Stripper's Guide

The little remembered cartoonist Foster Follett occupies a pretty high standing in my mind, a cartoonist who really knew his stuff and made the most of what he did. For instance, without bothering to read the strips above, and trying to ignore that awful printing quality, look at the animation and energy of the characters, the staging of the panels, the seemingly effortless, even careless, drawing. Follett never wowed us with pyrotechnics, but he was a quiet and assured master of the form. Which makes it doubly unfortunate that his work was presented like this above, with bad printing and parts of panels lopped off*. 

The Hoodoo Nickel - Who Gets It Next? is a rare 1900s foray into comic strip continuity. Follett traces the adventures of a cursed nickel, which gets anyone who has it into serious hot water. Each week the nickel moves from one victim to another, telling a continuous story, but with a self-contained gag in each strip. We aren't told why the nickel has a "hoodoo" on it, but eventually the series personifies the curse with a flying ghoul who watches the proceedings with apparent glee. The series finally ends when one recipient recognizes that it is cursed and disposes of it for good. 

The Hoodoo Nickel - Who Gets It Next? ran as a quarter-page strip in Pulitzer's New York World from October 13 to December 15 1907. 

One melancholy comment about this strip. For many years I felt that Frank King's Gasoline Alley topper, That Phoney Nickel, was an overlooked stroke of genius. However, when I finally saw examples of this rare Follett strip, and the similar 1909 strip Adventures of a Bad Half-Dollar, I reluctantly had to downgrade King's strip into a mere revival of a great idea that had a much earlier life. Sorry Frank, this is one laurel you may not wear, as it belongs to Mr. Follett ... or are there even earlier versions?

* You can thank the Detroit Free Press for this execrable work. No doubt the strips were presented properly in the New York World.

Labels: Obscurities

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 4 comments

Since Peanuts lost 20 papers the strip fell from its number 2 spot down to number 4. This enabled For Better or For Worse to move up to the number 3 spot. With Shoe losing 15 papers the strip fell from #19 to 24. Our biggest gainer was Zits, which moved from 16 to 12.

The Average Number of Comic Strip per paper went up again; 18.668 strips per paper from last year’s total of 18.41.

Universal Comics Page

Over the past 80 years when you picked up a paper from another town or city in most cases you would read some of the strips that appeared in your local paper but mostly you would see strips that you have never seen before. By the 1980s, with the slow demise of newspapers beginning and fewer papers around to compete for features, more papers had the opportunity to buy strips that were not available to them before. This could lead to more variety from one paper to another, but instead, the editors of these papers would do the opposite and just pick the most popular strips. As this way of filling a comics page became more and more prevalent, you would now see many of the same comics in every paper.The Universal Comic Section is a measure of how many papers run the most popular strips. 

With a lot of classic strips being dropped the universal section had a shake-up this year. We only made it to the Top 16 strips before originality reared its head, but instead of one paper we had 4 papers that had the Top 16: El Paso Times (TX), Hartford Courant (CT), Montgomery Advertiser (AL) and Pantagraph (Bloomington, IL)

Top 2 – 186 (Down 4)
Top 3 – 165 (Down 8)
Top 4 – 139 (Down 14)
Top 5 – 113 (Down 11)
Top 6 - 95 (Down 6)
Top 7 – 83 (Down 4)
Top 8 – 68 (Down 2)
Top 9 – 53 (Down 4)
Top 10 – 41 (Down 3)
Top 11 – 23 (Same)
Top 12 – 19 (Up 5)
Top 13 – 13 (Up 2)
Top 14 – 10 (Up 6)
Top 15 – 9 (Up 5)
Top 16 – 4 (Same)
Top 17 – 0 (Down 1)

Here are the rest of strips that did not make the Top 30:

42 – Crankshaft – (0), Luann – (+3)

39 – Mary Worth (-3), Mutts (+5)

38 – Funky Winkerbean (+2)

36 – Rex Morgan (+1)

35 – Pickles (+5)

33 – Barney Google and Snuffy Smith (-1), Herman (-2), Lockhorns (+1)

30 – Alley Oop (0)

28 – Boondocks (+5), Curtis (0), Get Fuzzy (+15)

24 – Kit N Carlyle (-1)

22 – Grizzwells (-3)

21 – Geech (+1), In The Bleachers (-1)

20 – Marvin (-2), Robotman (+2)

19 – Judge Parker (0), Sherman’s Lagoon (+4)

18 – One Big Happy (0), Real Life Adventures (-1), Rubes (0)
16 – Baldo (R), Crabby Road (+1)

15 – Bizarro (0), Gasoline Alley (-1)

14 – Adam (+1), Betty (+1), Lola (+4), Pluggers (0), Stone Soup (+1)

13 – Andy Capp (-3), Big Nate (-1), Drabble (0), Overboard (-3)

12 – Anges (+3), Buckles (+1), Fred Basset (0), Grand Avenue (-2), Heathcliff (0), Mark Trail (0)

11 – Phantom (0), Soup To Nuts (R), Tank McNamara (-2), Tiger (0)

10 – Berry’s World (0), Piranha Club (-2), Six Chix (R), Speed Bump (0)

9 – Dunagin’s People (0), Sylvia (-1)

8 – Gil Thorp (0), Heart of The City (+1), Hocus Focus (-2), Middletons (-1), Nancy (-2), That’s Life (+4), Zippy (0)

7 – Apartment 3-G (-1), Brenda Starr (0), Dinette Set (+2), Herb & Jamaal  (-1), Liberty Meadows (+4), Rhymes with Orange (-1), Rugrats (-6), Shirley and Son (R)

6 – Dick Tracy (-1), Duplex (-1), Fusco Brothers (+1), I Need Help (0), Mr. Boffo (-2), Off The Mark (0), Red & Rover (R), Strange Brew (+1)

5 – Amazing Spider-Man (-2), Archie (0), Ben (0), Bound & Gagged (0), Citizen Dog (0), Committed (-1), Grin and Bear It (0), Kuduz (0), 9 Chickweed Lane (0), Pokeman (R), Safe Havens (0), They’ll Do IT Every Time (-1)

4 – Buckets, Crock, Horrorscope, Momma, Over The Hedge, Randolph Itch, Tumbleweeds, Twins

3 - Cats With Hands, Coast, Comic For Kids, Cornered, Donald Duck, James, Love Is, Mixed Media, Our Fascinating Earth, Pooch Café, Ralph, That’s Jake

2 - Ballard Street, Better Half, Between Friends, Bobo’s Progress, Broom Hilda, Chubb & Chauncey, Helen Sweetheart of The Internet, Loose Parts, Meg, Mickey Mouse, Natural Selection, Nest Heads, New Breed, Norm, Offsides, On The Fastrack, Redeye, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, Tarzan, Willy N Ethel

1 – Aminals, Animal Crackers, Belvedere, Big Picture, Bit Off, Bottom Liners, Do Not Disturb, Edge City, Fair Game, Flight Deck, Good Life, Laffbreak, Little Orphan Annie, Mandrake The Magician, Meehan Streak, Meet Mr. Lucky, Modesty Blaise, Mulch, Offline, Out of Bounds, Playing Golf With Jack Nicklaus, Quigmans, Raising Hector, Reality Check, Saturday Afternoon, Single Slices, Spooner, Squinkers, Top Secrets, Tundra, Warped

Labels: Paper Trends

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

The biggest gainer in 2001 was a repeat of last year. Cartoonist Jerry Scott’s two strips, Zits and Baby Blues, added a combined 29 papers between them, which is three more than his amazing performance of the year before. The other big gainer was last year’s bronze rookie winner, Get Fuzzy, which added 15 more papers, stepping up to silver.

Here are the strips that added at least 5 papers or more. You will see an interesting pattern with these strips:

Zits – 17
Get Fuzzy - 15
Baby Blues - 12
Fox Trot – 5
Mutts – 5
Pickles – 5
Boondocks - 5

As we begin a new century, we can see the mindset of the feature editors was “out with old and in with the new.” All the strips that gained 5 or more papers this year are relatively young strips.
 

The strips that were the biggest losers were mainly veterans. Leading the pack as with last year was a strip that went into reruns. Peanuts dropped 20 papers. The other big loser this year was  Shoe, which dropped 15 papers and Cathy with 11 papers. Here are all the strips that lost 5 or more papers:

Peanuts – 20
Shoe - 15
Cathy – 11
Frank and Ernest - 7
Beetle Bailey – 6
Wizard of Id – 6
Rugrats - 6
Garfield – 5

The continuing pattern of adventure and soap strips losing papers continued in 2001 with adventures strips losing 4 spots and soaps losing 3.

