Stripper's Guide

The enigmatic Lincoln Features, which was run by Horace T. Elmo, is a syndicate that sold features to weekly papers. Weeklies are a notoriously bad market, and Elmo never had a great deal of luck selling his material. Lincoln was a curious mix of slapdash and brilliant work. The syndicate's main claim to fame is that Jack Kirby got his start there. Unfortunately Kirby, as far as I know, didn't discuss the syndicate in any depth in later years, so we really don't know much about it. Some of the Lincoln material is so rare that it has yet to be found actually appearing in a newspaper (Kirby's Abdul Jones, for instance, so far exists only in the form of a run of proofs that Kirby held onto).

Runs of Lincoln strips are so rare that this is the first opportunity I've had to feature one on the blog. Detective Riley could, I suppose, be considered Lincoln's flagship strip. I've actually managed to find it running on a consistent basis in a few papers for decently long runs; most Lincoln products tend to pop up and run for only 4-6 episodes, which invariably means that the syndicate sent the newspaper some samples, which they went ahead and ran without any intention of picking up the service on a paying basis.

As with any Lincoln feature, information is spotty. The strip ran at widely varying times because Elmo didn't worry about such niceties as dating his material. All features were numbered so that he could continue to sell the material on hand for years on end. The best guess I can come up with as to an 'official' starting date for Detective Riley is February 1 1935. This is based on looking at numbered strips appearing in papers and then figuring back to when strip #1 would have appeared. That date is calculated from my earliest samples, which ran later in 1935. However, there is a run from 1940-41, with current copyright years cited on them, that figure back to a start date in August 1934. Of course that paper probably didn't stick with the service all those years (no paper ever seemed to stick with Lincoln for more than a year or two at most) so of course I'm just talking hypothetically.

The end date is no less murky. The highest numbered strip I've found is #435, which would have run on June 4 1943 in the almost certainly hypothetical paper that ran the whole series. It's worth noting, though, that #435 is in the middle of a story, so presumably there are more strips lurking out there somewhere. Not many, though, because Elmo switched gears in 1944, gave up on Lincoln, and started a new venture called Elmo Features Syndicate with a whole new stable of features. The man must have been quite the masochist, because this syndicate, too, tried to sell to weekly papers, and with no better success.

Detective Riley is one of those high-adrenaline adventure stories that were a staple of early comic books, and the art was about on that level. The feature was credited to Richard Lee throughout, but most of Lincoln's features were done under pseudonyms. Part of the run does seem to have been done by Jack Kirby, but others are by unidentified cartoonists (like the later samples above).

Needless to say, if you have have ANY information on Lincoln, Elmo, or any of their features, or any samples, I'm all ears.

Labels: Obscurities