Obscurity of the Day: Adventures of a Japanese Doll

 

When the new McClure-syndicated Sunday comic section began in 1901, one of their early high-profile offerings was a complete serialized printing of Henry "Hy" Mayer's children's book, Adventures of a Japanese Doll. The book was published in 1901, and the newspaper series ran from September 1 to October 20 1901. 

It seems to me a bad move for Mayer to allow this newspaper series when his book was sitting in bookstores at the same time, especially with the Christmas season just around the corner. My guess, though, is that Mayer was under contract with McClure for serialization rights, and they ran with it. Current books were often serialized in  those days, and I guess the idea was that the sort of people who would read these serializations in magazines and newspapers probably wouldn't have bought the book anyway, so the author and publisher might as well make a little money off them. It seems like a real questionable business model, but maybe I'm missing something about how the cross-marketing worked. 

In any case, Adventures of a Japanese Doll as printed in the McClure comic sections was a very text heavy feature, which means it really only gets an honorary mention in our Stripper's Guide listings -- if it appeared anywhere other than a comics section we'd probably pass on it. The illustrations are certainly lovely, and the text, not at all the sort of thing we're used to seeing from Hy Mayer, is sweet if a little cloying. It is certainly a nice change for the turn of the century comics pages to offer foreigners any respect, and this feature goes beyond that into a deep and knowledgeable reverence for Japanese culture. Too bad this sort of viewpoint failed to catch on and quash the racial stereotyping and outright racism of many comics of the day.