Here is brief clip showing actors Alan Reed (left) and Eddie Bracken reading lines from the 1971 animated movie “Shinbone Alley” — with a glance at Carol Channing, too. The clip is from “Animation: A Living Art Form,” a 10-minute feature that was released with “Shinbone Alley” to explained the intricacies of the animation process. (Coming decades before computer animation, the 85-minute film required more than 400,000 drawings!)

Reed is known to many as the voice of Fred Flintstone, but he also gave a memorable performance in “Shinbone Alley” as Mehitabel’s tough-guy tomcat boyfriend, Big Bill. Bracken and Channing were Archy and Mehitabel, reprising their roles on a remarkable concept album released by Capitol Records in 1954, “archy and mehitabel: a back-alley opera”—the predecessor of the 1957 Broadway show “Shinbone Alley,” starring Eartha Kitt and Bracken, as well as the 1971 animated movie.

“Shinbone Alley” confounded critics, who were impressed with the voice actors and with the movie’s bold animation, unlike anything seen in Hollywood in years. But they rightly pointed out that the movie’s premise — a cockroach infatuated with an alley cat, a love affair that Don Marquis never suggested in his original stories 40 years earlier — was preposterous.

“Animation: A Living Art Form” is impossible to find today. The clip is taken from an original 16mm film that was acquired 20 years ago (on eBay) and converted to digital format. “Shinbone Alley” is much easier to find, on old VCR tapes and on DVD. It’s also available on YouTube, here.

The New York Times today printed obituaries for two women whose lives could not have been more dissimilar.

Janet Wolfe, 101, was a New York socialite, “gleeful gadabout” and friend to some of the most powerful and creative men of the last century. Federico Fellini made passes at her, The Times noted, and Orson Welles sawed her in half in a magic show. Holly Woodlawn, 69, was a transgender actress who starred in Andy Warhol’s 1970 underground film “Trash” and was the inspiration for Lou Reed’s epic ballad “Walk on the Wild Side.”

Wolfe and Woodlawn had little in common except a rebellious spirit, bold and unstoppable, and a determination to wring every bit of life out of their time on this planet. So it’s no surprise that The Times has compared both women to Mehitabel, the brassy, bawdy alley cat whose adventures were captured in Don Marquis’s classic 1927 collection of tall tales and light verse, “archy and mehitabel.” The comparisons span many decades but are nonetheless fresh.

The Times’ Margalit Fox, in her obituary of Wolfe, wrote that to be in her presence “was to find oneself enveloped by an amiable hurricane, equal parts Holly Golightly, Auntie Mame and Mehitabel, the dowager cat at the center of ‘Archy and Mehitabel,’ Don Marquis’s celebrated World War I-era column in The Evening Sun.

“ ‘Toujours gai’ — ‘Always cheerful’ — Mehitabel would declare in her dotage; ‘there’s a dance in the old dame yet.’ (Ms. Wolfe, in fact, was drawn to strays: If she found a kitten on the street she might well take it to Schrafft’s for a bite.)”

Fox’s analogy was perfect. So too was a comparison of Woodlawn and Mehitabel in a 1971 Times review of the animated film “Shinbone Alley,” by Vincent Canby. Mehitabel, Canby wrote, was “a toujours gai old dame with the soul of Cleopatra, the airs of Emma Bovary, the artistic longings of Isadora Duncan, the hangovers of Dorothy Parker’s Big Blonde, and the sexual resolve of “Trash’s” Holly Woodlawn.”

Don Marquis first wrote about Mehitabel in 1916. Nearly a century later, it’s remarkable to see that Mehitabel remains a touchstone for women such as Wolfe and Woodlawn — brave, unrelenting and thoroughly fascinating. The world needs more of them.

(Icing on the cake: Fox’s obituary of Wolfe included a link to this website’s Archy and Mehitabel page. Thanks!)

George Herriman’s drawings of Archy and Mehitabel brilliantly capture the spirit of their subjects: the inquisitive cockroach and the sassy, brassy alleycat. To many most readers, the drawings are as much a part of Archy and Mehitabel’s charm as Don Marquis’s stories about them.

But Herriman was just one of many artists to capture their magic. Edward Gorey drew Archy and Mehitabel, and so did cartoonists at The New Yorker and Collier’s magazines. Animators drew them in a feature film, and artists today continue to draw inspiration from cockroach and cat.

Here is a look at Archy the cockroach through the eyes and pens and pencils of 10 artists, drawn over the course of nine decades. Scroll further down the page for an up-close look at each of the images. And look for drawings of Mehitabel in a future post.

