Friday, June 30, 2023
Obscurity of the Day: Major Stuff
After dropping the popular Lady Bountiful Sunday strip, Gene Carr inexplicably decided to follow it up with what I consider a rather limp and uninspired Sunday strip titled Step-Brothers. It was a creativity-deficient Katzenjammer Kids knock-off that ran for almost seven years in Pulitzer's Funny Side Sunday section, from 1907 to 1914. Why Carr, a cartoonist of no small ability, would waste his time for so long on such dreck I cannot imagine, but he did. And there's no telling how long it could have gone on, but luckily in 1914 Pulitzer snagged Rudolph Dirks who was about to bring his original Katzenjammer Kids to the Funny Side. This development forced Carr to find something else to do in his space. We'll cover more about Step-Brothers one of these days, but today we're going to go deeper into obscurity with the successor/continuation/refocusing of that strip.
Step-Brothers starred a pair of kids (natch), whose adult antagonists/victims were Uncle Crabapple and Major Stuff. Once Carr had beaten the Katzies angle far enough into the ground to hit magma, he now refocused the strip on the two adults. The 'new' strip debuted on May 10 1914*, the week after the last official Step-Brothers strip (and a month before Dirks would make his debut). At first the kids were still around sometimes, but their roles were significantly reduced. By July the pair had decided to go camping, and for the next half-year the gags (as you will see above) all relate to the two city-dwellers adapting to life in the wilderness.
The pair were finally brought back to the city, but they were no funnier there. The strip ended on February 21 1915, to be followed the next week with the revival of Lady Bountiful, which maybe Carr should have just stuck with in the first place.
The strip didn't really have an official title, but instead mentioned one of the two characters in the headlines; I elected to offer an 'official' Stripper's Guide title of Major Stuff only because I seem to see his name in the headline a little more often.
* Source: All dates from St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Labels: Obscurities
