Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Obscurity of the Day: Einstein
Been well over a month since we did an obscurity of the day. We'll chip off the rust and oil the joints with this delightful little strip, Einstein by Jay Heavilin and Frank Johnson. The strip ran just a little over a year, from January 6 1964 through February 13 1965.Einstein was a really neat idea. It was a light-hearted adventure punctuated almost daily with puzzles and riddles of various kinds. Read the strip, solve the puzzle and tune in tomorrow to see if you got it right. The only fly in the ointment is that limited to a diminutive daily format there wasn't much room to get fancy with the puzzles. Perhaps even worse, the strip was distributed by the George Matthew Adams Service which was on its last legs at the time. Wouldn't surprise me a bit if the strip was barely even marketed.
The creators were already old hands; Jay Heavilin was a writer for NEA; he's the fellow that wrote a lot of those short-run factual strips NEA was always giving out. He also scripted Vic Flint, a few years of Kevin the Bold and probably lots of others for which he took no credit.
Frank Johnson at the time was getting a little work from the New York Daily News doing filler strips in their Sunday comics section, but his bread was buttered mostly in comic book work. He later hooked up with Mort Walker to do the art on Boner's Ark, and then in the early 80s he would add Bringing Up Father to his workload, a strip that he stuck with until the bitter end.
Thanks to Jeffrey Lindenblatt for the running dates from the Staten Island Advance.
Labels: Obscurities
Comments:
Eh, the puzzles don't send me although I appreciate the effort to address this kind of market. The granddaddy of puzzles in the comics (although it's more of a feature than a comic strip) is Uncle Art's Funland by Art Nugent. Bob Weber Jr.'s Slylock Fox also offers puzzles. Are there, or have there been, any others?
# posted by 
: 6/03/2008 7:50 PM
: 6/03/2008 7:50 PM 
Yikes I didn't even comment on the art. (!) It's very nice. I always did like Frank Johnson's style: clear and clean, and he gets in some nice detail and texturing like the sky in the May 30th strip.
# posted by : 6/04/2008 6:15 AM
: 6/04/2008 6:15 AM
Hi Toonhead -
Puzzle features have been appearing in Sunday comics sections from the very earliest days of the form. There were even Ting-Lings puzzles in 1894. What's exceedingly rare, though, is to make the puzzles an integral part of an ongoing comic strip storyline.
--Allan
Puzzle features have been appearing in Sunday comics sections from the very earliest days of the form. There were even Ting-Lings puzzles in 1894. What's exceedingly rare, though, is to make the puzzles an integral part of an ongoing comic strip storyline.
--Allan
I remember this very well. It ran in the local San Diego Evening Tribune as a stand alone filler, not on the regular comic page. I even clipped strips and kept them in a long vanished homemade scrapbook.The puzzles, etc. appealed to me more than anything. Even at 9 I thought it was an innovative concept realized in a very mediocre manner.
I was actually excited to find these. I moved in the summer of 1964 (age 8) and in our new town we got the Houston paper instead of the Dallas paper - and we did not have Einstein. The next time I saw a Dallas paper, Einstein was gone.
This explains it all. I thought it was pretty cool at the time!
Post a Comment
This explains it all. I thought it was pretty cool at the time!
# posted by : 5/08/2023 10:34 AM
: 5/08/2023 10:34 AM 