Wednesday, March 13, 2024
Obscurity of the Day: It Seems Like Yesterday
Many local strips look a little rough around the edges, but Howard Overback and Ernie Hager produced a very fine looking feature in It Seems Like Yesterday, which they sold to the Oregon Journal. It looked so professional that when I stumbled across a few clipped samples of the feature in an old scrapbook I thought for sure it had to have been syndicated.
Luckily the clips I found betrayed their origin as the Oregon Journal, and it turned out that GenealogyBank, a newspaper archive website I rarely use, had many years of the paper at my disposal. GenealogyBank, by the way, has a user interface much inferior to its sister site, newspapers.com, and its servers are deadly slow. Watching a newspaper page load can make me quite nostalgic for downloading on a 1200 baud modem connection. Unless there's specific material you need that is only on GenealogyBank, and they do have exclusives on a number of major papers like the Oregon Journal, I would suggest giving them a pass.
Anyhow, after many hours of watching dust accumulate on my laptop screen as I researched the short run of It Seems Like Yesterday, I can tell you that the feature began running in the Sunday magazine section on July 28 1940. The creators soon talked the Journal into taking their brainchild on a 6-day per week basis, and the feature became a daily on September 30. Everything went tickety-boo for a year and a half, and then Pearl Harbor inconveniently got bombed. Seeing the writing on the wall for these two 20-something creators, they ended with a farewell panel on March 27 1942. Overback was called up in summer 1942, and Hager probably about the same time. While Overback doesn't seem to have gone back into the stripping business when he got home, Hager did, as another of his obscure strips, Stubby Stout, has been covered here on the blog.
Labels: Obscurities
