Stripper's Guide: An Unknown Major Ozone?

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

An Unknown Major Ozone?

According to Patrick McDonnell in his superb biography of George Herriman Krazy Kat - The Comic Art of George Herriman, the great man's first run of Major Ozone's Fresh Air Crusade ran from January 2 1904 until July 10 1904. Reproduced above, however, is a Major Ozone strip that ran on July 17th 1904. Now this could just be a case of the strip running late in this paper, but that would have been an unusual occurrence. Major Ozone ran in the World Color Printing preprint sections, and those sections were all printed and shipped out to subscribing papers at the same time.

Unfortunately, my source for this tearsheet saw fit to cut up the section to sell individual strips. Because of that I have a half-page with no masthead, and so don't know what paper this strip ran in. Not knowing what paper ran it, I have no way of doing additional research to find out if said paper was running their WCP sections late. Sigh.

So do we have an additional Herriman Sunday not uncovered by McDonnell (who I'm guessing used the St. Louis Star as his source, where it did indeed stop on July 10), or not? No way to know, unless someone has the complete run to check against.

Extra Credit Question: I considered explaining the reference in the final panel of Major Ozone, but what fun would that be? Huzzahs and felicitations to the first reader to explain the reference to 'Fitz'.

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 10:58 AM