Stripper's Guide

Alex Jay sends a wonderful assortment of Detective Riley strips, an obscurity we first discussed the other day. Following are some of the many faces of the weekly dick.

Strip numbers 83 and 84, done in a pleasant semi-cartoony style. Looks a little like Ben Batsford work, but he was gainfully employed elsewhere at the time. There's something about that drawing of Private Buck in the last panel of #83 that I feel should be the big clue, that distinctive pose and the style of the face seem really familiar.



Strip number 85 welcomes in a new artist, who preferred a more realistic style. This guy used swipes for practically everything:


Strip #133, and our same swipist has taken a real shine to Alex Raymond. Is there any part of this strip that isn't a direct Raymond swipe?


In December 1937, another abrupt change. H.T. Elmo himself is now the cartoonist, and takes credit for them too (numbering obscured, probably #144 and 145). Elmo was woefully unsuited for drawing a realistic adventure strip:



In January 1938 (numbering also obscured), Elmo is still struggling away but no longer feels the need to take credit:


In February 1938 (again, number obscured) either we have another new artist, or Elmo decided to do some swiping of Chester Gould. My guess is that it is still Elmo here because of the distinctive lettering style.


Finally, here is the man himself, H.T. Elmo in a 1925 passport photo. Thanks so much to Alex Jay for submitting this interesting material!

All these items appeared in The Fourth Estate:

January 2: The Outcault Advertising Company, Chicago, owners of the Buster Brown comic pictures, have begun a suit for $1,824.90 against the Smith Baking Company of Kansas City. This amount is alleged to be due the plaintiffs for the exclusive use in Kansas City of the Buster Brown service, which the bakers used.

January 9: The Toledo Times has followed the example of the Boston Herald and abolished the use of comic supplements.

January 23: Elmer Bache, cartoonist of the Spokane Orator-Outburst, has given up his position and returned to New York.

January 30: T.C. McClure has retired from the active management of the McClure Newspaper Syndicate. He is succeeded by R.B. McClure, who for a number of years has been associated with him in the management of this business. Mr. McClure intends to devote his attention in the future to work of an encyclopedic nature.

February 6: Ferdinand G. Long, a well known comic artist with the New York Evening World, is the originator of a new "Billikins." He has christened his funny little model, "Bub, the Cherub of Cheer."

February 20: The Star League newspapers of Indiana, comprising the Indianapolis, Terre Haute and Muncie Stars, have resumed the colored comic supplement service with their Sunday papers. The Star papers discontinued this feature some time ago, believing that they could increase their circulation and advertising business without it.

March 6: Homer Davenport, the well known cartoonist of the New York Evening Mail, was cut by broken glass Sunday when the taxicab in which he was riding crashed into a tree in Central Park.

March 20: O.P. Williams, the cartoonist who in 1904 went from the Boston Herald to the Philadelphia Public Ledger, is again drawing cartoons for the Boston Herald.

Labels: News of Yore

The very productive C.H. Wellington has been seen on Stripper's Guide quite a few times now. My favorite work of his are the panel cartoon features, and I think the best of those is And The Worst Is Yet To Come. There's A Reason is sort of in the same vein -- a pantomime feature that makes the reader expend at least a little brain juice to figure out the gag. There's A Reason isn't nearly as creative with the concept, but then Wellington wasn't quite so practiced in the form yet. This weekday feature was done for Hearst's New York Journal from January 20 1909 to July 14 1910.

Labels: Obscurities

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

Labels: Jim Ivey's Sunday Comics