Friday, September 16, 2022
A One Shot Wonder: The Queer Life of Dipsy Beans
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About six years ago we covered an obscurity titled In The Good Old Days, a Sunday strip produced by Jimmy Swinnerton in 1918-19 as a temporary replacement for his bread and butter strip, Little Jimmy. What I failed to mention at the time is that the week before that strip began, Swinnerton did a one-shot called The Queer Life of Dipsy Beans. Oddly this one-shot has a lot in common with In the Good Old Days; both were about a sailor (Noah in the latter case) and his animal friends. And, in fact, the one-shot really reads like the beginning of a series. Why Swinnerton did the sudden about-face I have no idea.
The other thing you need to know about this one-shot is that it is documented in my book as running for two weeks, which it didn't. I got messed up by trying to triangulate between two papers which ran the one-shot a week apart, giving the illusion, if you don't have the strips in front of you at the same time, that the 'series' ran two weeks. So mea culpa, and take a Sharpie to listing #5223 in my book.
Thanks to Cole Johnson for the scan.
: 9/16/2022 10:16 AM This might be another time that a "Pilot" was used long after anyone considered its possibility as a series, which seemed to happen several times with Swinnerton art around 1910. Notice he didn't include the year "18" in his signature, as he usually did. It could be a few years old. The format here starts about 1914. The title type font however, started closer to 1916 or 17.
Why would there be such a thing? Might be a ready to use piece of art to use as an emergency if regular art wasn't ready in time.
I wish I could recall, but I don't know what paper my brother pulled this from. It would seem like the colours seen in an inside Hearst section, but could be in a big city client paper as well. I say this because most clients would often still run inside pages in one colour. Also, as he had a volume of June 1918 Los Angles Examiner, a top paper in the Hearst chain, and Queer Bean Dip didn't appear there.
: 9/17/2022 4:54 PM Good note about the lack of year in Swin's signature. He was generally pretty good about that, so it may be a K-Mart blue light special end of season clearance item.
--Allan
