Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Obscurity of the Day: Chris and Christena's Courtship
In mid-1912 the Rocky Mountain News ran Chris and Christena's Courtship as sort of a banner on the front page of their Sunday classified section. I have a run of the strip from July through August, but it may well have run longer.Notice that this strip is in (limited) color, even though it ran in what is normally a black-and-white section of most papers. The papers of Denver (the Post, the Times, the Republican, the Express, the Rocky Mountain News and perhaps even others) were in a pitched battle for circulation, though, so many of the papers brightened their paper with a liberal use of color. The color extended to the news coverage as well -- the Denver papers of the 1900s-1910s are some of the yellowest journals you'll ever find. If you're a fan of sensational newspapers like I am, you'll find nirvana in the pages of these old Colorado papers.
I don't know whether this strip originated at the News or if it was syndicated from elsewhere. The cartoonist Artigue has a few comic strip credits in Boston and Philadelphia in the 1906-09 period, but I lose track of him after that with this one exception from 1912. Can anyone offer more information on either Artigue or this strip?
Labels: Obscurities
