the upside down world of gustave verbeek

The format of the strip put extreme restrictions on the use of word balloons (even with the use of ambigrams only three strips used word-balloons, all in March 1904).

A pilot strip was published on October 4, 1903. Verbeek created a total of 64 of these strips for The New York Herald, from October 11, 1903, to January 15, 1905. When inverted, the image shows a later scene of Lovekins in the beak of a giant roc: Muffaroo's canoe has become the bird's beak, the fish has turned into the bird's head, the island has become its body and the trees its legs, and Muffaroo has turned into Lovekins. For example, in one often-reproduced panel, Muffaroo appears in a canoe next to a tree-covered island, and is being attacked by a large fish.

The two main characters were designed such that each would be perceived as the other character when inverted. His signature usually appeared at the top of the first/last panel, upside down. Verbeek is most noted for The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo, a weekly 6-panel comic strip in which the first half of the story was illustrated and captioned right-side-up, then the reader would turn the page up-side-down, and the inverted illustrations with additional captions describing the scenes told the second half of the story, for a total of 12 panels. Easy Papa appeared in The New York Herald from May 25, 1902, through February 1, 1903. Verbeek's first strip was Easy Papa, a fairly conventional strip about two mischievous kids and their father, similar to the highly popular contemporary strip The Katzenjammer Kids, which ran in a competing newspaper. He had been a patient there for two months.

He was ill for two years, and died on Decemat the Home for Incurables, on Third Avenue and 183rd Street in the Bronx, New York City. He was noted for his expressionist monotypes, which were the subject of an article in The Century Magazine in June 1916. In the 1910s he abandoned cartooning and became a fine artist. In 1900 he moved to the United States, where he did illustrations for magazines such as Harper's, and produced a series of weekly comic strips for newspapers. He grew up in Japan, but went to Paris to study art, and worked for several European newspapers, creating illustrations and cartoons. He was born as Gustave Verbeck ( Dutch: ) in Nagasaki, Japan in 1867, the son of Reformed Church in America missionary Guido Verbeck.

The upside down world of gustave verbeek