Monday, June 05, 2023
Obscurity of the Day, Revisited: Jon Jason
NOTE: Jon Jason was an Obscurity of the Day way back in 2012, and at that time I candidly admitted that my review was based on only the scattered strips I was able to find then, Now with a substantial run of the strip, I'd like to give it another whack.
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Take this quiz before you read the sample strips above. Which is the most unlikely cover profession for a globe-trotting government agent:
a) Plumber
b) CPA
c) Dog Catcher
d) Magazine Illustrator
If you picked (d), you not only picked a pretty fair answer but also the profession of Jon Jason, titular hero of today's Obscurity of the Day. Yes, Mr. Jason is a world-travelling magazine illustrator; the reason he's always visiting foreign countries is that he works as a cover artist for International Woman magazine, and of course he has to go to foreign countries to find the most beautiful women to pose for him. It actually makes some sort of twisted sense, if one ignores the fact that photography had been invented a hundred years earlier. And Jason is indeed really a magazine illustrator, he just has a little side gig as a government agent searching out Nazis hiding from justice after the war.
This was Elmer Wexler's second comic strip, but the first that he wrote. During the early days of World War II he was the original artist on Newspaper PM's Vic Jordan, and he did a fine job on it until he went into the Marines. Coming back from the war, Newspaper PM offered him a new strip. Keen to take on the job as a solo project, Wexler took a writing course and with that under his belt, began Jon Jason on February 4 1946. Unfortunately his lack of experience showed; his stories were labyrinthine, following too many characters and too many subplots. A really good writer might have managed to pull it off, but Wexler just didn't quite have the chops. But evidently Wexler put a lot of time into the writing, because the art, by comparison to his earlier work on Vic Jordan, looks very rushed. It gets the job done, but it isn't the pleasure to behold that we know he could produce.
Jon Jason was available in syndication, but there were very few takers. Not only wasn't the strip itself quite up to snuff, but since Newspaper PM was a far left liberal paper, no papers with a right-leaning editorial stance would have considered it even if it was the next Terry and the Pirates. Wexler and Newspaper PM waved the white flag after one year, ending the strip on February 8 1947. Wexler ended the strip by welcoming its replacement to Newspaper PM, Elmo, in the final strip. Evidently by that time there were no syndicated clients, or perhaps Wexler produced a different farewell strip for them.
Labels: Obscurities
-Allan
