Friday, December 16, 2022
Obscurity of the Day: Brownie Clown of Brownie Town
Cox drew his famed Brownies for Saint Nicholas magazine, and published a number of books of their escapades. His work for newspapers early on was limited to series which evidently served as marketing for those books. However, in 1907-08 Cox penned a newspaper strip series that was made up of new material, and only appeared in book form after the conclusion of the series.
The series was Brownie Clown of Brownie Town, and I am told that it is the first time that Cox opted to use word balloons in addition to his customary rhyming captions -- a sure sign that he was trying to keep up with the times.
The Sunday strip debuted on March 17 1907* and I cannot figure out who syndicated it. It might have been Cox's publisher, the Century Company, or it might be a regular newspaper syndicate. Normally to figure that out I look at what tended to appear in the same comic sections with a feature like this, but in that case this method leads me to believe it was syndicated by World Color Printing, because all but one of the strips in my own collection are World Color in the rest of the section. But I just don't think WCP, a readyprint syndicate mostly used by lesser papers, had the marketing clout to merit being chosen to distribute the strip.
The strip gives kids all their favorite Brownie characters, and focuses on the Brownie Clown -- not being a Brownie fan, I'm afraid I don't know if this is a new character to the series. He looks like an established character, but a flip through of a few Brownies books leaves me without an earlier reference to a character by that name -- oddly, Cox rarely refers to them by name.
As popular as the Brownies were (perhaps waning just a bit by 1907?), newspapers seldom seem to have stuck around for the whole series. Perhaps because so many papers started it late, many still had a backlog when they learned a book version was about to be published. Would that have encouraged them or discouraged them from running the strip? I dunno. Maybe the Century Company required that the strip end in newspapers well before the publication date, thinking people wouldn't buy what they could get in their Sunday paper?
In any case, I think the series ended on March 1 1908**, but I don't have any paper that ran the whole series, so that's an estimate. The Boston Post, my earliest start, may have run the whole thing (they did run it through the end of 1907) but the microfilm for 1908 was missing.
The book version was published in September 1908. According to Worldcat it is 103 pages (huh?), so if we assume that means about 48-50 strips, printed two pages to a Sunday, we're pretty close. An actual perusal of the book would be very helpful, but I'm afraid I don't have a spare $1000 to invest in that little research expedition.
* Source: Boston Post; many papers started the series late.
** Source: Washington Evening Star.
Labels: Obscurities
https://archive.org/details/PublishersWeekly1909/1909-01-30/page/186/mode/2up
Cox was a cartoonist super star for many years; I have one of his children's books from the 1880s, "Queery Queers with wings, tails and claws" (that was one of my grandfather's as a kid)so he'd been around a long time. By 1907 everybody knew him and the Brownies. When the "Brownie" camera came out in the 1890s, it seemed the Brownies that tumbled around it in the ads just were an anonymous mob.,so the Brownie Clown" seems to be devised for the series.
I have seen this series in several papers, among them the Detroit Free Press. It sure looks like a smaller or self-syndicated item. Is the "American-Reveille" from Bellingham, Washington?
The Brownies had made an earlier foray into stripdom, in 1903 they had a series where they I believe, had an adventure in the Phillipines. Can't recall much about it. What syndicate it was just doesn't come to mind.
: 12/16/2022 4:00 PM Cox did the 1903 Phillipines series, but also a an 1898-99 series. Both were based on books, and presumably offered by the publisher (Century). The 1903 series seems to have been syndicated via the New York Herald, the distributor of the 1898-99 series is not as clearcut.
But the series I referred to starring the Brownies is much earlier; not even a spark of interest out there? Harrumph.
--Allan
