'The Two Rogues'.
Very little is known about early 20th-century Australian cartoonist L. De Koningh, who, in the 1920s, drew the feature 'The Two Rogues' for Pranks, the children's supplement of The Sunday Times in Sydney. Starting out as a gag comic, it eventually became an adventure series, retitled 'Hapless Herbert and the Two Rogues', running until 1930.
The Two Rogues
In the mid-1920s, L. de Koningh's newspaper comic 'The Two Rogues' ran in Pranks, the juvenile supplement of The Sydney Sunday Times. The "rogues" in question are the street kids Bob and Snowy, and their main victim is Fat Herbert. On the other hand, the boys are sometimes victims of Herbert's antics as well. When lovesick Herbert decides to mend his broken heart and run away to sea, the two pranksters join him. From 8 November 1925 until the end of the year, their sea journey became the subject of an ongoing narrative, while the feature was renamed to 'Hapless Herbert and the Two Rogues'. During the 1926 episodes, Herbert, Bob and Snowy return to gag-a-week pranks, but this time as a threesome. The final page appeared on 30 May 1930.
'The Two Rogues', 8 November 1925.
'The Two Rogues' appeared in Pranks among the fairy tale-like serials of Ruth Vickery, Wynne Davies' 'Percy Plantaganet', Norman McMurray's 'Fish and Chips' and the American 'Felix the Cat' comic strip by Pat Sullivan. Like several other Pranks features, 'The Two Rogues' made use of both speech balloons and text captions underneath the images.
Identity?
De Koningh was a technically skilled artist, but his further whereabouts are unknown. He was probably the Australian landscape painter Leon De Koningh, about whom very little is known as well, except that he was part of a new Sydney artists collective called the Deka Group in 1941.
'Hapless Herbert and the Two Rogues', 30 May 1926.