Long before Arthur "Pop" Momand created his long-running Keeping up with the Joneses strip he toiled in the New York Evening World bullpen, turning out mostly forgettable stuff like today's obscurity, Diary of a Bad Boy. This series, like seemingly a billion others of its ilk, concerns the pranks and antics of a rotten li'l kid. The execution is snappy enough, but how many of these kid strips does the world (or the World, for that matter), really need?
The weekday strip ran for eighteen episodes from August 27 to October 27 1906, averaging an appearance every second day until a longish layover befor the last episode.
Took me a few beats to figure out that "Hot bird! Cold bottle!" meant a dinner with refreshment. Current slang or the cartoonist's own coinage?
ReplyDeleteWould have been current slang, I think, based on a number of references I've seen in the writings of Lucius Beebe regarding the "lobster palace" era. It tends to be used in somewhat louche situations where one is dining with fast women.
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