Comic strip writer and Stripper's Guide reader Jay Maeder has a question for you. He has the original art to a Sunday comic strip titled Wow, Wanda! by Dale Messick, creator of Brenda Starr. Neither he nor I have ever seen a strip of that title published, so he's hoping that someone out there may recognize it and tell us where it appeared.
The strip is dated June 25 with no year indicated. Jay thinks that the style and content point to it having been produced in the late 1960s (I'll add that June 25th was a Sunday in 1961, 1967 and 1972). Jay didn't mention it having a syndicate stamp on it, so I'm assuming it didn't. Jay has provided a scan of a portion of the artwork. The artwork included a colored overlay, so it was definitely meant to appear in color when printed.
So what is this? My best guess is that it was a failed tryout strip, but typically tryout strips aren't dated, so that may be a bad guess. Can you help?
Do you have mystery items that you'd like identified? Stripper's Guide is willing to help. Just two rules that I'd ask you to abide by. First, please do not send me huge attachments - I am on a dialup connection and they can take half a day to download. Keep your attachment under 500k or you will get a very snitty email in return. Second rule is that I will not answer requests asking for appraisals - don't ask me to estimate a value of your item so you can put it on eBay - put it up there and the final bid is the value of the item - very simple!
Allan, my first thought was a reject from WOW What a Magazine, but it doesn't look like 1936.
ReplyDeleteFrom the bit shown hard to tell, but it seems a bit over the top for US syndication.
As a guess I'd say it was either intended for a weekly magazine or overseas syndication. That's just guess of course.