Obscurity of the Day: Shopping Around

We still don't know whether the creator of Brenda Breeze is more properly referred to as Rolfe Mason or Rolfe Memison: for discussion of that question, see these posts (or check back tomorrow, when Alex Jay will present the results of his sleuthing). Whichever last name Rolfe prefers to go by, we now have two features by the guy. In addition to Brenda Breeze, Cole Johnson has sent me some samples of this feature, Shopping Around.

Mason/Memison was evidently casting about for work in the waning days of his long-running Sunday Brenda Breeze feature, and NEA threw him a bone (a very small, dry one) in the form of a weekly panel for their Pony Service. Rolfe came up with a theme with plenty of possibilities; that great American addiction, consumption.

It wouldn't have made much difference what the panel was about though, because the NEA Pony Service (a bargain service that catered to small weekly papers) offered many good, bad and indifferent strips and panels over the years, and very few subscribing papers used them, for reasons I don't really understand. Shopping Around is yet another one that fell into that black hole. It was advertised in E&P from 1961 to 1963.

Thanks to Cole Johnson for the samples!