Thursday, September 25, 2008
Obscurity of the Day: Mrs. Bumps Boarding House
We've already discussed the McClure Syndicate's acquisition of the talented and popular Dwig when we covered Uncle Jim, Tad and Tim; here's the other strip Dwig did for their Sunday section.
Mrs. Bumps Boarding House was vintage Dwig, echoing the classic School Days half-page panels he'd previously done for the New York World. The new feature substituted a bunch of oddball boarding house residents for the classroom kids, but the philosophy was precisely the same. Dwig's busy panels were the sort of feature you couldn't appreciate in a quick glance. They took a good bit of study to decode all the activity and the Rube Golberg devices, and in those days newspaper readers were willing to spend some time on a Sunday morning drinking in all the subplots and machinations that intertwined on these precisely constructed panels.
Mrs. Bumps Boarding House began on January 12 1913, changed titles to Mrs. Bumps Cabaret on November 9 and ended on December 28.
Labels: Obscurities
