Stripper's Guide

 I've been avoiding doing posts about the Paramount News Feature Service for years, hoping that eventually I would shake some fruit from the research tree and be able to offer you some good hard facts about the syndicate. That hasn't happened yet, but Alex Jay has produced a batch of Ink-Slinger Profiles about the syndicate's artists, so I'm going to try to chime in with what little I do know, and pad it out with some educated guesses. I have no original tearsheets of the syndicate's wares, so our show-and-tell is going to have to rely on material from digitized microfilm. Apologies in advance for the low quality.

So, what was the Paramount News Feature Service? Well, first of all, it had nothing to do with the Hollywood movie company. Second, it seldom actually went by that unwieldy name, but instead abbreviated it as "PNF Service". To save my fingers, I'll go with their shortened version from here on out. Third, as with so many failed syndicates, they were trying to sell their strips to that supposedly overlooked market, weekly newspapers. To repeat my standard refrain about weeklies, for most their sales were never about features; they were about readers wanting to know what others in their community were up to. Syndicates catering to weeklies quickly find out how loud and definite the responses of "No Thanks" are from weekly editors.

I can find no business information about PNF Service, and those who worked for it seem to have never bothered to mention it or their strips in later years, so we're pretty much out in the weeds as that goes. But we do know that S.M. "Jerry" Iger was one of those creators, and given his later business acumen, it wouldn't be a terrible guess that he was the ringleader of this ragtag syndicate. Another telltale that he was running the show? The only strip from the syndicate that got any promotion is his strip, The Gang:

The dates that this syndicate actually operated are also questionable. We've tracked some of their strips back as early as July 1927, others we can only track back to a few months later. Among our early adopter papers, the syndicate seems to have a big shake-up in June 1928, after which some replacement strips make a very short appearance. The early adopters then drop the syndicate. 

But the PNF material keeps running for years after that -- I've seen their material printed as late as 1941. Is this all reprints? For the most part the answer is assuredly yes, but since the early adopter papers were found on microfilm years ago, we cannot easily do a strip-by-strip check to make sure that there was no more new material being created in mid- to late-1928. And whether or not they are reprints, who was selling them to these papers? Was PNF still out there beating the bushes for years afterward? Or did PNF sell off their stock to one (or more) of the reprint vendors, who sell the bleached bones of dead syndicates cheap to poverty row papers? My guess is that it is a combination of the two. Usually we can count on reprint vendors to remove syndicate stamps from the strips they resell, but in many cases we see PNF still credited on later runs. On the other hand, I've also seen papers that are clearly buying this material along with other grey-bearded old junk from those reprint vendors, and in those cases the syndicate stamps are indeed usually missing. 

Perhaps the oddest feature of these reprint runs is that the titles of the features is as hard to pin down as a confirmed bachelor at a Sadie Hawkins dance. And we'll see examples of this in the coming days. It's a real mess, and I doubt that I have it fully unravelled.

Another thing we know, and it's perhaps the most interesting feature of the whole syndicate, is that they sold their material to both mainstream and black papers. That in itself isn't unheard of, but it's how PNF did their marketing that is, I think, close to unique: some or possibly all of their strips were available with white or black characters -- the newspaper could choose which they preferred! This bit of hocus-pocus was pulled off quite simply; the strips would be drawn with white characters, and then a proof would be created on which those characters would get their skin shaded with a basic crosshatch to indicate their new race, and maybe a few details would be changed to make the characters more believable as black. Make a new proof based on that, and voila, take your choice, newspaper customer. 

Tomorrow: Sam Iger's Headlining Strip, The Gang

Labels: Obscurities

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM