Wednesday, July 19, 2023
Toppers: Holly of Hollywood
Keeping Up With The Joneses was already quite a venerable daily strip when it added a Sunday page on January 3 1932. The daily began in 1913, almost two full decades earlier. Associated Newspapers, the distributor, was primarily a syndicator of dailies, so it is perhaps not surprising that it took one of their better-known strips that long to take the plunge into colour. Or maybe the wait was for creator Pop Momand to find enough able assistance to take on the extra work. Who knows...
Whichever it was, the Sunday Keeping Up WIth The Joneses was not exactly a gangbusters success, but it did get enough clients to be kept running until both the Sunday and daily were cancelled in April 1938. In this seven-plus year run the strip had one and only one topper that ran with it every single week for the entire span, titled Holly of Hollywood.
In the earliest few strips, the svelte tall beauty Holly was an aspiring Hollywood actress, but after just a few months she set her sights considerably lower and became a waitress in a greasy spoon. Holly might have been attractive, but her personality left something to be desired -- she was vain, self-absorbed, and lazy. From this Momand eked out the gags of this one-tier usually three panel strip. Typical situations involved her smarting off to the restaurant customers, sassing the other help, or going out on first dates (one can imagine second dates were pretty rare).
Holly of Hollywood ran from January 3 1932* to April 10 1938**, the same running dates as the main Sunday page. For some reason for most of those years the name Holly in the title panel was lettered within double-quotes -- I have no idea why.
* Source: Brooklyn Times, via Jeffrey Lindenblatt.
** Source: Brooklyn Eagle
Labels: Topper Features
: 7/19/2023 5:22 PM The concept mainly came about because of newspaper strikes. If your paper was on strike, the radio station would get the proof sheets and keep you up to date on what was happening in the story strips. I think the other shows that read the funnies were more a way to cheaply fill air time. Why the papers would advertise them is a bit of a mystery to me. Maybe they thought the kids would get hooked and make papa switch papers to get the funnies they'd heard on the radio?
--Allan
The term "canned", in radio jargon, was applied to ready-made, syndicated stuff, like "The Comic Weekly Man", who was reading it for the whole chain. Hearst had many "canned" programmes from the 1930's to 50s. I myself own one such disque, an episode of "Jungle Jim" on one side, and something from "The American Weekly" on the other. It's 16" wide. Basicly, a "canned" comic reader could only happen with Hearst's "Puck" section, because pretty much all other papers were unique, and would have to have a production tailored for them.
: 7/31/2023 9:04 AM 