Obscurity of the Day: Orbit

 

By the 1980s adventure strips were about as relevant to newspaper readers as horsecollars, and that meant even stalwart SF classics like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon were fading away. But syndicate editors with anything on the ball knew that a certain class of newspaper reader, especially in the treasured younger audience, loved everything and anything SF. So how to get SF onto the comics page without requiring attention to a months-long storyline? Give them SF humour strips, of course. 

Among the first to realize this was the tiny start-up syndicate Asterisk Features, helmed by John Somerville. In fact Somerville had plumbed this genre long before he started his own syndicate, when he penned the delightful Stanley Steamer strip starring a cuddly robot in the 1960s. After his retirement from Universal Press Syndicate in the early 1980s he decided to keep a toe in the syndication game and sought out a strip or two to promote.

Cartoonist Bruce Hammond, who was already doing a 7-days a week strip called Duffy for Univeral Press, was seeing his sales figures on that strip starting to slide, so he was willing to take on the huge task of a second strip as insurance when Somerville came calling. Hammond had Orbit, a gentle young reader strip about a cute little alien, in his files, a syndicate submission that had gone nowhere back in the 1970s.  Somerville was immediately taken with it and chose the strip to be the first offering of Asterisk Features. 

Asterisk Features had its biggest hit* with Orbit, selling the offering to an amazing number of papers for a start-up syndicate. Reportedly the initial sign-up was about a hundred papers, and it included lots of high-profile big city clients. The strip debuted on September 1 1985** as a Sunday and daily feature.

The feature stars Orbit, an alien who runs a shoeshine stand on the moon when he's not running around the universe in a clunker spaceship. His best pal is a hyper-intelligent dog named Tyrone, and Dr. Otto von Valvelock, a wacky inventor, is sometimes on hand.The strip was intentionally written to appeal to the younger set, with rather simple gags that rely heavily on kids' fascination with weird aliens and the far-flung future backdrop. To reinforce the intended audience the Sunday strip even offered membership to an Orbiteers fan club that gave kids access to the Orbiteer Galactic Decoder, allowing them to read secret messages in the strip. 

After its strong start, though, Orbit started faltering pretty quickly. Why? My guess is that Hammond's excellent artwork, as good as it is, does not really communicate well that the strip is meant for children. It looks like a strip that an adult should enjoy, but when adults read Orbit they find it, not surprisingly, childish.What a catch-22 for poor Hammond if I'm right -- his art was too good for his strip! 

Bolstering my argument is the fact that the Sunday seemed to hold clients far better than the daily. The Sunday comics being widely thought of as the province of kids, Orbit evidently felt like a better fit there. But even so, the strip lost enough clients that Hammond had to call it quits after juggling his two strips for a few years. The Sunday Orbit ended on November 1 1987***. The daily lost papers to the point I was not able to document it past the end of 1986, but Jeffrey Lindenblatt has found it ending on August 29 1987 in the Baltimore Sun and Windsor Star -- thanks Jeffrey!

* Okay, technically the not-really-a-comic Eggers was probably more successful, but I refuse to count such an utterly pointless space-wasting feature. 

** Source: Miami Herald. A few Canadian papers started the strip a week or so early, running material before its stated release dates.

*** Source: Baltimore Sun.