Adventure (-4)
Alley Oop – 30 (0)
Mark Trail – 12 (0)
Phantom – 11 (0)
Brenda Starr – 7 (0)
Dick Tracy – 6 (-1)
Amazing Spider-Man – 5 (-2)
Mickey Mouse – 2 (0)
Steve Roper and Mike Nomad – 2 (0)
Tarzan – 2 (0)
Little Orphan Annie – 1 (0)
Mandrake the Magician – 1 (0)
Modesty Blaise – 1 (0)
Zorro – 0 – (-1)

Soaps (-3)
Mary Worth – 39 (-3)
Rex Morgan – 36 (+1)
Judge Parker – 19 (0)
Gil Thorp – 8 (0)
Apartment 3-G – 7 (-1)

Ended -- Heart of Juliet Jones, but it was already at 0 papers in the survey

Labels: Paper Trends

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

Last year our biggest rookie focused on a minority group in this country, the African American community, with the strip Boondocks. This year our top rookie focuses on a different minority community, Latinos, with the strip Baldo that gets 16 papers in our survey. Other big debuts were Soup to Nutz with 11 and Six Chix with 10. Here is the complete list of the Rookies for the past year:

Baldo – 16
Soup To Nutz – 11
Six Chix – 10
Shirley and Son – 7
Red and Rover – 6
Pokemon – 5
Randolph Itch Two A.M. – 4
The Coast (revival of Leftcoast, aka The Other Coast), Pooch Cafe – 3
Helen Sweetheart of The Internet, Natural Selection, Offsides – 2
A Bit Off, Mulch, Raising Hector, Saturday Afternoon, Spooner, Squinkers - 1

Labels: Paper Trends

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

But more importantly, what's with this jarringly untraditional term 'straw-ride'? For goodness sake, how could Hutaf know the activity, but not know it is a hayride? Now I'll grant you, out in the midwest grain-growing belt, I suppose they might actually refer to it as a straw-ride, since they produce lots of straw there. But Hutaf was a New Jersey guy, and here on the east coast we're hay-makers. And yes, I refuse to explain the difference to you city slickers. Look it up yerself, fancy-pants.

Labels: Wish You Were Here

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 3 comments

Is this an editorial cartoon from 2020? Nah, it's a perfectly innocent (and very cute) gag cartoon published in 1897. It was penned by H.B. Eddy for the January 31 1897 edition of the New York Journal.

Labels: One-Shot Wonders

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 2 comments

As a kid I was absolutely fascinated with dinosaurs, reading everything I could get my hands on about them. I recall elementary school teachers being gobsmacked when I could properly pronounce their names and reel off all sorts of information about them when other kids were barely past sounding out the adventures of Dick and Jane.  

I guess I was far from the only one, because evidently lots of kids loved Alley Oop, even in its pre-time travel days. Of course there were actually no cavemen in the time of the dinosaurs, but we kids in the know were willing to look the other way about that inconvenient fact, just so long as we could fantasize ourselves meeting up with these amazing monstrosities of prehistory. 

V.T. Hamlin must have understood that fascination, because some of his Sunday toppers were on the subject of real dinosaurs. Dinny's Family Album, the first and longest-running of Alley Oop's toppers, was a panel devoted to actual information about actual dinosaurs, and boy oh boy, I would have eaten it up if I was growing up in the 1930s. 

Dinny's Family Album debuted along with the new Alley Oop Sunday page on September 9 1934*, and ran until February 7 1937**. It was replaced by more prosaic topper fare, perhaps because Hamlin had run out of interesting dinosaurs to cover after two and a half years. 

* Source: Buffalo Times.

* Source: NEA Archives.

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

Even though Gus Mager had a very popular series going with his 'monk' strips in the New York Hearst papers, he was constantly trying out other ideas. One very short-lived entry in this long list of experiments was Ain't It?, which had a lifespan comparing only slightly favorably to a mayfly's. This series, whose title is also the punchline, was extant from March 2 to March 10 1909 in the New York Journal*. 

* Source: Dave Strickler's New York Journal index.

Labels: Obscurities

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

I've opined on the subject of the hapless Copley News Service here before, and no doubt will again in the future as long as I can still bang on a keyboard and dig up samples of their wares. But let's recap: Copley owned a chain of newspapers, primarily in California, and starting in 1955 they began trying to syndicate some of their features to other papers. 

Sounds okay, right? But that statement deserves some caveats. First, at least in regard to comics it should be pointed out that much of what Copley syndicated, in fact almost all of it, did not appear in their own newspapers. And second, the syndicate was downright spectacular in its ability to NOT sell features. So, taking those two facts into account, I am left with head in hands, sobbing quietly, wondering what the point of it all was. If you didn't want these features for your own papers, and the client list for the features hovered very close to zero, what was the point? Surely you couldn't have done it JUST to drive comics historians crazy looking for this stuff!

I'll be okay. Just give me a moment to dry my eyes, and we'll talk about today's Copley obscurity, Alex in Wonderland. This strip by Bob Cordray is about a kid, Alex, trying to understand the perplexing adult world. Alex's parents are MIA, so his main foil is his uncle, who goes by 'Unk'. The gags, as you can see above, are light social and political commentary, and Alex is the Candide-type who generally starts the ball rolling by asking a question, giving Unk the excuse to deliver the punchline. 

The strip is by no means fabulous, but Bob Cordray's wonderfully simplified art style and quick, pithy gags puts it over, giving readers an instantly digested seconds-long daily experience. 

Cordray had a long-running strip before this called Smidgens, but it died when the syndicate (National Newspaper Syndicate) shut down in 1975. A few of National's remaining properties went to United Feature, but they apparently took a pass on Smidgens. Left without a meal ticket, Cordray started shopping around and ended up creating this new feature for Copley. 

The strip seems to have debuted on April 5 1976, though its only known client at the time, the Chicago-based Daily Calumet, started it a day late and dropped it after a two-week tryout. Which is about par for the course with Copley strips. 

Playing to an audience of practically none, Alex In Wonderland soldiered on until 1980, ending on June 14*. Copley continued to offer the strip in reprints at least through 1986, but for some bizarre reason they offered it only as a weekly. Figure out the logic of that, I dare you. 

* Source: San Pedro News-Pilot.

Labels: Obscurities

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: Wish You Were Here

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: One-Shot Wonders

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 1 comments

Grape-Nuts, the cereal whose ingredients include neither grapes nor nuts, tastes like tree bark and will chip teeth if you don't let it soak in milk for an hour before choking it down. So imagine yourself as a Madison Avenue ad-man finding out that you're supposed to convince people to buy this stuff. Once you realize that New York skyscraper windows don't open and you can't escape the assignment through timely death, you accept that you actually have to come up with an ad campaign to sell war surplus shrapnel as food. 

Since you are one of those rare admen who has a conscience, you don't cook up a campaign claiming that this boxed gravel comes out the other end as gold bars. No, you do what desperate advertisers do when they want to make consumers buy a truly awful product -- you ignore the product entirely and merely associate it with something people do like. In the case of Grape-Nut Flakes, the ad-man called on one of the most well-liked fellows in Hollywood, Joe E. Brown, to shill for this goop. 

Brown was a major Hollywood star, and in the 1930s was instantly recognizeable to anyone living outside a hermit's cave. He was funny, he was friendly, and his image was squeaky clean. And best of all, his stardom in 1936 was starting to teeter a bit, and so he was open to the idea of plastering his puss all over the nation's newspapers, even if it was to sell horse-feed to humans. 

The Joe E. Brown Grape-Nuts Club was advertised in 1936 with a series of about a half-dozen or so comic strips that appeared both in colour Sunday comics sections and in black-and-white weekday paper editions. The ads offered a lapel pin, plus photo or ring, to any kid who could convince their parents to buy a single box. But of course once the kids were in the club, presumably more goodies would be offered in exchange for additional box tops. 

The art is very nice, and my guess is that it is provided by Darrell McClure. However, I do notice that the faces often have a decided Milton Caniff flavour to them, even if the rest of the art doesn't reflect that sensibility particularly. So c'mon you art-spotters, offer your opinions. Are we looking at Caniff, McClure, or am I way out in the weeds here?

Labels: Marketing Madness

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 6 comments

September 21 to 23 1911. And unless you have access to the Pittsburg Leader, you'll never know if that lion ate poor Bobby, because this is the end of our series!

Labels: Bobby The Boy Scout

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 2 comments

September 18 to 20, 1911

Labels: Bobby The Boy Scout

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: Bobby The Boy Scout

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: Bobby The Boy Scout

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: Bobby The Boy Scout

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 1 comments

Labels: Bobby The Boy Scout

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: Bobby The Boy Scout

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: Bobby The Boy Scout

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 2 comments

Labels: Bobby The Boy Scout

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 1 comments

For Hogan's Alley magazine issue #10, published around the turn of the century, I wrote an article tracing the origins of the newspaper adventure comic strip. Starting from what are often thought of as the firsts, Buck Rogers and Tarzan (which in an amazing coincidence started on the same day in 1929) the article worked the true origin backward in time. 

