Wednesday, April 17, 2024
Obscurity of the Day: Herbert Johnson's Daily Cartoon Panel
Fame can be fleeting; just ask Herbert Johnson. Or, actually, don't bother because he's quite dead. But if he were alive, he'd no doubt be flabbergasted at the nearly universal response of "Who?" should you ask even dedicated cartooning fans about him. On the other hand, the average reasonably literate man on the street in, say, 1930, would have been able to ID this ink-slinger with no trouble.
Johnsons's cartoons were folksy; the writing calling to mind H.T. Webster while the art resembled that of Clare Briggs. He came onto the cartooning scene out of nowhere, having never taken an art lesson in his life. Yet he was able to bounce around the country in his early years readily finding work on newspapers and having magazine submissions, even cover drawings, accepted on a regular basis.
His real fame came when he became the in-house cartoonist of the Saturday Evening Post, which is a position he apparently landed in the early 1920s (information is murky). The Post was a nearly universally read magazine, and that made Johnson a household name. For the Post he branched out from his folksy material into editorial cartooning. Johnson was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican and by the time FDR got into office his Post editorial cartoons had lost most of their folksy charm and were stridently anti-Democrat. He seems to have retired by 1942, having perhaps finally gotten fed up with spitting into the wind about FDR as the president's third term was in full swing.
Here on Stripper's Guide we have commemorated Herbert Johnson once back in 2009 for his only Sunday comic strip, Eph Jackson, which ran in 1905-06. The only other series we can offer up in his memory is his best one, a daily panel series that had a cadre of running titles (I really have to come up with a term for these things). The series was syndicated through the cooperative syndicate Associated Newspapers. It debuted on January 3 1921*, and evidently Johnson's name already had plenty of clout because the series was picked up by an impressive number of papers.
I really wish I knew when Johnson got his permanent berth at the Saturday Evening Post, because it sort of stands to reason that it was in 1922 but I have no hard evidence, just circumstantial. Johnson's daily newspaper panel seems to have sputtered that year, with it being reduced to a frequency of 2-3 times per week. This would make sense if he was getting busier with Post work. It sure doesn't seem like the problem was lack of newspaper clients. The series becomes so sporadically printed that I can only offer my best guess as to when it was finally cancelled. I think it was in December 1922**, though I have seen a goodly number of his panels printed later, but generally by papers where printing material late was a typical thing.
* Source: Boston Globe
* Source: Boston Globe and Calgary Herald,
Labels: Obscurities
For a genré title, how about "Fake H. T. Webster?" Or possibly "Briggs Knockoff?"
: 4/17/2024 12:25 PM 
: 4/17/2024 2:48 PM 