Obscurity of the Day: Tumble Tom

 

In their heyday New York's evening newspapers were designed with the evening commuter in mind. The stories tended to be short and punchy, the headlines lurid, and the comics catered to grown-up humour tastes. And yet sometimes decidedly different material snuck in, like Eleanor Schorer's Tumble Tom, which appeared in the Evening World daily from July 12 to September 18 1915. Tumble Tom was basically a rehash of Little Nemo, but with simpler stories and no apparent intent to entertain the grown-ups as well as the young 'uns.

In Tumble Tom a young boy divides his time between the waking world (Ope-Eye-World) and his version of Slumberland, called Bye-Low-Land. In Tom's dreamland there reside all the characters from the familiar fairy tales. In the confines of each daily strip he has a little adventure with the fairy tale characters and then wakes up, often to tell his mother of his experiences. It's a perfectly sweet strip, and no doubt was gobbled up by the children of Mr. Commuter when he arrived home and let them have the paper. 

But why did this strip, obviously geared for children, appear in the Evening World? The telltale answer comes in the running dates. In high summer New Yorkers, even cartoonists, took their vacations to get out of the blast furnace of NYC. The Evening World offered its A-list cartoonists leaves at this time of year, and that was an opportunity for cartoonists lower on the totem pole to get some of their wares accepted by the paper. Schorer took this opportunity to try out a kid's strip, as opposed to her more usual fodder of romantic material. Perhaps she was seeking to create a strip that would gain her a permanent berth with a regular title. If so it didn't work, and Tumble Tom took the long beddy-bye as the A-listers reappeared along with the cooler weather at their drawing boards.