Wednesday, March 16, 2022
Obscurity of the Day: Sky Figures
Lucky for me, some kid in Newark who was crazy about flying decided to keep a scrapbook of newspaper and magazine clippings about the subject. And lucky for him, the Newark News had a weekly page for kids about that very subject. And lucky for Dick Kirschbaum, a flying-mad cartoonist, he was contracted by the News to pen a weekly panel cartoon about his favorite subject, flying and flyers.
I have not indexed the Newark News, and as far as I know it is not yet digitized, so my information on Dick Kirschbaum's Sky Figures is based solely on the crumbling clippings from this scrapbook and a few scant mentions online. All my samples of Sky Figures seem to be from 1937, but for all I know the feature could have run much longer. But on the other hand, maybe not because in 1941 Kirschbaum published a retrospective of his cartoons. The book, Fifty Famous Flyers, offered only fifty cartoons (obviously), which would have been just short of a year's worth. So maybe they all ran in 1937? Can anyone supply running dates for this very well done local panel cartoon series?
Tomorrow Alex Jay weighs in with an Ink-Slinger Profile that will offer tantalizing information about Kirschbaum's other cartooning work.
Labels: Obscurities
