Friday, July 21, 2023
Obscurity of the Day: The Smithers' Baby
When it seemed like every second feature in 1900s comics was a Katzenjammer Kid rip-off, it is oddly reassuring to sometimes find an imitator who at least tries to be original about what they copy from. Here today we have Smithers' Baby, a klunky rip-off that fails to sufficiently crank up the level of raucous zaniness properly to match George McManus' Newlyweds and their Baby, a huge hit in the New York World.
This me-too feature was by Frank Collier, whose only credits I know about came from the Boston Globe in 1906 to 1911. He had a number of short-lived series, but his bread-and-butter feature was Smithers' Baby which ran sporadically in the Sunday section from May 6 1906 to January 8 1911*.
What Frank did with the rest of his time on Earth is pretty much unknown to me, but I have found slight evidence for him still being in Boston in 1927, and still being referred to as a cartoonist.
* Source: All dates from Dave Strickler's Boston Globe index.
Labels: Obscurities
but not his Boston Globe index.
How many papers did Dave index?
--Allan
