Recreating the image archive of Barnacle Press was an undertaking, but only represents part of the content that was lost when the site went down; there were also hundreds of blog entries going back to 2005! Since that’s a lot of content to just let slip beneath the waves, we’ll be digging back and reposting previously published material. We’ll start with the very oldest items, so hopefully it’ll be new to you, or an invitation to revisit some features that you missed before.
Here we have another exciting entry from the Gilded Age, The Wish Twins and Aladdin’s Lamp. This strip was the creation of W. O. Wilson and ran weekly from 1904-1907. The twins are two boys, likely around age 10, who just happen to have gained possession of Aladdin’s fabled lamp. With the unlimited power of imagination, our boy heroes wish their way into pirate adventures, encounters with cannibals, and dinners featuring exploding pudding. While I certainly would not cite this strip as an example of the best the still developing artform had to offer, it remains an interesting sample of early 20th Century fantasy.
