Stripper's Guide

The Columbus Dispatch was a dream paper for lovers of cartooning. Besides a good mix of syndicated material, they offered Billy Ireland's superb The Passing Show page, a For Junior Readers page with great cartoon content, Milton Caniff's early work and lots more. Today we'll look at Jolly Jingles, which was a second gorgeous full page feature of the Sunday Dispatch in its heyday. While The Passing Show featured material of local interest, Jolly Jingles was more universal. Cute gals for the menfolk, fashions for the ladies, and rhyming humour for all. 

The Jolly Jingles page began sometime in 1919 (unfortunately the Columbus Dispatch microfilm I reviewed was missing a lot of material for that year so I cannot offer an exact date), penned by Dudley T. Fisher, Jr. The idea, I assume, was to offer readers a magazine-cover feature similar to those offered by the American Weekly and other nationally distributed newspaper Sunday magazines. Unlike the syndicated magazine covers, which often featured outright glamour girl cheesecake, Fisher's girls were attractive but generally modest and fully clothed. 

The feature was well-received, and so on September 6 1920 it added a thrice weekly panel in addition to the Sunday appearances. Fisher's capacity for creating his little ditties was soon tested to the limit when thrice-weekly became daily on October 26 1922. The new daily was syndicated by the Universal Feature and Specialty Company, though takers of the feature were very few. With syndication not proving to be the financial boon hoped for, Fisher gave up on the daily after a little under a year, ending September 1 1923. 

The Sunday page went on hiatus from July 13 to October 12 1924 -- whether Fisher was contemplating dropping the feature, taking a vacation or or he was under the weather is unknown. 

To the delight of Dispatch readers the Sunday page returned, and in 1926 Fisher made a deal with World Color Printing to syndicate it. This went absolutely nowhere, but in the process got him to crank up the daily panel once again. This time it had a very short life, from February 4 to May 1 1926. 

Now giving up on  half-baked syndication deals, Fisher's lovely colour page continued in the Dispatch for another twelve years. On January 16 1938 Fisher began yet another full page feature titled Right Around Home, a feature in which a big crowd scene was observed from overhead. This feature was earlier tried out as Skylarks, but the new version featured a family that reappeared each week. Jolly Jingles and Right Around Home both ran in the Sunday Dispatch on January 16 and 23rd, and then Jolly Jingles went into retirement. Apparently Fisher admitted that after nearly two decades of coming up with humorous verse he felt that his tank was dry and he needed a change. That change, to Right Around Home, which introduced the little girl Myrtle to the world, would end up becoming Fisher's big feature, widely syndicated well past his death. 

An important footnote about this feature: you will find a lot of wrong information in cartooning histories about Jolly Jingles. Part of the reason for this is that there was a second Jolly Jingles feature running concurrently in the 1920s. That second one was a weekday strip by Graham Hunter. Information about this feature and Fisher's version get all balled up together in most cartooning histories. I hope I have set the record straight here on Fisher's Jolly Jingles, and for good measure we'll cover Graham Hunter's version right her on Wednesday. See you then!

Labels: Obscurities

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM