Gustave Verbeek

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Gustave Verbeek (sometimes spelled Gustave Verbeck) (1867, Nagasaki, Japan - 1937, New York City, New York) was a newspaper cartoonist in the early 1900s.

Verbeek was of Dutch ancestry, but was born in Nagasaki, the son of Reformed Church in America missionary Guido Verbeck. He grew up in Japan, but went to Paris to study art. He worked for several European newspapers, creating illustrations and cartoons. Around 1900 he moved to America where the immigration officer misspelled his name as "Verbeck". Throughout his career he continued to sign his works with both names. In the 1920s he started concentrating on engraving and painting.

He is most noted for his unique The Upside Downs, 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 told the second half of the story.

The full title of the feature was The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo. The two main characters were designed such that each would be perceived as the other character when upside down, which facilitated the storytelling. The most famous and frequently-reprinted panel from The Upside Downs depicts, in one orientation, Muffaroo in his canoe being attacked by a fish, close to a tree-covered island. When inverted the image shows 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. Finally, Muffaroo has turned into Lovekins. He created a total of 64 comics for The New York Herald, they ran from October 11, 1903 to January 15, 1905.

Verbeek's other works included The Terrors of the Tiny Tads, which featured a variety of strange creatures based on clever word combinations, such as a "hippopautomobile" (a hippopotamus with seats in its back as in an automobile) or a "pelicanoe" (a pelican in which a rider could sit and paddle like a canoe).

[edit] External links

• Some examples of Upside Downs strips
• More examples of Upside Downs strips
• Full-color example of an Upside Down strip
• Toonopedia entry for The Upside Downs
• Tribute strip by Brad Young
• A short biography
• List of strips and collections