Friday, April 26, 2024
Toppers: Boots and her Buddies
Boots and her Buddies by Edgar Martin had debuted as a daily strip in February 1924 and NEA clients seemed to really take to it. It was essentially a flapper strip, which could have been strictly a me-too affair, but Martin put his own stamp on it by making Boots an interesting and multi-faceted character and populating the strip with an interesting troupe of second bananas, too.
By 1926 Boots and her Buddies was firmly ensconced as an NEA A-lister and it could easily have merited a Sunday strip. But NEA at the time was uninterested in supplying more than a 4-page Sunday comic section*, considering that the majority of their clients didn't even publish Sunday editions. But there was a simple solution to that problem when toppers became the latest fashion; make Boots and her Buddies into a topper. For presumably no reason other than a roll of the dice, the Boots topper was paired with Our Boarding House, and the two were wed on September 12 1926**.
The pairing lasted for five years until NEA finally started relenting on the four-page Sunday strip limit and expanded their Sunday offerings. The final Boots and her Buddies topper ran on October 18 1931. The new topper to Our Boarding House was The Nut Brothers, which was produced by Gene Ahern himself.
An interesting footnote is that the new Boots full page Sunday had already debuted over a month earlier, on September 6, so there were actually two Boots strips running simultaneously for that short period. And that explains the mystery of why the new Sunday page was initially titled Girls rather than Boots and her Buddies. It was to avoid confusion about the duplicate strips.
* The four Sundays were Out Our Way, Freckles and his Friends, Our Boarding House and Salesman Sam.
** All dates from NEA archives at Ohio State University.
Labels: Topper Features
When Hearst launched the "Puck" section in September 1931, it really caused a big shake up in the comics world.
It would seem NEA's reaction to Puck was to stay competitive and attractive to clients, they'd counter with more strips, which would be new and familiar at the same time.
Also in the fall of 1931, Chicago Tribune and the Ledger syndicate then started to add the equivalent of top strips, though they were at the bottom of the page. "Hairbreadth Harry" cartoonist F. O. Alexander told me the Ledger followed the ChiTrib directly, (and you'll notice they rather revamped their offerings in a near perfect duplication of the Trib's new format) because the Trib now could say they had twice as many titles, counting stuff like "Kitty Higgins" and "That Phoney Nickle" etc; now at no extra cost. The Ledger came up with their own new dazzlers nobody asked for like "The Back Seat Driver", "The Wet Blanket" and Alex's own "High-Gear Homer", which he said he never liked doing, he just had to, because the syndicate wanted to boast that they too had extra titles in their line up.
: 4/26/2024 7:36 PM 