the sequence in the comic strip resulted in the “vendetta that destroyed her father’s career and liberty,” a combined effort by the mob and the Skippy thieves. Crosby would die in an asylum where he had been committed for some behavioral problems that, today, would hardly dictate confinement.