Monday, July 07, 2014

 

Obscurity of the Day: W.C. Fields



In the early 1980s, when the L.A. Times Syndicate was busy throwing licensed properties against the comic strip wall (Dallas, Star Trek, The Legend of Bruce Lee and Star Wars), one that really got lost in the shuffle, even more obscure than the others, was W.C. Fields.

As you most likely already know, W.C. Fields was a great film comedian of Hollywood's golden age. He was an iconic misanthrope, and one who reveled in every known bad habit. Unfortunately, by the 1980s the W.C. Fields persona was no longer sharply defined in the public consciousness. While the classic images of Fields were still cultural touchstones, relatively few people had seen any of his movies.

While it is a shame that the general public had begun to lose touch with the W.C. Fields character, it is beyond ridiculous that the LA Times was willing to do a strip about the man, yet right from the beginning diluted the character into an almost unrecognizeably plain vanilla version of himself. If the syndicate was afraid to do a strip about a man who drinks to excess, hates children and kicks dogs, why in the world do a strip about W.C. Fields? It would be like licensing the Marx Brothers and deciding that the strip should have Harpo speak, drop Chico's accent and swap out Groucho's moustache for a nice beard. 

The first team to tackle Fields-lite, starting on October 31 1982, consisted of artist Frank Smith, and Jim Smart.  Smart is unknown to me, but Smith had proven his chops on Disney's Donald Duck newspaper comic strip. The art is fine, as you would expect, though Fields is made to look far too cuddly -- but the lackluster amiable gags are enough to make the ghost of Fields move to Philadelphia.

By July 1983 somebody had decided that something had to be done to, if not necessarily save the strip, at least rehabilitate the W.C. Fields image. On July 31, a new creative team took over. Gags were now credited to a member of W.C.'s own family, Ronald J. Fields. Ronald was very much involved in licensing of his grandfather's images, but was also a scholar, having published several books about his grandpa. While Ronald may not have necessarily inherited his grandfather's comedic gifts, at least his heart was in the right place. All of a sudden, Fields became rancorous, lethargic and half-lit -- just as he ought to be.

Throwing the baby out with the bath water, artist Frank Smith also exited, and was replaced by Fred Fredericks. Apparently Mandrake the Magician wasn't keeping Fredericks busy, so he tried his hand at this strip, probably knowing that the gig would be short-term.

And short term it certainly was. The latest I can find the W.C. Fields strip running is August 7 1983, meaning that if I have the right end date then the new team was active for a mere two weeks. However, all my dates cited in this article are for the Sunday strip -- it may be that the even rarer daily switched creators earlier and/or lasted longer.  (Actually, I have yet to find a single example of the daily strip running anywhere -- it was advertised as available, but did it even exist?).

I have no doubt that there is more to the story of the W.C. Fields comic strip, and I've undoubtedly made assumptions that will turn out to be wrong. I'd certainly be delighted to hear from anyone who was involved in the strip, to get all the details right about this strange tale.




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Comments:
Ah, yes.
My first thought of W. C. and comic strips go to The Great Gusto and Big Chief Wahoo.
Followed by Larsen E. Pettifogger from The Wizard of Id.
Barnaby's Mr. O'Malley may have been closer to Fields in attitude, in not appearance, than the other two.
Surely there were more comic strip characters based on W. C. Fields.
D.D.Degg
 
Did WC ever appear in the Mortimer and Charlie strip?
 
Frank Smith and Jim Smart created the dailies through Saturday, 1983-Jun-25. Then Fields and Fredericks took over on Monday, 1983-Jun-27.
The last daily I can find is 1983-Aug-18.
View some samples here!
 
Update: Found a daily from 1983-Oct-07.
 
Hi Nems/Mark Taylor --
Thanks for the info and the samples of the daily version. In what newspaper did you find these? Are you able to find a start date for the daily from that source? Is that Oct. 7 daily from a newspaper or original art -- looks like it might be the latter.

Thanks, Allan
 
The Pacific Stars and Strips (Tokyo) ran the dailies from 1983-Jan-03 to 1983-Aug-16. I added some examples (in .pdf format) to the link found in my earlier post. Everything I found outside of that range is from original artwork.

A word of caution when researching: All Smith&Smart dailies from 1983, actually display a "1982" copyright notice.

An article about Ron Fields from March of 1986 states; "There is also a Fields comic strip, for which the grandson has to dream up jokes." Could the strip have actually lasted till 1986?
Read the whole article here.
 
Odd that the S&S would end the strip on a Tuesday. It was a daily paper at this stage, wasn't it?

The lagging copyright years don't bother me, since the hand-written dates are consistent with 1983. Just goes to show that the LA Times didn't even care enough about the strip to send the artist new date slugs.

Regarding that 10/7/83 strip, I'm going to note that in the listing, but it could be that it was produced without any papers actually running it.

Thanks for sharing your research!

--Allan
 
Yeah, the Pacific Stars & Stripes was a daily at that stage. The Fields strip was dropped to make room for Bloom County (which was added on Wed, 1983-Aug-17).
 
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