Any serious comic strip fan can probably name a few precursors to these popular strips, but I like to think that I surprised one and all by tracing the form back almost two full decades to 1911. It was on August 21 1911 that the Pittsburg Leader, a comparatively minor paper in that city, offered its readers a new homegrown comic strip, Bobby the Boy Scout. The Leader probably couldn't afford much syndicated material, so they picked a fellow out of the art bullpen and dumped the job in his lap. F.E. Johnston was a cipher to me then, but Alex Jay has since fleshed out his bio here in an Ink-Slinger Profile. As a cartoonist he was no more than adequate, and working at a second rate paper in Pittsburgh for most of his career ensured that his name would be forgotten in cartooning lore. His important contribution, unheralded in his own time and instantly forgotten, would be hidden in the microfilm record for the next eighty years. 

It was pure serendipity that prompted its rediscovery. I was in Pittsburgh on other business and carved out a half day to visit the Pittsburgh Public Library. My primary target was to view the microfilm of the Philadelphia Inquirer. I had already indexed the early years of the paper in the State Library at Harrisburg, but I found that the microfilmer of that version had consistently left comic sections off the microfilm after about 1916. I hoped that the version housed in Pittsburgh would include those later Sunday sections.  

As it turned out, this library had a copy of the same version of the Philadelphia Inquirer microfilm. Disappointed but with a few free hours on my hands, I decided to do some spot-checking of the modest selection of papers the library had on microfilm. I spent a lot of time, mostly wasted, on the major Pittsburgh papers, finding little of interest in them. Then just for the heck of it, I pulled out a few representative reels of minor Pittsburgh papers, including the Leader. And there it was, this very unusual comic strip about a Boy Scout. It was immediately obvious that this was no typical comic strip of the 1910s, but rather one that was based on blood-and-thunder dime novels and cliffhanger movie serials. Little did he know it but Mr. Johnston had created a new genre of comic strips, one that wouldn't get rolling outside the pages of the Pittsburg Leader for many years. 

Bobby the Boy Scout is not an outstanding adventure strip by any means, but it does pre-figure the rules for the genre. It is a story with a sustained narrative from day to day, it has characters confronted with real perils, and it is not played for laughs but is intended as a serious story. It even goes the normal adventure strip one better in that Johnston had a self-imposed rule that there must be a cliff-hanger situation at the end of practically every single strip. While that makes the story absurdly melodramatic at times, and outright ludicrous on occasion, you have to doff your hat to his ingenuity. 

What is also amazing about Bobby the Boy Scout is its longevity and consistency. In an era when the typical daily strip ran its course in a matter of months or a few years, and many still weren't dailies at all but just ran on miscellaneous weekday schedules, Johnston's strip ran over six years as a true daily. And its end, on November 21 1917, may have only been because Johnston's health was failing. He would die a little over a year later. 

In Hogan's Alley I was only able to show a few examples of the strip, and they had to be run at very small size. Not much for readers to sink their teeth into. I did make some quite decent photocopies off the microfilm back then, and recently came upon them in the stacks. So now after just a short wait of 20-plus years, I'd like to present to you the first month of Bobby the Boy Scout, which will be run here over the next ten days. Because the captions are quite hard to read on these copies, I have added better quality printed captions underneath them.

Labels: Bobby The Boy Scout

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 1 comments

Here's a Gene Carr postcard, issued in 1907 by the Rotograph Company. Some cards of this series were topical cards for various holidays, but this one simply celebrates boyhood summertime fun. This card is designated 242/7 in practically invisible red ink at the lower left hand corner.

Labels: Wish You Were Here

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

By 1895 the New York Herald did have colour printing capability, but they tended to use it for things besides comics. So here then is a Clarence Rigby strip from the Herald of August 4 1895, run in glorious black and white. This strip offers a fascinating glimpse into the still-evolving conventions for comic strips. I'm not going to tell you to what it is I'm referring; you'll have to read the awful captions to figure it out. Great drawings, though!

I suppose there is a question worth posing -- was the convention being broken here pretty much established by 1895, and Rigby was just a little slow on the uptake? I'm tending to think he might be a little behind the curve...

Labels: One-Shot Wonders

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 2 comments

There were plenty of kids caught trying to play hooky from school in the early newspaper comics, so when the great George Frink cast his eye on that hoary old plotline, he decided to shuffle the deck. What if those kids, rather than playing hooky, kept the schoolteacher from getting to the school? Then not going to school is no crime -- there's no school to go to!

George Frink was the undeniable king of the Chicago Daily News cartoonists, and he created many weekday series there from 1901 to 1915. The Red Creek School was just a passing fancy, lasting only from May 22 to July 24 1906, but it had Frink's signature boisterous and subversive energy. In each strip the boys, dubbed the Redskins Three, put their combined intellects up against that of the teacher, Professor Whack, and inevitably came up the victors each time.

Labels: Obscurities

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 1 comments