Obscurity of the Day: Bug-House Records

 

Here's an instance of a weekday strip which was demonstrably produced with syndication in mind as well as the home paper. According to Jeffrey Lindenblatt's index of the New York American, Hearst's flagship paper, Jimmy Swinnerton produced four episodes of Bug-House Records from December 22 to 30 1915. Yet if I check papers around the country, I can come up with a total of five episodes in the series. In other words, one of those episodes did not make it into the home paper of the Hearst chain. 

By the 1920s, big syndicators like Hearst and Pulitzer would be producing lots of weekday/daily material primarily for syndication, but in the 1910s that practice was still uncommon enough to surprise me a little when I find an example. Granted, in this case the home paper missed only a single episode of a short-lived series, but it wouldn't be long before the profitability of syndication would make the big chains produce lots of material that would never see the light of day in their hometowns.