Wednesday, February 21, 2024
Mystery Strips: Misery Is...
I have a batch of 1983 United Feature weekly syndicate books, and I found in one issue two weeks worth of a panel cartoon called Misery Is... by Scrawls (Sam C. Rawls). My run of the books is by no means perfect, but I cannot find this feature anywhere but in the May 16 edition, and I have other weekly books from April, May and June, though not all of them.
In the May 16th book there are two weeks worth of the feaure, slated for publication in papers of May 16-21 and May 23-28.
This is obviously a very short run feature, and I have no printed examples in my collection. I cannot find any mentions of it in E&P or in interviews/articles on Sam Rawls. I checked the online archives of the Atlanta Constitution, where Rawls was the editorial cartoonist at this time, and a spot check did not find them running the feature.
So this one is a misery, er, I mean a mystery. If anyone has a printed example, or knows of a run of it somewhere, don't keep it to yourself. Let's get this one into the books as a feature that made it into papers.
UPDATE 2/23/2024: Paul Di Filippo sends me this article from the Palm Beach Post, dated June 1 1983:
In which the feature is announced to be set to appear "from time to time" in the paper's entertainment section (the section was titled "Poster" for some reason). After this big section-heading article announcing the feature I looked through the next two weeks of the section and found Misery Is appearing exactly zero times.
Labels: Mystery Strips
There's a faintly piscatorial pong about this one. Note there's no dates applied to them, for starters. Also, even as far at single column nuggets of philosophical wisdom panels go, or even knock-offs of Charles Schultz's "Happiness is" device goes...this is really startlingly poor.
This is not clever, or insightful or humourous, it's as stupid as calling it "This bad:"....
Misery is an ingrown toenail. Misery is blackouts. Really, they are. So what? That's it? It's almost like you, the late twentieth century American newspaper reader, are supposed to see a small panel cartoon and your proscribed Pavlovian reaction is to, if not laugh or even smile at it, just take it unconsciously as a piece of comedy, intended to be funny, never stopping to analyse whether it has any point to it at all, instead of an existential statement of fact that goes nowhere.
So what is, "Misery Is?" My guess- This is something the syndicate saw potential for in the name, id est, the trade mark. So if it appears in the weekly book, and it becomes theirs. The "weeklies" are what are entered into copyright for everything inside. It matters not if they ever actually syndicated it or developed anything further with it, they own the name "Misery Is."
: 2/21/2024 4:13 PM : 2/22/2024 4:32 PM Question, though ... I used to be able to buy the NEA and UFS syndicate books through St Marks Comics in NYC, and I've heard that the CTNYNS books were sold at the newsstand in the Daily News building. So did King bother with the ritual of making their books available for purchase somewhere, and if they did, where was it?
--Allan
There were, possibly still are, two weeklies, at least by our syndicate. The one with all the comics, as tall as a proof sheet, about 14", and a second, at 8" x 10", was the one for all the columns, puzzles, specialty items and the retread old stuff and the new obscurities. These came under the collective appellation "The Weekly Service" package. At one time, it meant material we'd set aside, with different rates, for the hundreds of small town once a week papers, and probably expanded to foreign sales, too.
My guess is that maybe UFS has/had a second weekly as well, and that somehow, "Misery Is" might have been a feature in that book, only accidentally appearing in the regular strip book that you have.
That the Palm Beach Post ran a news story about it, yet didn't use any of them, shows that at least it reached a level where some publicity was generated. Note, though, this is not created by UFS, because it comes off as a terrible feature, promising rather than laughs, a few seconds of unpleasant associations, pain, fear, or actual MISERY.
Why do editors dislike controversy in the features they pick up for their paper? They don't want to offend their readers. In this little article, the writer seems to be spending all the gags in some initial sample pages of "Misery Is", and each one makes the panel seems even more repellant. It's like telling the world this will be a feature that will surely offend all readers and editors alike.
: 2/23/2024 11:33 AM 