Click on the thumbnail images below for full-size views:

The very first image of Archy appeared in the New York Tribune on September 11, 1922. The was the day Don Marquis joined the Tribune as its star columnist, and the newspaper took out half-page advertisements in rival dailies, including The New York Times, to brag about its new hire. Marquis had created Archy six years earlier at The Evening Sun and would remain at the Tribune until 1925.

This image accompanied a retelling of Don’s classic story “the lesson of the moth” that ran in Collier’s magazine on June 5, 1926. After Don left the Tribune, he had a weekly column in Collier’s titled “If You Know What I Mean” that ran for one year. Archy, of course, made regular appearances in it. His story of the moth willing to fry himself on a lightbulb was a repeat; it had previously appeared in The Sun in 1922.

The book “archly and mehitabel” had been in print for three years when, in 1930, Don’s publisher, Doubleday Doran, asked what he thought about a new edition with illustrations by George Herriman, who was well on his way to achieving cult status with his weirdly brilliant newspaper comic strip Krazy Kat. Don replied that if it would boost sales, he was all for it. It did, and the rest, as they say, is history. (For more on Herriman and the dust jackets he created for Marquis’s books, check out this recent blog post.)

Collier’s magazine published many of Don’s short stories and poems throughout the 1920s and ’30s, and this image of Archy scuttling away from a tin of insect repellant was part of a rhyming alphabet by Don that appeared in the July 22, 1933, issue.  The alphabet is tremendously funny, and begins, naturally, with the letter A: “a is for Archy, which becomes / a synonym for roaches / an archy neither stings nor hums / but subtly he encroaches / some persons heed him and cry louder / others reach for the insect powder.” View the complete poem here.

This squib appeared in The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” column on January 14, 1950, accompanying a story on the death of The Sun newspaper. The magazine noted bitterly that in all the obituaries published by other newspapers, “there was only one mention of the most distinguished Sun man of them all, Don Marquis. The fact that the Sun office was the place where the lower-case Archy, the bug with the soul of a poet, subsisted on stale paste and apple parings and performed his nightly labors on the typewriter keys proved not worth a passing notice. Ah welladay!”

Archy came back to life, gloriously, in 1970 with the release of “Shinbone Alley,” a feature-length animated movie directed by John D. Wilson. It was based on a 1957 Broadway musical of the same, and it featured the voices of Carol Channing as Mehitabel, Eddie Bracken as Archy, and Alan Reed Sr. (“Fred Flintstone”) as Mehitabel’s tomcat boyfriend, Big Bill. It’s an enjoyable movie, with tuneful music and animation nothing like the standard Disney fare of that time.

Any literary character would be thrilled beyond words to be drawn by a master craftsman such as George Herriman, but Archy has the distinction of being drawn by two of the greatest illustrators of the 20th century. That second honor came with the release of the October 1986 issue of The Atlantic magazine, which featured a four-page spread of “lost” Archy stories illustrated by Edward Gorey.

Those lost stories mentioned above had been found by one Jeff Adams, who purchased the contents of an abandoned trunk of Marquis papers. Ten years after the Atlantic spread, Adams published a more robust collection of Archy stories that had never been included it books before. This new book was “archyology,” and it features a new set of illustrations by illustrator and New Yorker cartoonist Ed Frascino. More stories, and drawings followed in 1998 with “archyology ii.”

Some years back, a fortuitous mix of Google search terms revealed a webpage featuring the art of Paul Hosteler, an illustrator in Charlottesville, Virginia. He had posted several pages of unfinished sketches, including one from 2009 with drawings of Archy as a smart, sophisticated cockroach dude — wise and a bit world-weary. This is one of those sketches. Here is a link to Hostetler’s Facebook page.

Another lucky Google search uncovered the art of Isaac Cates, editor of Cartozia Tales, a clever magazine featuring stories by independent cartoonists. (And, oh yeah, Cates is also a Ph.D. poetry and writing lecturer at the University of Vermont). This image of Archy was part of an alphabet drawn in 2012 for his Satisfactory Comics blog.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, here are 10,000 that say Archy is alive and well as his 100th birthday approaches in March 2016 (see my archyFest! page). In fact, Archy has never looked better!

Mark your calendars! Fans of Archy and Mehitabel are already making plans to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Archy’s first appearance in Don Marquis’ Sun Dial column in the New York Evening Sun. March 29, 2016 will be a cockroach centenary like no other, and we’d like to hear about your plans — in New York and around the world. (The 1927 classic “archy and mehitabel,” after all, was popular in Canada, England, India and Australia as well as the United States, and translated editions were published in German and Italian.)

