Wednesday, February 16, 2022
Obscurity of the Day: Still Life
Jerry Robinson, best known for his important role in the early years of the Batman comic book, later moved from comic books to newspaper cartooning, and not only had several successful features but even ran a small syndicate for many years.
Robinson's first foray into newspaper work was as the artist on Jet Scott, an impressive but ultimately unsuccessful adventure strip that ran 1953 to 1955. With that bad taste in his mouth, it is perhaps unsurprising that Robinson's next feature did not get into papers until eight years passed.
On January 17 1963*, right in the middle of a newspaper strike at the New York Daily News, Robinson's new feature Still Life debuted in the Daily News' strike version, which was called the Metropolitan Daily. Although the feature was half-heartedly offered in syndication by the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate, it never had more than a few clients. The bread-and-butter client for the panel was always the Daily News itself.
Still Life attempted to answer the question, "what would inanimate objects have to say if they talked about the state of the human world?" While that may seem like a rather bizarre question, in Robinson's capable hands it gave him the ability to comment on politics, society and current events in a quite serious way, yet offer those opinions in a way that could produce a smile. The sidestepping of human caricatures also gave the feature an original look that worked well on either the op-ed page or with the comics.
It may well be that the feature's spanning the gap between the worlds of editorials and gags made it a no-sale. Too serious for the funnies page, too flippant for the editorial page, it occupied a no-man's-land and newspaper editors just didn't know what to make of it.
Thankfully, the New York Daily News did not fail to see the value of Still Life. It ran there for almost a decade and a half, ending on October 15 1977** only because Robinson decided to replace it with a new but very similar feature, Life With Robinson.
*Source: Editor & Publisher, Janury 26 1963.
** Source: Editor & Publisher, October 15 1977.
Labels: Obscurities
I remember this panel. I never thought much of it, it came off as an unfunny knock-off of PIXIES. I never realised that it preceeded and anteceeded Wohl's panel.
Quite understandable it wasn't widely syndicated. It's kind of a given that editors don't want to put politically charged features among the neutral, family-friendly material on the comics page, and generally speaking, every inch of the editorial pages is too important to fill with more than one topical cartoon, that would be a formal editorial effort.
One thing I recall about it, and you have one here-it ran against it's own premise- the term "still life" means inanimate objects, yet it often had bugs or mice, or even birds in play.
: 2/17/2022 11:31 AM 