Tuesday, March 30, 2010
News of Yore: E&P Mysteries
Here are some articles from Editor & Publisher about mystery features. Can anyone help find them?
This feature was advertised several times in 1971:
A Christmas comic strip designed to run either three or four weeks (the first week is optional), starting Nov. 28, is offered by the New York Herald Tribune Syndicate. It is called "The Plot Against Santa Claus" and it is drawn by Arnold Roth, the "Poor Arnold's Almanac" man. The strip is funny and yet it bears a wise and heart-warming message.
Classic is the case of a strip about Hollywood, which was widely sold about 20 years ago. It showed, one day, Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler on a beach. Ogling a group of bathing girls, Dick was exclaiming: "Oh, look at the DAMES!" The next day Warner Brothers announced a musical starring Dick and Ruby, called "Dames." The strip was dropped by almost all papers within a week and never recovered.
This feature was advertised several times in 1971:
Christmas Comic
(10/15/60)A Christmas comic strip designed to run either three or four weeks (the first week is optional), starting Nov. 28, is offered by the New York Herald Tribune Syndicate. It is called "The Plot Against Santa Claus" and it is drawn by Arnold Roth, the "Poor Arnold's Almanac" man. The strip is funny and yet it bears a wise and heart-warming message.
Comic Strip Creator Has Troubles, Too
(excerpt of article, 11/19/60)Classic is the case of a strip about Hollywood, which was widely sold about 20 years ago. It showed, one day, Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler on a beach. Ogling a group of bathing girls, Dick was exclaiming: "Oh, look at the DAMES!" The next day Warner Brothers announced a musical starring Dick and Ruby, called "Dames." The strip was dropped by almost all papers within a week and never recovered.
[article was about the tightrope cartoonists must walk to keep from offending editors -- so which strip are they referring to here?]
Labels: News of Yore
Comments:
The story about the strip with Dick Powell leaves out a lot of context, at least as far as I can tell. So they did a strip with a celebrity using a word which turned out, the next day, to be the title of his next movie? So what? Why would that cause any newspaper to drop the strip?
If anything, if I were a newspaper editor back in 1934 (when the movie "Dames" came out), it might make me think that the cartoonist had the inside scoop about what the studios were planning, if he was able to slip in references to the stars' next films before they were even publicly announced. The strip's circulation should have gone up (in my opinion).
If anything, if I were a newspaper editor back in 1934 (when the movie "Dames" came out), it might make me think that the cartoonist had the inside scoop about what the studios were planning, if he was able to slip in references to the stars' next films before they were even publicly announced. The strip's circulation should have gone up (in my opinion).
# posted by 
: 4/05/2010 7:53 PM
: 4/05/2010 7:53 PM 
Allan, please come back! Please forgive us...yes we agree that Buford Tune's "DOTTY" is an unabashed ripoff of Chic Young's "BLONDIE".
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# posted by : 4/10/2010 9:38 PM
: 4/10/2010 9:38 PM Monday, March 29, 2010
Obscurity of the Day: Oh, Piffle!
Here's a strip from Harold MacGill, one of several he did for Hearst's Evening Journal to supplement his bread and butter feature, The Hall-Room Boys. The title Oh, Piffle! bears little relation to the gag, which was about the change in a man's behavior around pretty girls. MacGill usually worked in the larger two-tier format, so one redeeming value of this one-tier strip is that he didn't have as much opportunity to overload the strip with a novel's worth of dialogue; a vice he exercised with gusto in most of his work. The strip ran sporadically from May 29 to December 3 1908.Thanks to Cole Johnson for the scans!
Labels: Obscurities
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Sunday, March 28, 2010
Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics
