You've got to hand it to the Brooklyn Eagle. It was never an important or terribly high circulation paper -- at least by New York City standards -- but they had some skin in the game by consistently running comics from the 1900s onward, almost all of which were produced in-house by their own bullpen.
Their only real breakout hit was Buttons and Fatty, which had some modest success in syndication, but that is by no means the whole story. Here, for instance, is a Sunday strip called The Superstitions of the Twaddle Twins, which ran from March 30 to July 6 1919. Hal Merritt is the author of this one, and he had a number of series with the Eagle in the 1917-1919 period. My guess is that when some of the better cartoonists went off to war he got his chance up at the plate.
Merritt wasn't much of a cartoonist but he does have a certain knack for getting good action scenes out of his players. His writing is also not so great -- the entire series is based on a premise long over-used, where a character scoffs at a superstition only to be proven, and painfully so, that the superstition should be heeded.
The Superstitions of the Twaddle Twins would be Merritt's last comic strip series for the Eagle, and as far as I know, anywhere else.
It's striking that the black kid and the white kids are communicating more or less as equals. That seems unusual for that era, and for cartoons of that era in particular.
ReplyDeleteGood point Whygh. This paper was published in Brooklyn, a city that was a true melting pot whose readers were of many different cultures, races and ethnicities. The Eagle reflected the somewhat more enlightended attitudes of its readers. Smart of the Eagle! -- Allan
ReplyDelete