Monday, December 12, 2022
Mystery Strips: Whatta Life and Kampus Keeds
Winter is coming on and that means outside projects finally get put on hold and the Stripper gets to spend a lot more time in his archives. And what work awaits him there? Giant teetering piles that must be put under control, itemized, categorized, inventoried and put to bed in their rightful places. And what that means is that he turns up mysteries at a fair clip.
Today that mystery goes beyond a comic strip, it started out as a whole doggone newspaper. What I have here is the May 6 1933 edition of the New York News. Nothing mysterious about that, you say? Nah, I didn't say Daily News, just News. It's a black newspaper published out of New York City, a city that already had a black "News" paper -- the Amsterdam News. At first I wondered if the Amsterdam News experimented with this as a new name, but no dice there. Finally I found a slight mention of a paper called the New York News and Harlem Home Journal on WorldCat, but the listing offers no information except that it was published in the 1910s-30s. Jumping to my books on black journalism history, I find that not one of them mentions this paper, at least as far as the indexes are concerned. Jumping over to the Library of Congress listings, I learned that there are only two reels of microfilm for the paper known to exist, partial years from 1921 and 1927. Now that's what I call a newspaper that flew beneath the radar.
So here's the front page headline area and the indicia, plus a snippet of a tirade against other black papers below the indicia.
Okay, so the newspaper is no longer a complete mystery, just very, very obscure. Why do we care? Naturally I wouldn't be beating my typing fingers to the bone here if there weren't comics somewhere in this story. And yes there are, in fact two of them. This issue include strips of Kampus Keeds and Whatta Life, both by a Lucille Fitzgerald. Being 1933, and assuming that Lucille was African-American, she would be the very first known published black female cartoonist, pre-dating Jackie Ormes by four years.
The only problem for me is that I'd love to put these strips in my database, but with only one sample of each I have no proof they were series. I know this is a real longshot, but any help out there??
Labels: Mystery Strips
