Obscurity of the Day: Bringing Up Baby

Here's a rather bizarre item from the crumbly depths of Cole Johnson's collection. Bringing Up Baby illustrates odd behavioral tics of babies, supposedly submitted by readers. The panels seem to read like the start of an advice column, where someone tells momma how to deal with the problem -- except there's no column; this is it. Is a baby who can't roll off his back supposed to be funny? Heck, I'd be thinking rickets. As if having a baby that looks like Nikita Krushchev isn't bad enough...

The feature was, I guess, self-syndicated by this R.G. Miller fellow who appears on the copyright slug. And apparently Miller needed to farm out the art to a "professional" who very wisely goes only by his initials, "J.W.", when he bothers to sign at all.

Believe it or not, this feature did actually appear in a few papers and not just in a farm weekly owned by some doting relative of Mr. Miller. My running dates, January 30 1922 to August 12 1922, are based on the run in the San Francisco Chronicle.