Wednesday, April 13, 2022
Obscurity of the Day: Sisters of Eve
If the name Will Lawler sparks any memories for you, it is pretty certain that you think of him as the poor guy who laboured in anonymity at the New York Herald as the ghost-artist of the "original" Buster Brown.
When R.F. Outcault was wooed away by Hearst in late 1905, the New York Herald retained naming rights for the Buster Brown strip. Outcault could take his character to the New York American, but he was not allowed to use his star's name as the title of the strip. So, just like a decade earlier when Hearst hired Outcault away once before from Pulitzer, the original paper was considered to be free to continue the original strip (in that case Hogan's Alley), while the new paper was allowed to continue using the original characters, but not the original titles.
So in 1906 when Buster Brown (the character) became a Hearst strip, the New York Herald was left with a title but no cartoonist. After several months of trying out various cartoonists on the strip, they settled on Will Lawler. Lawler has no earlier cartooning credits of which I'm aware, so this gig may have been his first high-profile newspaper art job -- but it was also anonymous. He did a perfectly creditable job of aping the atmosphere and look of Outcault's strip, and the "original" Buster Brown lasted another five years in the Herald under his able stewardship. I can certainly imagine that he must have chafed at being incognito while producing the further adventures of one of the most popular of comic strip characters.
Once Lawler's meal ticket had petered out, the Herald strangely seemed to have little interest in offering him a chance at another strip. It isn't until two years later that Lawler reappears in the comic strip realm, this time producing a couple of pretty forgettable weekday strips for the Herald's minor-league evening newspaper, the Evening Telegram. One was Discord in 'A' Flat, the other is our obscurity today, Sisters of Eve.
Sisters of Eve is a perfectly okay comic strip, offering the familiar twitting of female flightiness that working stiffs riding home on the evening train would enjoy. What is strange, and almost creepy, is that Lawler, now free of the shackles of copying Outcault, produced a strip in which the masthead is done in his old familiar Outcault style, and the strip itself is a blatant copy of T.E. Powers' style.
I'm torn between feeling sorry for Lawler and wanting to admonish him for wasting his chance to let his own star shine. Maybe Lawler was just one of those artists who never gets to the point of evolving their own style -- maybe all he could do was copy the styles of others?
In any case, the pair of weekday strips produced by Lawler for the Evening Telegram ran for a little over a year -- not an insubstantial amount of time for a weekday strip of those days. But his work obviously did not become any sort of draw and when these strips ended, Lawler produced nothing further in the comic strip line. Sisters Of Eve ran from December 26 1912 to February 13 1914.
PS -- To make a longish post even longer, I want to mention the origin of the sample above -- the only hardcopy sample of have of this strip. It was found on the reverse of 1913 correspondence from a New York real estate brokerage firm. According to a note on the bottom of the sheet, they liked the cartoon so much that they had bought the rights to reproduce it on their stationery! Evidently the Evening Telegram had supplied them with a syndicate proof sheet of the strip, because you'll notice in the next to last panel the typeset text "RELEASE FEBRUARY 11".
Labels: Obscurities
