Stripper's Guide

April 27 1910 -- Herriman notes the 'blue flu' happening around L.A., people taking the day off to go see Jack Johnson train for the upcoming Fight of the Century.

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 2 comments

Among the hundreds of those 'neat stuff that happened here' features, it's surprising how many of them ran in color in the comics section. That was pretty darn valuable space, and I guarantee every syndicate salesman who came to your town would gladly waste the feature editor's day with all the reasons that he would be better off with his syndicate's latest Sunday strip. Most features editors are of the superstitious, cowardly type who would break down under that sort of cross-examination by the third or fourth salesman. 

The features editors at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch get a tip of my hat for resisting all the naysayers who must have driven them nearly batty for over fifty years -- yes I said five-oh. But maybe their spines were stiffened some by the fact that they were being told to dump a feature that was originally suggested by Joseph Pulitzer II, and you don't need to get in trouble with people of that surname at the P-D. 

Our Own Oddities, which was first titled St. Louis Oddities, debuted on September 1 1940, drawn by Ralph Graczak, and was written mostly from reader submissions of odd and amazing facts about the area. Graczak had been a staff artist with the P-D since 1933, and had previously done another reader-submission feature, the pun based Dijever. Graczak's new feature made him by far the receiver of the most mail of any P-D staffer, and the popularity of the feature seldom seemed to wane.  Graczak took it upon himself to investigate each item submitted, often lugging a press camera out to people's homes in order for them to provide him with photographic proof of their reported oddities. 

Graczak remained on staff with the P-D until 1980. At age 70, he was ready to leave his other newspaper work. But Our Own Oddities, that he could not leave. He continued working on that feature as a freelancer until he was 81 and the feature was 51 years old. The feature last ran on February 24 1991. Most likely the death of his wife in 1990 finally took the last of the wind out of his sails. Graczak died in 1997.

Labels: Obscurities

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 3 comments

Boob McNutt began as a quite extraordinary new Sunday page in 1918*, featuring a dim-witted fellow who was intent on committing suicide. I know it sounds horrific, but in the hands of Rube Goldberg it was hilarious. Unfortunately, Goldberg eventually worked through that vein of black comedy and the strip evolved into a sort of domestic comedy, where Boob's naivete gets him into mostly uninspired silly situations. 

The strip would eventually rebound around 1927 into a looney adventure storyline that offered Goldberg much better raw fodder from which to make comedy hay. But in between, the strip was quite frankly deathly dull. 

On January 25 1925, Goldberg added a dog named Bertha to the McNutt household. On May 3 1925, the dog began talking in "dog language", with asterisks translating the nonsense into English. It could have been a cute idea, but 99% of the time the translations weren't even intended to be funny, they were just pointless comments on the situation.

When the Hearst Sundays added toppers in 1926, on January 10 Goldberg gave Bertha the top of the page, added a very Goldbergian breed name (earlier in the main strip she'd been called an Egyptian Wafflehound), and continued the mostly pointless conceit of translating her dog language.

The title Bertha the Siberian Cheesehound seems like it would be an entry point to some inspired Goldberg lunacy, but it wasn't. Perhaps recognizing that the strip was terribly weak, it ended after a little over six months, on July 4 1926. It was replaced by a new two tier topper, Bill.

* Many published histories insist that it began in May 1915; it did not.

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

There have been four different comic strip series titled Handy Andy, and today for the third one we've run here as an Obscurity of the Day, we cover the most obscure of them all. 

In 1919 the World Color Printing preprint Sunday comic section consisted of two original pages -- full pages of Slim Jim and The Kelly Kids, and two pages of reprints purchased from defunct syndicates. The Kelly Kids was drawn by Charles Kahles, who did not (at that time) take credit for the strip. As 1919 progressed, the art became sloppy on The Kelly Kids, and I'm not even sure if Kahles was still doing it, but dashing it off, or if someone at WCP was trying to ape his work. 

Finally, after a few especially awful installments of Kelly Kids, the strip was replaced starting on December 28 1919* with a substitute, a new version of Handy Andy. A very different sort of Handy Andy had appeared in the WCP sections of 1904-05, and then a more similar series ran in 1908-09. The new series sported crisp art by the excellent Jack Wilson, who had done a number of earlier series for NEA, but after that seemed not to be able to find a place to settle down.

The gags are about what you'd expect -- Andy tries to be handy around the house on DIY projects, but ends up making things much worse than they were. The idea isn't original, but certainly the sort of material that people relate to quite well. 

Handy Andy was strictly made as a fill-in, though. On April 11 1920 The Kelly Kids made their return (actually announced in the masthead of Handy Andy the previous week) with much reinvigorated art by Kahles. Why did Kahles need three months off? There's a story we'll probably never know. 

Thanks to Cole Johnson for the scan.

* Source: I can find no paper that ran the complete WCP section on the last week of 1919 or first week of 1920 for some reason; this start date was determined by using the Arizona Star, which ran the section late but by a known degree.

Labels: Obscurities

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

Here's card #3 from the 1910 Campbell's Kids series, inspired but not drawn by Grace Drayton. These cards came in two varieties, this version adds the text "10 cents a can".

Labels: Wish You Were Here

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 2 comments