Obscurity of the Day: Lucky Looie

 

Roy W. Taylor was certainly fascinated by the idea of the effects of good and bad luck. In the Chicago Daily News he penned this strip, Lucky Looie (or Louie sometimes), from April 14 1903 to April 13 1904. In this series Looie, a hobo, starts out the strip with what seems like what will be bad luck, but in each installment the situation turns and Looie ends up smelling like a rose, so to speak. 

Later at the New York World he would turn the tables with a short-lived 1906 series called Unlucky Looie. In this series a very different Looie is looking for a job and manages every time he gets one to have an accident that, of course, causes him to lose the job. 

Finally, in the Philadelphia North American Taylor penned another version of Unlucky Looie, this one representing some of his last comics work before he died in 1914 at age 38 -- making him, I hate to say, just as luckless as some of his characters.