Obscurity of the Day: Jolly Jingles (a different one)

 

If you were here with us on Monday you read about Jolly Jingles by Dudley Fisher. Today we're going to cover an unrelated but identically titled feature that ran during the same period. This coincidence has gotten most printed and online histories all balled up, melding information about the two features and coming up with one Frankenstein feature that stitches it all back together in a bit of a mess. So let's set the record straight, shall we?

Graham Hunter's Jolly Jingles, unfortunately, is very hard to track because it went through perhaps as many as four different syndicates in its short life, and hardly sold to any papers from any of them. So while we can unravel it from Fisher's version, definitive data about Hunter's is scarce. 

Why were clients so rare? Hunter's cartooning was quite nice, but his poetry .... well, regular visitors here know that I have a low threshold of pain when it comes to poetry, but I think anyone would admit, just based on the samples above, that Hunter was not exactly gifted by the poetry muse. I mean, look at that last example. I don't claim to be a poetry expert, but the meter there is just jarringly wrong. In two minutes flat I was able to come up with an alternative using the same rhymes but that I think scans more properly:

Eugene is practicing the casting art,

But getting off to a very bad start,

He hooks onto an angler's bowler hat,

This lesson is over, time to depart!

Still not a great gag or great poetry, but couldn't Hunter put in a few minutes effort?

Anyway, enough carping. Hunter's Jolly Jingles debuted in the Chicago Tribune on March 9 1924, a new addition to their children's page that ran each Sunday. The strips offer far better rhymes than our samples above because Hunter had a whole week to come up with one winner rather than six stinkers. 

The Tribune advertised the strip as available for syndication, but good luck finding a taker for it. I have managed to find exactly one sample outside the Tribune*, from March 1925, and oddly that sample is clearly copyrighted to Readers Syndicate. If the Tribune was sharing distribution with Readers Syndicate, that makes two companies that were making a big fat zilch off the feature. So that's a head-scratcher. 

By the end of 1924, the Trib had banished it from their Sunday kids' page, but they continued to advertise it in Editor & Publisher at least as late as October 1925. Ironically the ad makes a big deal about the Trib only syndicating material they run in their home paper, and yet this feature had not seen the light of day there in close to a year. 

Apparently the Tribune gave up on it around this time, and the next we see the feature it is now with McClure Syndicate. McClure took it on as a daily feature, and reduced it in size a bit. The weekly strip had generally been five panels, the new daily was four (as seen above). The earliest start I can find for this iteration of the strip is on March 29 1926**. 

Here we get another oddity -- in the 1926 E&P Syndicate Directory they duly note the daily strip, but they credit the distributor as Ledger Syndicate!  Is this a typo, or is the syndication story of this feature just that convoluted? Anyway, I've never seen a printed sample of the strip bearing a Ledger stamp, so hopefully that's just a red herring. 

The new daily Jolly Jingles failed to capture the hearts of many newspaper editors, and the strip ended in 1927. The last I can find it appearing on time and in order is January 29 1927 in the Sioux City Journal, but the Harrisburg Evening News, which ran it with all the consistency of lottery numbers, seems to run material dated perhaps as late as July 1927, though they don't do so until much later in the year. 

Graham Hunter went on to a richly varied career in cartooning, but as far as I know never had another syndicated newspaper feature. Can you blame him after this experience?

* Source: St. Joseph News-Press

** Source: Sioux City Journal