Stripper's Guide: Obscurity of the Day: Lois Lane, Girl Reporter

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Obscurity of the Day: Lois Lane, Girl Reporter

There's been a lot of discussion on the Comic Strip Classics group over the last few days regarding a rare Superman companion strip titled Lois Lane, Girl Reporter. I had information on the strip but no scannable samples, so Peter Maresca was nice enough to send me some scans, which are reproduced above.

This strip was known to accompany the Superman Sundays in the Cleveland Plain Dealer from 10/24/43 through 2/27/1944. The strips were numbered 1-12, undated, and didn't run every week in the Plain Dealer.

The odd thing is that a half-page strip like Superman typically would not have had a topper, and the addition of this companion makes Superman run as a 2/3 page - practically an unheard of format. What's more, the McClure Syndicate, which distributed Superman to newspapers, generally did not supply toppers for their strips. That makes this strip a real head-scratcher. I had long assumed that this was a special companion piece that Siegel and Shuster did specifically for their hometown newspaper.

However, Peter Maresca has supplied an extra clue about this oddity. He says that his samples came from much later, 1946 specifically, and from a Texas paper, and that they were printed out of sequence. Well, that kills the 'hometown special' hypothesis. My new best guess then is that this strip was supplied as a free promotion item when a paper signed up to take the Superman Sunday, and was to be used if and when the newspaper had a free space. This explanation would account for the strip's rarity and the lack of a regular publication schedule.

Anyone have additional information to share on the strip?

If you're not a member of the Comic Strip Classics email group, you can become a member by going here (I think). For some reason, this group doesn't seem to be accessible by doing a search from the Yahoo Groups main menu.

Labels: Obscurities