Friday, September 08, 2023
Toppers: Know Your Navy, Know Your Merchant Marine, Know Your Sports
Our headline above says "Topper" but today we've got a feature (or rather, three of 'em) that sort of bend the definition. To me a topper is generally a separate strip or panel included with a feature that, when discarded, helps to allow a paper to run the feature in various different formats. Know Your Navy/Merchant Marine/Sports doesn't fit that definition because I know of no format for Mickey Finn in which it has the function of being a 'drop panel' to assist in reformatting. With Mickey Finn, if you run the Nippie topper, you also get Know Your Navy/Merchant Marine/Sports, and if you drop Nippie, that extra panel goes away with it. In other words, that panel has no particular function except to make Nippie a five panel strip instead of six.
This sort of feature is certainly not unique to Mickey Finn -- Dick Tracy's Crimestopper's Texbook and Heathcliff's Kitty Korner come to mind. This type of feature probably deserves its own name, but what would that be? Lagniappe feature appeals to me, but I imagine that would send a lot of people scrambling for the dictionary.
Anyway, since I lump this stuff in with toppers in my book, and I know of no industry term for it, let's call it a topper and plow on.
Mickey Finn's main topper, Nippie - He's Often Wrong, ran with the Sunday strip from 1936 to 1946. For almost all of its life it was a three-panel single tier affair, but on November 14 1943* it was upgraded to two tiers and the Know Your Navy panel was added, offering weekly factoids about that division of the armed forces. Since this is during World War II, there's no mystery about its appeal. Why in particular Lank Leonard picked that service branch, however, is unknown. Perhaps he looked around at all the other strips that had military components and decided that the Navy could stand a little more of the spotlight.
At the conclusion of the war Leonard decided to change the focus. He renamed the panel Know Your Merchant Marine on September 9 1945** and began covering that somewhat obscure public/private naval service.
The Merchant Marine panels no doubt told readers much that they did not know, but Leonard tired of it quickly. On December 16** the panel was refocused again, this time under the title of Know Your Sports. Panels explaining sports rules offered little to fascinate readers and the feature was dropped entirely on April 21 1946***. Nippie reverted to a single-tier affair, but it too would be dropped just three months later. From then on the Sunday Mickey Finn offered no toppers.
* Source: Atlanta Constitution
** Source: New York Mirror
*** Source: St. Petersburg Times
Labels: Topper Features
: 9/10/2023 11:13 AM 