Obscurity of the Day: Zoo Gossip

 

Clarence Rigby, one of the main contributors to the World Color Printing Sunday comic section from 1904 to 1911, closed out his association with that company with today's obscurity, Zoo Gossip. And evidently Rigby was already on the hook to another concern that didn't like moonlighters, because on this feature he signed himself Y.B. Gir. Which ya gotta admit, is pretty cute, if not exactly diabolical in its cleverness.

Anyhow, from Jul 10 1910 to April 9 1911* Zoo Gossip tells completely made up fairy tales about how animals got to be the way they are. You know, like how the giraffe got a long neck, that sort of thing. Rigby was a very fine cartooner of animals, so the visuals are great. The stories ... well ... I don't think Mother Goose and Aesop were in any danger of being dethroned as purveyors of this sort of story. 

* Source: Canton Repository