Wednesday, January 10, 2024
Toppers: Simp O'Dill
William Randolph Hearst was an enthusiastic lover of comics, and he usually had a good eye for quality. Most famously, he championed that oddball strip Krazy Kat and kept it running despite dismal sales. But everyone can have a blind spot, and to my mind Hearst's was The Nebbs. According to old stories, Hearst absolutely loved the strip, and though he did not syndicate it, insisted that many of the Hearst papers run it.
I, on the other hand, cannot see the attraction. To me it reads like a weak-kneed version of The Gumps or The Bungle Family. The comparison with The Gumps is apt because the writer of the strip, Sol Hess, got his start ghost-writing for Sidney Smith. But whatever magic he brought to The Gumps was lost when he decided that his own strip would have less abrasive characters and more down-to-earth stories. Dull as dishwater, in other words.
Perhaps I'd give the strip more of a chance if the art by Wally Carlson wasn't like fingernails on a blackboard to me. And I don't know what it is about it that I hate! It's perfectly capable work, if a little sterile and perfunctory, but for some reason I can't stand it. (Just to get it off my chest, Jimmy Hatlo's art has the same effect on me.)
Anyway, Mr. Hearst and I will simply have to agree to disagree. The Nebbs was undeniably a successful strip, and not just in Hearst papers. In the 1920s and 30s it has been claimed that it ran in over 500 papers, and even back then that was an impressive number. So somebody must have liked the darn thing.
Anyway, this post is not just a pointless whining session. It's about the main topper of The Nebbs, Simp O'Dill. This strip about a simpleton began on February 24 1929* as a small one-tier topper, as was the style with Bell Syndicate at the time. He had no real personality, he just acted out 'dumb guy' gags straight out of joke books. He seems to have appeared out of nowhere, or at least I am not aware of him ever being a character in the main strip.
On September 16 1934, Simp O'Dill was enlarged to a two-tier format, becoming a full-fledged half-page strip. The strip did not really change in any way except that it took twice as many panels to tell the same bad jokebook gags. The idea, of course, was to make The Nebbs a better-selling Sunday by making it easy to substitute a half-page ad for the topper. Newspapers seemed to really appreciate this format, and I imagine it gave Sunday sales of The Nebbs a nice little bump.
In 1936 Hess decided to add activity panels to the topper mix, but generally they just shaved a single panel off of Simp O'Dill to squeeze them in. Simp, just like The Dude, abides.
In 1941 Sol Hess died, but his duties were continued by Betsy and Stanley Baer, and both The Nebbs and Simp O'Dill soldiered on without a stumble. Though newspaper readers began to lose interest in The Nebbs in the 1940s, the Sunday half-and-half setup allowed Simp O'Dill to survive when many other toppers got the axe. But to all good, bad and indifferent things there must be an end, and so it was with Simp O'Dill. It last ran on January 4 1948**, and The Nebbs Sunday was thereafter no longer available in a full page format.
* Source: Tucson Citizen
** Source: St. Cloud Times
Labels: Topper Features
