Wednesday, April 06, 2022
From The Stacks: Teddy in Africa - From Teddy's Diary
You won't find the series Teddy in Africa in my book because it is too text-heavy to qualify, but Walt McDougall's series is certainly worth a look here on the blog. Since it bubbled up to the top of the stacks, I present the first three episodes of the series, which ran in 1909 coinciding with the beginning of ex-president Teddy Roosevelt's actual safari/scientific expedition in Africa. Teddy was both a naturalist and a hunter, which he didn't consider to be a logical inconsistency. Because of my admiration of the man on other fronts, I'll not go any further down that rabbit hole.
I can document at least 27 episodes of this series, which seems to have been issued to run about every 2-3 days. It was self-syndicated by McDougall, who had recently left the Philadelphia North American. He tried self-syndicating a few of these series that combine a large panel cartoon or two with lengthy text stories. McDougall mentions this series in his autobiography, saying that he felt it didn't do well because newspaper readers objected to his satirization of T.R. I have to disagree; we all know that T.R., no matter how much we love him, practically begged to be caricatured, and many cartoonists of the 1900s can thank him and his pince-nez for some portion of their paychecks. No, I think that T.R. was so close to being a caricature of himself that McDougall's comedic diary might well have had newspaper readers confused about whether they were reading fiction or fact.
Labels: Archives Sub-Basement
