Wednesday, September 06, 2023
Obscurities of the Day: Clown Alley and Longshots
Some newspaper features hope to become classics of the form, to be recalled with wistful nostalgia by nonagenarians and collected in sumptuous complete hardcover editions for collectors. Others are just -- quite literally -- created to take up space.
Such was the inspiration between this pair of features, Clown Alley and Longshots. Somehow Universal Press Syndicate got together with the Philadelphia Inquirer on a redesign of their Sunday comics section, and it was noticed that on a page with four quarter-page strips, which by the 1980s were actually a little shy of a true quarter-page tall, that a thin slack space was left. Universal Press saw this as a skinny opportunity and went to Bill Hinds to create content (how I hate that term) to fill it up. Hinds came up with Clown Alley and Longshots, both a page wide but each less than two inches tall. Each offered a weekly gag shoehorned into the odd space.
The Inquirer, rather than use their overly tall pages to run three quarters and one third-page comic feature, which would have incurred no additional cost to them, went along with this solution that put money into the pockets of Universal and Bill Hinds each week. That's what you get and that's what you deserve when you call in a consultant who has motives of their own.
Not that there's anything really wrong with Hinds' panels -- they do a pretty admirable job of gagging up this weird space. And Hinds was probably happy for the opportunity since one of his existing features, According to Guinness, had just cancelled its daily panel. But when Universal offered these new features to other newspapers there were few if any takers. After all, how many papers are going to buy Sunday comics features for the technical convenience of their compositors? It was a solution to an obscure technical problem, one that already had alternative free solutions due to the wide range of Sunday comics formats provided by the syndicates.
Longshots and Clown Alley both debuted in the Philadelphia Inquirer on June 21 1987 and ran there for over four years until July 28 1991, victims of the Inky's next section revamp.
Labels: Obscurities
As a kid I remember ads in the Sunday comics, sometimes but not always in comic form. Del Monte soda, for example, briefly had a parody superhero serial, Delbert Montague. Also remember strips like "Li'l Abner" being weirdly reconfigured to accommodate larger ads, which I now remember as tabloid page size dropped onto a broadsheet.
At some point Sunday comics ads faded away (although I recall writing sales materials for them at the Mercury News into the current century).
