Friday, March 29, 2024
Obscurity of the Day: Digby
To Golden age comic book fans the name Harry Lampert is well-known. Although he did not spend a great deal of time toiling in the comic book bullpens, he happened to be paired up with Gardner Fox to create a new superhero, The Flash, in 1940 for DC Comics. Of course, as was typical of those times, Lampert received no financial bonanza for a creation that would make DC Comics untold millions of dollars, and he went on with his life unchanged.
Lampert preferred doing humor work, and so he then gravitated toward magazine gag cartooning, and also got into instruction and had an ad agency during his later career. What many of us fans remember, though, was how Lampert spent his retirement years. Harry and his wife started appearing at comic book conventions in the 1970s and he was a big hit with the fans because for a certified legend he was very gosh-darn friendly and approachable. We fans eagerly paid him back for his friendliness; he sold a LOT of badly drawn sketches of The Flash at those conventions, including to me. I don't know if Jim Ivey's OrlandoCons were his first experience of being a convention guest, but I very well remember that he absolutely revelled in them.
As far as I know Lampert never let on that he had a newspaper strip series, but if he did it would have made for a pretty funny story (or sad, but Lampert was too positive a fellow to see it that way). Lampert created the strip Digby, a strip about a teenage boy, in 1949. It was basically just a me-too affair, with no obvious originality over Archie, Harold Teen and their ilk. Well, I say it didn't exhibit any originality in concept, but in fairness the strip didn't last long enough for Lampert to do much with it.
How long? Well, Digby debuted in the New York Star on January 23 1949*. And that was a really bad time to be hitching your wagon to that particular Star, because the paper went belly up on January 28. So Lampert's strip came and went in exactly six days. As far as I know, Lampert did not succeed in selling it anywhere else. The New York Compass, debuting a few months later, was considered essentially the resurrection of the Star, but alas, Harry's strip was not revived therein.
* The New York Star bucked normal newspaper practice by publishing their 'daily' paper Sunday through Friday, issuing no paper on Saturdays.
Labels: Obscurities