Is your theater group planning a production of “archy & mehitabel”? Maybe your school, library or book club can host a poetry reading, or a poetry slam. Or host a showing of the 1971 animated feature “Shinbone Alley.” A group in New York hopes to sponsor public displays and performances, and we welcome your ideas and involvement. Check out the link at the top of this page, “archyFest!” for more, and use the Twitter hashtag #archyfest! to keep in touch!

Here are publicity photos of Eddie Bracken and the inimitable Carol Channing taken during the studio recording of “archy and mehitabel: a back-alley opera,” a concept album by writer Joe Darion and composer George Kleisinger.

Darion and Kleinsinger recorded the album (Columbia ML 4963) in February 1954, but Columbia wasn’t sure it would sell and didn’t release the album until January 1955. They got behind the album after the Little Orchestra Society staged a successful, one-night performance at New York’s Town Hall theater on Dec. 6, 1954, though without Channing or Darion. It took another two-plus years before the renamed “Shinbone Alley” finally premiered on Broadway as a full-cast musical production. The Broadway show had been partly rewritten by an up-and-coming comic talent, Mel Brooks, and starred Bracken and Eartha Kitt. (Channing was pregnant when the show was being cast.) “Shinbone Alley” ran for only 49 performances, but several songs remained in Kitt’s repertoire for the rest of her life.

Channing and Bracken were reunited as lead vocal talents in the 1971 animated movie “Shinbone Alley.” Visit my Archy & Mehitabel page for more on the production’s enduring appeal, and click on the images above to see larger versions. The photos come from the Masterworks Broadway website, part of Sony Music Entertainment, which also has a link to buy a digital copy of the album from Amazon.com and Apple’s iTunes.

“Don Marquis and Rosita Alvarado in a pulsing dance of Spanish blood.” — photo caption on the cover of the Los Angeles Times’ Rotogravure section, May 1, 1927.

An online search for the name “Don Marquis” can yield some surprising results.

Perhaps you’ve seen links to those strident anti-abortion essays Don wrote. And maybe you’ve been tempted to read what Don had to say on the history of jazz since, after all, he wrote that biography of jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden. But if what you wanted was new insight into the life and times of the creator of “archy and mehitabel,” you would have been mistaken.

“Disambiguation” is the term used by Wikipedia, the online reference site, to distinguish among various entries bearing the same title or keyword. And it might be useful here, near the start of this blog, to disambiguate among the several Don Marquises who have made a name for themselves in disparate endeavors.

Don Marquis is indeed an opponent of abortion rights. He is a philosophy professor and medical ethicist at the University of Kansas, and his 1989 essay “Why Abortion Is Immoral” is widely quoted by adherents.

Don Marquis is also the author of “In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz,” a 1978 biography of the cornet player who, in the words of Wikipedia, “is regarded by contemporaries as a key figure in the development of a New Orleans style of rag-time music which later came to be known as jazz.”

Confusing Don Marquis the columnist and humor writer with other men of the same name is nothing new. Don himself once wrote, with perhaps just a bit of exaggeration, that he had been inundated with angry letters from women in California claiming that he had promised them love and marriage and then abandoned them at the altar. In fact, at least two other Don Marquises are known to have lived in California during the 1920s and ’30s, one of them a Latin dancer in Los Angeles and the other a Stanford grad and car dealer in Oakland.

And then there is Don Marquis the director of the 1923 silent movie “Blood Test.”

Except for his name in the credits of that one movie, virtually nothing is known today about the director of “Blood Test,” itself a forgettable Western melodrama that was released in April 1923. Yet IMDb, a leading Internet movie database, has linked “Blood Test” director Marquis to the writer responsible for the 1926 silent movie “The Old Soak,” the 1937 talkie “Good Old Soak” and the 1971 animated movie “Shinbone Alley” based on the Archy and Mehitabel stories.

Other online movie databases have followed IMDb’s lead, further compounding the confusion, even though a look at Don’s life in 1922 and early 1923 makes it clear that he had no time to dabble in silent movies.

Besides writing six newspaper columns every week, Don was busy at the time shepherding his first play, “The Old Soak,” through a successful 10-month run on Broadway. The comedy opened August 22, 1922, and a few weeks later Don took a new job writing a daily column for the New York Tribune. That Tribune job was a big, big deal for Don, and he certainly wouldn’t have risked it, or the success of his play, by tackling a whole new undertaking — a silent movie, and a guns-blazing Western, at that.

(Apologies, by the way, to all you other Don Marquises whose accomplishments haven’t been acknowledged!)