Friday, August 18, 2023
Obscurity of the Day: Vic's Vacation
Back in the olden days, valued employees of a firm were given outmoded things called vacations as a perquisite. Even cartoonists, later viewed more as commodities than actual people, were offered these benefits.
Granted, many employers failed to get into the whole reason for vacations, to take a breather and recharge the batteries, and told their cartoonists that they were welcome to take vacations -- all they had to do was work twice as hard beforehand in order to create a backlog of material. Shame on them, but then as now some employers can't see beyond the tip of their financial statements.
The New York Evening World was an exception. Despite Pulitzer's reputation as a bit of a slavedriver, cartoonists in his bullpen did actually get vacations in the 1910s, the heyday of that paper. Better yet, instead of ruining the thing by making the cartoonists work double-time in order to earn that vacation, instead another bullpenner would take up the slack for the vacationing cartoonist. Above we have a particularly delightful example of that practice.
In 1919 Vic Forsythe was riding high producing the popular new strip Joe's Car (later Joe Jinks) for the Evening World. When vacation time came around, fellow bullpen cartoonist Ferd Long was called upon to spell Vic with a substitute strip. Usually these substitute strips were tryouts, where the stand-in would make his play to come up with a new strip that would impress the readers enough to be invited to continue. Long was an old hand, though, and coming toward the end of his career. Instead of trying to to create the next blockbuster hit strip, he simply imagined what sorts of things might be happening on Forsythe's vacation. The title, simply enough, was Vic's Vacation. I imagine Long and the rest of the bullpen got quite a kick out of cooking up the ultimate bad vacation for Vic.
As this was the end of the teens, and national syndication was quickly making this sort of practice outmoded, Vic's Vacation was not a complete replacement. In the Evening World Vic's Vacation ran on alternating days with new Joe's Car strips. In syndication, for which I gather Vic's Vacation was not considered a great fit for some reason, there were a limited number of Vic's Vacation strips distributed, and the additional slack was taken up with Jazbo Jones, a fill-in strip that ran very rarely in the home paper, and additional Joe's Car strips (reruns, presumably, though I haven't gone to the trouble to determine for sure).
Vic's Vacation ran on alternate weekdays in the New York Evening World from June 28 to August 8 1919, less often in syndication.
Thanks to Mark Johnson who supplied the samples above.
Labels: Obscurities
