Toppers: Hotsy-Totsy

 

 

It's a good thing I don't actually talk about strips but type about them, because I would have shown an embarrassing gap in my knowledge when I pronounced the name of this strip. For years and years I thought the gal in the strip had a name that rhymed with "suits". Of course as you well know, her name rhymes with "puts". And if you didn't know, well, you're welcome. My wife, who has exactly 0.00005213% the interest in comics that I do, heard me say the name of the strip out loud and quietly corrected me without batting an eye. Yeah, she's a swell gal that way. 

Anyhow, to the subject at hand. Jimmy Murphy's Toots and Casper was a sort of melange of The Newlyweds and their Baby, the George McManus classic, and Blondie, which didn't exist until this strip was a decade old. Our two title characters are young marrieds, much in love, and dimwitted enough to make a hash of something every day just in time to give readers a guffaw or groan. Buttercup the baby came along early in the life of the strip, and the doting parents gained all those old McManus gags to reenact. 

Toots and Casper was a Hearst product, and in 1926 when the decree to add toppers came down,  Murphy stepped right up to bat with Hotsy-Totsy, wich debuted on January 10 1926* along with most of the other Sunday pages in the Hearst stable. 

Hotsy-Totsy was a ridiculously repetitive strip in which a pair of cooing sweethearts while away the hours because they can't bear to part. All that really changes from strip to strip is the location -- in a car, on the phone, in a park, etc. After a few months of that the lovers gain names, Gerald and Doris, and Murphy puts a little, and I really mean a little, effort into offering different gags. 

Just as Murphy was starting to give his young sweeties a little personality the strip was replaced with It's Papa Who Pays, which would run for the next thirty years. Hotsy-Totsy ended on April 18 1926*. 

* Source: Palm Beach Post.