Stripper's Guide

 Today we'll cover the comic strip and panel cartoon series contributed to Wheeler-Nicholson's blanket service by M.A. Dunning. Marshall Alston Dunning might not have been the most accomplished cartoonist ever, but if we are to believe the interwebs, he certainly excelled in selling his services. If the Library of Virginia has the story right, between the 1910s and 40s Dunning lent his cartooning talents to the San Antonio Express, Akron Times, Cleveland Press, Miami News, Jacksonville Journal, San Diego Tribune, Austin American-Statesman, plus animation work at Walt Disney Studios and Columbia Pictures, and even a stint working for the Landon correspondence school. Colour me a little skeptical of the extent of this resume.

To that long list we can add Wheeler-Nicholson, Inc., for which he produced a panel cartoon and a comic strip. The panel was one of those "Guess what's about to happen" things, a genre that I generally find appealing. Dunning's work on They Never Do This But Once is quite uneven, the cartooning varying from just fine to amateurish. Dunning also showcases his *ahem* interest in ethnic humour, with lots of stereotype blacks as the butt of his jokes. The nadir of these has a KKKer in a cartoon of singularly bad taste, even for its day. 

Unlike the strips, the Wheeler-Nicholson panel cartoon features weren't numbered. Although it is devilishly hard to come to any definite conclusions about these things based on the universally sporadic publication of these features, I'd be willing to bet that these panel features did not all make it to true daily frequency, even for the eight week span of The Syndicator service. 

Dunning's penchant for ethnic stereotypes was showcased once again in his comic strip, this time training his sights on Jews. My jaw dropped the first time I saw the title Maggie's Yiddish Moe, which sounds more like the title of a Tijuana Bible than a comic strip for mainstream newspapers. It's pretty hard to get a sense of the plot since newspapers could not seem to manage to run this strip in anything like the intended order (I've preserved that lack of order below -- you're welcome). 

I gather that Moe Kabinzie is in love with Maggie O'Day, who is a secretary to Moe's papa, a knock-off of Harry Hershfield's Abe Kabibble. I imagine in that day a romance between a Jew and an Irish Catholic would have been somewhat scandalous, but I see little of that dynamic in the strips, mostly because Dunning sends Moe off to a vacation resort for much of the storyline, so the two lovebirds seldom manage to even get in the same room. Dunning is evidently more comfortable making gags with the father, anyway, 

Maggie's Yiddish Moe went unprinted by many of those who ran the Wheeler-Nicholson offerings. I  imagine most readers outside of New York City would have been mystified by the Yiddish dialect stuff, so many papers didn't bother with it. It was no great loss. 

Maggie's Yiddish Moe is another Wheeler-Nicholson feature that did not make it into the E&P listings in June. My guess is that it was a late replacement for another strip they advertised that never appeared. That was Little Otto by H.T. Elmo, and as far as I know, Little Otto never made it into papers from any syndicate.

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM