Monday, September 25, 2023
Obscurity of the Day: The Old Pueblo
In the modern era of newspaper comics a local strip, drawn for a particular newspaper, is very rarely run in the Sunday colour comics section. Why? Because the production of those sections is (for reasons I admittedly do not comprehend) usually farmed out to big companies like Eastern Color Printing and Greater Buffalo Press. When newspapers do that, I'm guessing, the logistics of having these companies insert custom material like a local strip is either costly or just impractical. (Anyone in the newspaper production biz care to weigh in on this?)
So in 1975, when the Arizona Star placed a historical epic strip titled The Old Pueblo on the cover of the Sunday comics section, that was a very unusual occurrence and one to be highly commended. The strip ran for 52 weekly installments, from January 5 to December 28, telling the history of Tucson from prehistoric times to the present. The creator was Johnny Bain, a Tucson history buff and cartoonist.
Bain's strip unfortunately suffers from production problems, worst in the early episodes like those above. Colouring is a bit of a mess, and the art doesn't seem like it was quite production-ready. But credit to Bain and the Star, they stuck with it for the entire year's worth of strips, improving as they went along, and even issued the completed series in booklet form at its conclusion.
Bain seems to have kept up his art career at least until the mid-80s when I lose track of him. However, as far as I know he never did another newspaper strip.
Labels: Obscurities
