Saturday, July 29, 2006
Mr. Jack Goes to War
Here's a couple of 1917 Mister Jack strips by the great Jimmy Swinnerton. These are 'dailies' in that they ran in dailies papers rather than Sundays, but they were not produced six days per week. Many references cite the 1910s version of Mr. Jack as a daily, but t'ain't so.At this time Swinnerton was at the height of his powers. He evidently relished working on Mr. Jack more than the rather repetitive Little Jimmy, so it might come as a surprise that the Hearst organization seldom ran the Mr. Jack dailies in their New York papers. To find the black and white wartime Mr. Jack strips we must, for the most part, find them elsewhere. In fact, based on the Jeffrey Lindenblatt's indexing of the New York American, I had concluded that the Mr. Jack daily was produced only on a very sporadic basis. It wasn't until I got a look at the Pittsburgh Post that I found it to be produced, at least in the timeframe I got to see, on a very regular basis, several times per week.
