Stripper's Guide

Gus Mager had quite the little cottage industry going with his 'monk' characters. He started drawing weekday strips for the New York Evening Journal starring human-monkey hybrids in 1904. At first they skewed toward apedom, but later the 'monks' became more and more human, until new readers would no doubt be wondering about the point of the title. No matter, because the strips were a real hoot, starring a cast of characters named for their dominant characteristic -- you had Tightwaddo the cheapskate, Coldfeeto the timid guy, Boneheado the dummy, Braggo the ... well you get the idea. 

In December 1910 a new pair of characters was added to the list, a brilliant detective named Sherlocko and his faithful companion, Dr. Watso. No internet points at all for being able to decode this not exactly sly take-off  on Mr. Conan Doyle's famed creations. This wasn't by any means the first appearance of a super-sleuth in newspaper comics, which is hardly surprising because Sherlock Holmes was all the rage in this era. What Mager brought to the party, oddly enough, was an obviously great respect and enthusiasm for Holmes. While there was plenty of funny stuff going on in the Sherlocko strips, the simian detective himself played things straight -- his preternatural ability to find and interpret clues was handled with surprising fidelity to the original.

The new character was a hit, and became a fixture of Mager's 'monk' strip. Things went along their merry way until early 1913, when Mager decided to leave the Hearst stable in favour of the rival Pulitzer organization. One of the carrots held out to Mager was that his star character would be given the red carpet treatment, moving to a full page Sunday strip. At Hearst, Mager had pretty much been frozen out of the prestigious Sunday paper, appearing with only a few fill-in strips back in the mid-1900s. 

The first Sherlocko the Monk Sunday appeared in Pulitzer's Funny Side Sunday section on February 23 1913, as seen above. But you'll notice one big difference -- our heroes are no longer Sherlocko and Watso; they are now Hawkshaw and the Colonel.Also note that the name changes were obviously made at the last minute -- the new names are shoehorned into the word balloons, obviously replacing the original ones.

In Bill Blackbeard's introduction to the Hyperion Press book Sherlocko the Monk 1910-1912 he posits that the Conan Doyle estate might have served Pulitzer with a cease and desist order just before the new Sunday feature debuted. I disagree -- it seems to me that if the Conan Doyle estate was going to object to the obvious copy of their characters they would not have waited over two years to do so. My guess, rather, is that in the legal tradition already established by Buster Brown, it was assumed (or ordered) that Mager could take his characters with him to a new syndicate, but the name was not allowed to go with it. The last minute nature of the change makes me think that a cease and desist letter was probably received from the Hearst organization just shy of press time, and therefore the awkward looking change.

Why 'Hawkshaw' though? Although anyone could be forgiven for thinking that Mager might have actually coined the term for a detective, he actually appropriated it from a detective in the 1863 stage play The Ticket-of-Leave Man. Apparently though the play was critically panned it was an audience favorite and was constantly revived during the Victorian era, and the name Hawkshaw became synonym with detectives. 

The newly minted Hawkshaw the Detective had a long run in the Pulitzer Sunday section, ending its first run in 1922. The strip was then revived in 1931 to become the topper to the Pulitzer strip The Captain and the Kids, which ironically enough, was also a feature stolen from Hearst and renamed due to legal wrangling.Thus it continued until 1947, making a tremendous nearly half-century run and Gus Mager's contribution to the history books. 

Labels: Firsts and Lasts

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM