One night at my studio a friend and fellow artist, Jan Carpenter, handed me a book she had collected about 15 years earlier. I had no idea that before the evening was over, because of that book, the direction I and my studio would be taking for the next few years would change so drastically. I had never seen any “Pore Lil’ Mose” comics and had always thought, like most people, that comics and cartoons from the early 20th century usually depicted blacks and black culture in the most unflattering and demeaning manner possible. I knew of the artist R.F. Outcault as the father of the modern comic strip and the creator of the first real modern comic character, the Yellow Kid, and his later creation Buster Brown, but I had no idea of the existence of “Pore Lil’ Mose”. The more I looked at the book the more I realized Outcault had done something very special and historically significant.

I learned the book of thirty-six cartoons was only about half of the “Pore Lil’ Mose” cartoons published. In late 1902, The New York Herald published the hardcover book, named Pore Lil’ Mose His Letters to His Mammy, to fill the requests of “Pore Lil’ Mose” fans after Outcault was no longer doing the weekly strip and had moved on to Buster Brown. The book contains a compilation of select cartoons chosen from the original strip that ran in The New York Herald newspaper from December 1900 to August 1902. The original comics ran on the front page of the Herald’s Sunday color comic supplement. Why certain comics were chosen for the book over others is not known. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to the selection.

More research revealed that a complete book in as good a shape as Jan’s was quite rare. When I contacted several of my friends and colleagues who are experts in the field of comic art and illustration, only a couple had ever seen a few individual pages of the “Pore Lil’ Mose” book. None had ever seen a complete copy of Pore Lil’ Mose His Letters to His Mammy. It’s not difficult to find individual pages from the book, many collectors of black memorabilia sell them, some in reasonable shape, but they all are printed on unstable paper and are burning up as the acid in the paper takes it’s toll. One thing is a certainty, in thirty to forty years almost all copies will be lost to time. The only “Pore Lil’ Mose” color prints left in existence are from the book. We have not been able to find copies of the N. Y. Herald containing “Pore Lil’ Mose”, or any of Outcault’s original drawings. The only copies of the strip not in the book are on old and scratched microfilm, also beginning to show their age and like the paper they too will be gone in a few decades.

Looking at it today, “Pore Lil’ Mose” was a dichotomy. It was far ahead of its time in social commentary and portrayal of blacks, and a throw back in time with its style and artistic execution. Before he was a cartoonist, Outcault was a masterful illustrator working for Thomas Edison producing complex illustrations for Edison’s laboratories and illustrating for some of the largest newspapers and magazines of the late 1800’s. In the beginning, cartooning was just a way for Outcault to make additional income and have fun. Because of his experience as an illustrator, his early cartoons were drawn with more detail and skill than other cartoonist and are rich in artistic and historical detail.

What truly makes “Pore Lil’ Mose” stand out from other black cartoons of the period is Outcault’s portrayal of blacks. One should keep in mind that in 1900 the Civil War had only been over for 35 years (about the same amount of time since the Vietnam War ended for us) and the civil rights movement of the 1960’s was still over sixty years away. “Pore Lil’ Mose” was the first comic strip to have a black character as it’s main protagonist and it would be the late 1960’s before another black character would take this role in a comic strip again. It wouldn’t be until the 1980’s and 90’s that comic strips and books containing black characters would be widely accepted and marketed. For over half a century “Pore Lil’ Mose” was the only comic strip to have portrayed blacks as judges, teachers and other professionals. Outcault’s characterizations of blacks were no more extreme than any of the other ethnic groups he drew and quite a bit less extreme than most other artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When you look at the 70 plus “Pore Lil’ Mose” strips, you see Outcault created a character in Mose who was polite, kind, generous, accepting, intelligent and at times a deeply profound thinker who loved his family and friends. A role model for every human being no matter what their color.

You can look at “Pore Lil’ Mose” in the chronological order they appeared and see the concept that Outcault started with is a different concept than it became. In many ways he was limited by his times but he was still able to take deep jabs and barbs at politicians and society. He took an absurd concept of a 7 year old black kid living on his own in 1901 New York City with his monkey, bear, dog and cat friends and was able to make people laugh and at times take a critical look at themselves and the world they lived in. I don’t believe Outcault started out to create a lot of firsts or to champion certain views. I think like many important endeavors he started with one thing and it evolved into something great not from planning but by just doing it for the right reasons.

How We Began To Figure It Out

One of the first things that was obvious about the “Pore Lil Mose” images from the book, they were all deteriorating and we needed to find a way to halt the deterioration. I knew we could send them to a restoration expert and have them treat the paper to neutralize the pH, which would stabilize the rate of decay but it is very expensive and would do nothing to restore the images. Our hope was not to just stop the deterioration of the images but to find a way to return them as close as possible to new condition so new prints could be made from them. Between my wife and I we have just over 50 years of computer and digital imaging experience and a better than average amount of software and hardware, so we thought, all things being equal it should be a doable.

Once we digitized some of the images and experimented with them a while we realize we were facing a much more complicated set of problems than first anticipated. To under stand the most serious complication you have to have a little basic knowledge of color printing. Today the color printing you see in magazines and newspapers is done using four colors of inks. Cyan (light blue), magenta (hot pink), yellow and black. The cyan, magenta and yellow are always printed first then the black is printed last. When you want to print photographs and illustrations in color it requires converting the images to dot patterns called halftones. You create half-tone screens for each of the four ink colors. The size and density of the dots on the half-tone screen is what creates shadows and shading, the more dots closer together the darker the shading and less dots further apart the lighter the shading. Of course you have to be able lay color and halftone screens on top of the previous color with very accurate registration. This is done using registration marks which look like this: . We’ve all seen them on the flaps of our cereal boxes and the non-printed edges of magazines the printer was suppose to trim off.

It was the order they printed the inks and the fact the printing industry in 1900 was not yet using registration marks that almost kept “Pore Lil Mose” from ever being restored. For seven months we experimented with filters and enhancement software with unacceptable results. So we tried better, more expensive filters and software and since we were at it, a bunch of better, faster and more expensive hardware. No matter what we tried we couldn’t overcome bad printing techniques and years of decay. What the original printers had done was to first print the black outline drawing and then print the other colors on top of the black. The reason they did this was they did not have registration marks to guide them when they laid down colors so they printed the black drawing first and registered the other colors into the black image. Because inks in the early 1900’s were more opaque than today’s inks and their control over registration from ink layer to ink layer was minimal they printed over the black ink and at times obliterated the black ink completely. I should add at this point that Outcault was not involved in the coloring of his images, that would have been done by a person or persons at the printers, called a colorist. All Outcault would have provided to the printer or newspaper would have been an ink drawing of the image on paper.

When the original printers covered the black ink, they removed any chance of recovering the original Outcault drawing using standard digital or photographic techniques. We even thought maybe the black layer was still there and we just couldn’t see it with our equipment, what we needed was someone with really, really high-end equipment to remove the top layers. Again we tried, courtesy of a friend at a nameless government agency, but what we found was not at all encouraging. Due to certain techniques the printers used, such as printing ink of one color on top of wet ink of another color, on very porous paper, each color was no longer a separate color, each on their own layer. It’s like mixing a bunch of colors into a can. You may pour in a bunch of bright, lovely colors but once they’re mixed it’s just a dull, muddy brown. Up until this time we had thought the way to restore the image was to use 21st century computer technology and let digital filters and enhancement software strip away a hundred years of decay and reveal the original image. But the real solution would require turning back the clock and using techniques as old as “Pore Lil Mose” but with a modern twist. We found a solution that we now knew would work but it came with it’s own set of problems.

Provenance & Security

When you look on the back of a Pore Lil Mose print you will see two numbers. A 32 digit identification number and a 7 digit randomly selected security number. With each print we also issue a 4.25 x 5.5 inch identification certificate exclusive to that print (also printed on archival paper). It contains the unique ID and security numbers for that print as well as the original date on which it was published in The New York Herald newspaper. Of course Mastodon Studio keeps a master file of all numbers and prints and with the numbers can identify on what day each print was printed, on which printer, it’s size, the media type, etc., etc. Mastodon provides the most extensive system for protecting the integrity of its prints today. The system we use was designed exclusively for Mastodon Studio and the Pore Lil Mose project. The combination of these two numbers and the certificate gives a complete provenance of the print.

You will never see a “Pore Lil Mose” refrigerator magnet, T-shirt or post card. The only time Mastodon Studio will release a “Pore Lil Mose” image will be as a signed and numbered limited edition series. Our plans are to have all 36 prints in the book completed and released by mid 2004. The remaining prints that are only available on microfilm will be completed over the following three to four years. The prints from microfilm are much more difficult to do and require a lot more time to remaster than the prints from the book. When completed the “Pore Lil Mose” project will be the first in history in which every print from the original series will have been remastered and saved from being lost forever. In a hundred years the only images most people will know from the platinum age of comics will be those few in archival vaults and the “Pore Lil’ Mose” prints remastered by Mastodon.