Obscurity of the Day: Naughty Ned

When I was prepping Naughty Ned to become an Obscurity of the Day, I thought I'd just be commenting on the interesting little switcheroo this strip plays on that boring old comic strip mainstay, the rotten little prank-pulling brat. In Naughty Ned, y'see, the kid wants desperately to be a nasty li'l bugger, but just can't seem to pull it off properly. Talk about an underachiever!

I was going to talk about that, but then I idly typed the creator's name into Google, and things got more interesting. Turns out that Munson Paddock, the creator of Naughty Ned and a short list of other okay but not greatly memorable strips of the late 1900s, has a bit of a fan club among the Golden Age comic book enthusiasts. Seems that Paddock was still cartooning 30-some years later, and his comic book work, especially the sci-fi stuff, has attracted interest.

Well, that's kind of neat, but then I find, if we are to believe these websites, that Paddock went by a laundry list of aliases as well. One of the sites, in fact, claims that Paddock was a woman -- Cecelia Munson Paddock. That seems to be a minority opinion, but another of the cited aliases also perked up my ears. Supposedly Walter Frehm, aka Walter Frame, is also a pseudonym of Mr. or Ms. Munson Paddock. Well, now hold on just a gosh darn second. I think Mr. Frehm, who was a member in good standing of the NCS, would like to keep his status as a real person.

Given all this hyperbolic biographing of Munson Paddock, I think I'll go back to stating what I do know. And that ain't much. But I can tell you that Mr. or Ms. Paddock's Naughty Ned, which is the only strip series s/he did for the Philadelphia North American, ran from March 21 to June 20 1909. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.