Smokey Stover

• Title — Smokey Stover • Creator — Bill Holman • Status — Concluded • Syndicate — New York News-Chicago Tribune Syndicate • Publisher — Whitman, Blackthorne Publishing, Fantagraphics • Genre — Humor • First — March 10, 1935 • Last — 1972

Holman was born in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and moved to Chicago, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts while working as an office boy in the Chicago Tribune art department. He relocated to New York City where he worked as a staff artist at the New York Herald Tribune and submitted freelance cartoons to magazines, including Colliers, The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Judge, and Everybody's Weekly. He began Smokey Stover as a Sunday comic strip for the Chicago Tribune Syndicate on March 10, 1935. The daily comic strip began on November 14, 1938.

The madcap situations in Holman's comic strip usually feature Smokey (short for "Smokestack") Stover, the "foolish foo (fire)fighter", often riding in his self-balancing, two-wheeled "Foomobile" (a single-axle fire engine which resembles a modern Segway with seats, or an independent sidecar), his wife Cookie, his son Earl, his boss Chief Cash U. Nutt, the Chief's wife Hazel Nutt and the firehouse Dalmatian mascot, Sparks. Smokey has an array of eccentric relatives who are also featured occasionally, with names like "Uncle Potbelly Stover", "Rusty Stover" and "Cousin Cole Stover". Smokey wears bright red (or yellow) rubber boots and a firefighter's helmet (always worn back-to-front), which he sometimes ties to his nose with string, in lieu of a chinstrap. His trademark helmet also features a prominent hole in its hinged brim, which he occasionally uses as an ashtray for his lit cigar. Although most of the sequences in the strip (and the occasional comic book) center on Smokey's escapades with the Chief, the loose "plots" and situations are mainly a framework to display an endless parade of off-the-wall verbal and visual humor.

The panels of Smokey Stover regularly include sight gags, mishaps, absurd vehicles, and bizarre household items, including oddly shaped furniture, clocks, vases, headwear, cigarette holders, and telephones. Framed pictures on the walls change completely from panel to panel or feature the subjects literally jumping out of the frames. The strip also abounds in nonsensical dialogue, non-sequiturs, and puns. The puns and silly pictures on the wall was the feature that provoked the most reader mail, according to articles and interviews with Holman. The cartoonist often visited the syndicate office to pick up the puns which readers suggested for the walls. He called these items "wallnuts". For example, a picture of a fish opening a door is labeled "calling cod".

• Illustration — 1946 strip as reprinted in issue 64 of the Smokey Stover comic book. The comic strip featured signs with strange nonsense words and phrases, such as "foo", "notary sojac", "scram gravy ain't wavey", and "1506 nix nix", and some became catchphrases. Holman defined "notary sojac" as Gaelic for "Merry Christmas" (Nodlaig Sodhach), and "1506 nix nix" was reportedly a private joke that included the hotel room number of cartoonist Al Posen, Holman's friend. His most frequent nonsense word was "foo", and Holman peppered his work with foo labels and puns. The term spread in popular culture during the 1930s and found use in 1938–39 Warner Brothers cartoons, most notably by director Bob Clampett, including Porky in Wackyland. Harvey Kurtzman claimed that the comic influenced him to use nonsense words and fill the corner panels of MAD Magazine with "nonsensical details". Smokey "often called himself a foo fighter when anyone else would have said firefighter", according to comics historian Don Markstein. "The word foo also turned up on signs, lists, menus, and the lips of various characters at random but frequent intervals." Foo may have been inspired by the French word feu meaning "fire", as Smokey's catch phrase was "where there's foo, there's fire", but Holman never gave a straight answer as to the origin. Holman states that he used the word due to having seen it on the bottom of a jade Chinese figurine in Chinatown, San Francisco, meaning "good luck". This is presumably a transliteration of the fu character (fú, 福), which is a common character for fortune, and figurines are common in Chinese communities featuring the "star gods" Fú, Lù, Shòu.

Holman launched an accompanying topper strip called Spooky one month later (April 7, 1935), to run with Smokey Stover on Sundays. With a perpetually bandaged tail, the peculiar black cat Spooky lives with her owner Fenwick Flooky, who does embroidery while characteristically wearing a fez and sitting barefoot in a rocking chair. Holman used the pseudonym "Scat H." to sign the strip. The topper ran until the strip ended in 1972.

Spooky, who makes frequent cameo appearances in Smokey Stover, also regularly turns up in the background of Holman's daily gag panel feature, Nuts and Jolts. Syndicated for more than three decades from July 8, 1935, to 1970, Nuts and Jolts was a stand-alone panel cartoon featuring an ever-changing cast of everyday people doing silly things.

• In 1971, Smokey Stover was a featured segment on Filmation's Archie's TV Funnies, the only animated form of this comic. Smokey Stover became one of several rotating segments on the Saturday morning cartoon series. It was repeated in 1978, without Archie, under the title Fabulous Funnies.

• A novelty song based on Smokey Stover—"What This Country Needs Is Foo", with words and "FOOsic" by Mack Kay—was recorded by Eddie DeLange and His Orchestra on Bluebird Records in 1939. Holman illustrated the cover for the sheet music, released by Joe Davis, Inc. Music Publishers. • In 1941, Bill Holman gave his blessing to The Order of Smokey Stover, a social club created by the Redmond Volunteer Firefighters Association in Redmond, Oregon. • In 1953, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, firefighters William J. Knight and Walter J. Pictrowski designed and built a three-wheeled version of Smokey Stover's Foo Mobile. With permission and suggestions from Holman, the vehicle was adorned with familiar paraphernalia, such as a rubber-handled ax, a fire call box, a fire gong, crank handle and steam-generating radiator cap (a fire nozzle with the slogan "Sea-Oh-Too!"). The Foo Car has been in and out of service over the years and has been restored twice, brought back for appearances at Berkshire area parades, musters and charity events. It is currently garaged. • Smokey Stover is referenced in "Jumbeliah", an unreleased song Bruce Springsteen wrote in his early career: "Built like Marilyn Monroe, and she walks just like Smokey Stover." • In the 1980s, Gateway Scientific Inc. produced a line of smoke alarms marketed under the Smokey Stover brand name, with the packages featuring his likeness. • Pete Schlatter of Francesville, Indiana constructed a workable single-axle, two-wheel Foomobile by hiding four support wheels inside the two wheels. • In 2001, Dark Horse Comics issued a limited edition figure of Smokey Stover in a colorful collector tin, as part of their line of Classic Comic Characters—designated as statue No. 21.