Stripper's Guide

Hmmm ... what to post on Labor Day. Probably ought to be something from the Daily Worker, but I don't have anything from them in the queue right now. Well, today's all about taking it easy, so how about a strip featuring one very laid-back fellow, Lazy Lew. Close enough!

Lazy Lew -- He Yawns was the epitome of a one-note feature. In case the title wasn't enough of a clue, Lew was constantly yawning. Bet you didn't know that a yawn can be represented in text as "Ow-o-e-o", so you learned something today! Eventually the power of suggestion would get his victim to do the same with hilarious (?) results. That was the never varying plot of this strip every Sunday for over two years (October 15 1905 - December 8 1907) in the Philadelphia Press. Penned by Hugh Doyle, who was a fixture at the Press from 1905-1911, this feature is emblematic of what was a major failing with the Philly Sunday funnies triumvirate (the Inquirer, the Press and the North American). Although they did publish some brilliant work, a lot of that Philly material is mind-numbingly repetitive like this.

Thanks to Cole Johnson who supplied the scans!

Labels: Obscurities

Labels: Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics

Here's another relatively recent feature that was never given much chance to find an audience. Ophelia and Jake was, I can safely guarantee, the only syndicated strip ever about a girl and her pet rabbit. The strip was syndicated by United Feature Syndicate from January 25 1988 to August 18 1991. I don't know that I'd call it a great strip, but it certainly had a different hook, and cartoonist Heidi Stetson had a really fine off-kilter sense of humor, especially evident in the second example above.

Maybe newspaper editors blew it off as a Calvin & Hobbes wanna-be, which it certainly wasn't (editorthink: kid plus animal = Calvin & Hobbes). Maybe the resemblance of Ophelia to another comics page character hurt it (editorthink: kid looks like Luann = must be Luann, which I already run or already passed on). Or maybe the target audience was the problem (editorthink: strip about pre-teen girl + pre-teen girls not big newspaper buyers = waste of space). In any case, Ophelia and Jake ran in very few papers in its short run and then hopped off to that big rabbit hutch in the sky.

Labels: Obscurities

Excuse the lack of posts this week please. Had a busy week. Wife had a health scare (turned out to be a false alarm thank goodness), and I was favored with over 200 pages of notes from Alberto Becattini that I've been working at melding into the Guide listings.

So where did we leave off. Oh, yeah. Some readers were arguing that the little game I came up with (see last post) was philosophically off-balance, that the classic strips are there because they've earned their places, and that the new strips coming out by and large blow. Hmmph. I don't have many kind words for those 'classics' that hang onto their spots like grim death. Most of them are about as funny as a visit from the reaper. But yeah, I'll agree that I too shake my head when I see many of the new syndicate offerings.

I am certainly sick to death of new features that are chosen not based on quality but in their presumed appeal to market sectors. And just how many family sitcoms do we really need? And new features by creators who already have a place on the comics page really get me steamed. Oh good, now creator X is twice as overworked and both features will suffer (often the first one wasn't exactly a classic to begin with). But there are some great new features that come on the scene, too, and by and large they never get a chance because of those entrenched so-called classics.

Today I spotlight one of my favorite recent strips, an undeserved obscurity. Lennie Peterson's The Big Picture was syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate to a paltry list of papers from November 29 1999 to August 8 2004. Peterson brought the autobiographical comics form that has become so popular in indy comic books to newspapers and did a great job of it. The strip was not just amazingly funny but also palpably authentic, a rare quality for newspaper strips. Lennie, as you can see in the samples above, wrote about his experiences, including his cartooning, with plenty of self-effacing humor. How he got some of his strips past a syndicate editor, especially the ones lambasting other newspaper comics, I can't imagine, by I'm sure glad he did.

Unfortunately there are no reprint books of Peterson's syndicated The Big Picture strip, but there is one that collects his pre-syndication magazine strips. You can find it used on ABE or Amazon though copies tend to be a bit pricey (proof that Peterson made an impression on the few people who got to read it!). Lennie also has a Big Picture website, but it harbors a rather nasty virus. I ignored Google's warnings and went to the site and it did indeed infect my computer. Ad-Aware fixed the problem, but my advice is to steer clear until Peterson fixes it.

Labels: Obscurities

Yesterday I received a giant package of Sunday comics sections from papers all around the country, mostly dated in 2000, from Mark Johnson. Thank you Mark!!

As I was leafing through the giant stack I couldn't get over the bland sameness of it all, and the old hoary strips that were in section after section after section. The experience was threatening to make me nauseous so I came up with a little game to fight off the ennui. It's called "How Stale Are My Comics?" It's a very simple game, and the object is to determine the average age of the comic strips in the section (or on your daily comics page, or whatever). Here are the very simple rules -- you add up the ages of each comic strip title in the section and divide that number by the number of strips you counted. Here's a quick example: let's say we have a comic section that has just three strips:

Dilbert
Peanuts
Zits

Dilbert started in 1989, Peanuts in 1950, Zits in 1997. So in 2009 those strips are respectively 20, 59 and 12 years old. You add those together to get 91 years, and divide by 3, the number of strips. The average age of the comic section is 30.3 years old. Okay, get it?

I was curious to see what sort of average age I'd find in these sections from 2000. Well, here are some of the results:

Boston Globe (20 features) = 14 years
Chicago Tribune (28 features) = 22.1 years
Long Island Newsday (22 features) = 24 years
Lawrence Eagle-Tribune (21 features) = 25.6 years
Waterbury Republican (23 features) = 26 years
Marietta Journal (19 features) = 27 years
Lowell Sun (17 features) = 27.5 years
Bucks County Courier-Times (18 features) = 27.5 years
Washington Post (40 features) = 27.9 years
Midland News (21 features) = 29.5 years
Indiana Gazette (22 features) = 32.3 years
Monroe News (22 features) = 33 years
Westchester Journal-News (27 features) = 33.5 years
Scranton Times (28 features) = 35 years
Hickory Record (18 features) = 35.7 years
Chattanooga Times (36 features) = 37.3 years
Florida Times-Union (28 features) = 37.3 years

A few comments. First of all, way to go Boston Globe! And everyone says you're a dinosaur. Sheesh, they couldn't be more wrong. Second, a few papers really gave their ages a major shot in the arm with the inclusion of Snuffy Smith (81 years old in 2000) and Ripley's Believe It or Not (82). Third, I'm sad to say that there wasn't a single paper that contained a feature that was zero years old (in other words, started in 2000). And finally, a note to you newspaper publishers that it sure would be keen if you'd put the name of your %#$@*! paper on the masthead.

I wanted to compare these averages, which seem to center around the high 20s, with a current paper. All I had to work with is my own local paper, the Leesburg Commercial. Things sure aren't looking good here in Leesburg. I have 32 features and an average age of 39.8 years. Hmm. Leesburg and Jack Benny have something in common.

So your assignment for today is to pull out the last Sunday section or daily comics page of your paper (you do subscribe to your local paper, right?) and answer the question ... How Stale Are My Comics? Report your results right here and let's see who has the best and the worst.

If you have trouble with this because you don't know when a strip started just drop me a line here and I'll supply you with the necessary raw data.