Obscurity of the Day: The Strange Adventures of Bob and Betty in Cut-Outs

 

It always astounds me these days to look up a cartoonist on Stripper's Guide and find that they've never been discussed here. Granted, that's to be expected for cartoonists who only had a single obscure feature, but when I realize that someone like William J. Sinnott*, who was an active newspaper cartoonist for two full decades or more, has been ignored here for almost twenty years, I just have to scratch my head and be amazed at how much ground there is to cover.

To add insult to injury, I've finally got a post about one of his features, and it is certainly the weakest one he produced. It is The Strange Adventures of Bob and Betty in Cut-Outs, and it offers us a brother and sister on a tour of classic fairy tales. The novelty, though, is that each panel is missing bits and pieces of art and word balloons. The idea being that junior will have a gay old time cutting out all the missing bits and pieces that have been corraled into an extra panel, then place them where they should be in the remaining story panels. Once all that is done our industrious rugrat is treated to reading the strip in its now complete glory.  

I realize kids were entertained by simpler pursuits in the 1920s, when TSAOBABICO (as we fans  know it) was running, but this just seems a bit pointless. It doesn't exactly take genius level mental gymnastics to make the substitutions in your head as you go along. There seems to be a maximum of two 'puzzle pieces' missing from each story panel, and they are identified so that there is no guesswork involved. Plus, there's no payoff for paper doll lovers, because most of the bits and pieces are incomplete and there's no clothes to add to the characters.

The feature ran in the Boston Globe's Sunday funnies section as a half-page, in which relatively small space (by 1920s standards) Sinnott could only manage three panels of story per week. He does his darndest to make things move along quickly, but that comes at the expense of character development and plot. Bob and Betty just hop mindlessly from one fairy tale character to the next. 

The Strange Adventures of Bob and Betty in Cut-Outs ran from November 4 1928 to April 7 1929. This was William J. Sinnott's final feature for the Globe, and he was already by this time only cartooning as a moonlighting job -- he became advertising manager of a Boston department store in the mid-1920s. 

When Sinnott bowed out, someone at the Globe still evidently thought this cut-out concept was a winner. Bob and Betty were sent into retirement, but a different creator jumped in with a very similar feature called Around the World with Pinky and Peggy in Cut-Outs. It only lasted about three months.

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* Major oops: I use the named Arthur Sinnott on all of William J. Sinnott's features in my book; Arthur was actually the editor of the Paterson Evening News.