Wednesday, June 21, 2023
Obscurity of the Day: Stanley
New Zealand cartoonist Murray Ball is venerated in his home country for the long-running Footrot Flats comic strip. Before that he scored another big hit with Stanley the Paleolithic Hero, which ran in the British magazine Punch either from 1970-74, according to Paul Hudson's The A to Z of British Newspaper Strips, or 1970-1981 as reported in various online sources. I'm guessing the latter must be closer to the truth, about which more below.
The strip starred a bespectacled caveman who tries with little success to fit in as a savage top-level predator like his kinsmen. The art and writing is top-notch, featuring exuberant slapstick material. Evidently U.S.-based syndication company Universal Press Syndicate thought it might appeal to the American market, and they offered it starting on April 4 1977* as a daily and Sunday strip with the abbreviatd title Stanley.
It is unclear to me how the American version of the strip relates to the material published overseas. The presence of Britishisms like gags about soccer would seem to indicate that the strip was essentially unchanged for the U.S. market. But since Punch would have had no use for daily/Sunday style strips, I can only assume that Ball was by 1977 producing material beyond their requirements. Whether Punch itself was ordering the extra material for syndication, or if Ball had taken his character to a more conventional syndicate by then, I'm afraid I do not know.
What I do know is that for all of Stanley's charm, it failed to impress many American features editors. The strip never managed to pull in more than a modest list of clients, and as far as I can tell was pulled by Universal Press as of September 8 1979**.
* Source: New Orleans Times-Picayune
** Source: Wilmington News-Journal.
They ran the strip until 6 November 1980, with the final entries with no dates any more, though still with Universal's name. There's a possiblity that the later ones were still new, but free of any prudish restrictions U.S. editors would impose, with gags shall we say,involving feminine anatomy.
: 6/21/2023 2:07 PM Ball did a later strip that appeared in Punch, titled "All the King's Comrades" (had to look it up). This looked newspaper-ready from the get go with panel borders, balloons, backgrounds, etc. It was about unionized medieval serfs versus a CEO/king in a broad labor-management satire. It was amusing, but not as elegant as Stanley.
