Eek & Meek – Benjamin L. Clark, writer

A small pile of newspaper comic strip clippings from around 1970.

1968.03.18, Eek and Meek newspaper clipping

1968.04.01, Eek and Meek newspaper clipping

1968.06.25, Eek and Meek newspaper comic strip

I received another batch of old Eek and Meek comic strip clippings, like in my earlier post, but way more of them. All of them seem to be 1968-1970, or so. As I was getting them sorted, only three 1968 strips seem to be in this lot, so here they are!

If you collect newspaper comic strips, what do you do if they’re missing some of the strip? I have two here, one of which has part of the final panel ripped away. These strips were attached to a different strip that I think the collector was going for; they were ancillary, and they didn’t care. I digitally dropped in the missing bits from online scans, which is why a little slice is a black-and-white scan instead of a full 300dpi color scan.

If I was really working to put together a collection of clippings of a particular strip, this would be unacceptable, but for me, here, I can live with it. For now. And, truthfully, I’m not even sure what I’ll do with these clippings, if I’ll keep them or offer them up at some point for something else.

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

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A small pile of Eek & Meek daily comic strip clippings. They are printed in blank ink on yellowed newsprint paper. They all date between 1967 and 1970. — A small pile of Eek & Meek daily comic strip clippings, 1967-1970

I recently acquired some comic strip clippings for my collection, and it came with a bonus batch of clippings for a strip I don’t collect, but I’m glad to have. I don’t know much about cartoonist Howie Schnieder, but I was aware of his Eek & Meek, though I didn’t realize it ran so long! I think of it as an early 1970s strip, which may be when it was most popular. Or maybe it’s just because my own newspaper, where I read the comics through the 1980s and 1990s, did not have it. Anyway, it’s fun to look at, which is the first thing a good comic strip should achieve. It’s also pretty funny.

Eek & Meek was a gag-a-day strip about anthropomorphic mice, though much later they would turn into people. I much prefer these mouse designs, though. The humor reminds me of early Johnny Hart B.C., and there’s something of Fontaine Fox in these poses. He really gets a lot of expressiveness into these characters that are really little more than stick figures, but there are other cartoonists who do this today. The drawing is interesting in its own way, as syndicates at the time became less concerned about detail and more on simplicity, or even so-called “bad” drawing, which is nearly always not actually true, but yes, much simpler compared to strips popular through the 1930s and ’40s. There’s something about it that reminds me of Stephan Pastis’s wonderful Pearls Before Swine, too. The drawing, in one sense but also the humor. I wonder if Stephan liked Eek & Meek growing up? I’ll have to ask him. Anyway, here are the eighteen clippings I have in chronological order, ranging in dates from 1967 to 1970: