Friday, October 07, 2022
Obscurity of the Day: Chestnut Charlie
Merrill Blosser is generally remembered for just one feature -- Freckles and his Friends. While it might seem like creating a popular strip that ran for almost sixty years is plenty of work for one lifetime, Blosser has several additional credits to his name if you look back at his early days at NEA in the 1910s.
One of those credits is for Chestnut Charlie, an unusually skinny strip that was formatted to span the entire width of a newspaper page. It appeared amongst a spate of similar strips, including A Reel of Nonsense.
Chestnut Charlie offered riddle gags that are sometimes preceded by a bit of business that leads up to the riddle, but often just a few panels with not much point to them. Features like this make it plain that Blosser was smart to stick with Freckles and his Friends.
Chestnut Charlie was distributed by NEA, and ran daily from August 4 1916 to May 6 1918*.
*Source: NEA archives at Ohio State University.
Labels: Obscurities
The West Viginian,(Fairmont WVa.) has this feature as early as 29 July 1916. (Saturday) It must have been a brand new title because on another page it has small one panel spot box showing a laughing face and drawing one's attention to see the strip on page 2.
This same strip is the first one that ran in the Albany Times-Union too, though on 3 August, so I think you'll agree that with NEA stuff, most papers weren't always kosher about proper running dates.
The WV also ran it until Thursday, 9 May 1918.
: 10/08/2022 1:38 AM --Allan
