Monday, May 13, 2024
Obscurity of the Day: Telling Tommy
Cartoonist W. Paul Pim is quite the enigma, at least to me. I have seen artwork of his that is very good. and yet his biggest successes looked like the above, which I consider quite awful. He seemed to like drawing little kids, and yet could not draw a cute kid any more than Elmer Fudd could catch a wabbit.
It's just weird. Pim seemed to be able to draw realistic stuff okay, yet when he switched over to cartoony mode he was a car wreck. And yet his longest-running features were cartoony, or partially cartoony like this feature, Telling Tommy.
This strip was meant to be instructional; Tommy asks wise ol' Dad a question, and Dad proceeds to feed him some 'facts' on the subject. I put the word facts in quotes, because if you were to get all your information from Tommy's dad, you'd fail a lot of tests in school. Both our samples above offer incorrect information. The one about rabbits is just misleading -- rabbits are actually much more common than hares in the U.S., and most all rabbits and hares molt twice a year, not just the show shoe hare.
The second strip is more egregious; the Canadian national anthem at the time, and for many years to come, was God Save The King. The Maple Leaf Forever was a patriotic song of some popularity, but never an official national anthem.
The most amazing thing about Telling Tommy, after its loose grip on the facts and feeble art, is its longevity. This is the sort of strip that you figure might have lasted a year or two before lack of clients shut it down. But Telling Tommy, believe it or not, was actively syndicated for almost a decade and a half! It was a comparative rarity the whole time, but it just kept chugging along.
The strip debuted with the Cosmos Newspaper Syndicate on June 1 1925*. Cosmos was a small syndicate that was active in the mid-20s. I know little about them, but they had an interesting habit of introducing new features only to have them defect to other syndicates. Telling Tommy followed that plotline. The amazing thing is that none other than King Features Syndicate took it over. It's hard to imagine Telling Tommy rubbing shoulders with the likes of Bringing Up Father, Barney Google and Happy Hooligan, but it really did. King took over with the release of August 23 1926**.
The strip just could not be stopped. Although very few newspapers ever ran the darn thing, King offered it until 1939***. I can't offer a specific end date, because the last samples I've seen are from 1937.
And yet, amazingly enough, this was STILL not the end of Telling Tommy. In the same year that the strip finally went belly-up, Pim got the Cupples & Leon publishing company to rework some of his strips with some additional text matter under the title Telling Tommy About Mother Nature's Curious Children. This eventually led to a six book series, the last of which was not published until seven years after Pim's death.
And there's yet another footnote. In 1943, General Features syndicate was barely out of their diapers when they decided to see what they could do with Telling Tommy. What they came up with was to offer the strip as a three-times-per-week advertising strip for department stores****. New and revamped material was created so as to make their subjects tangentially related to department stores and their value in the war effort. The idea seems a little hare-brained, but I'v actually seen the strips used as ads by a few department stores.
Okay, I think I've finally covered all the bases on Telling Tommy. If there's more to the story I'm not entirely sure I want to know about it. (Okay, fine, yes I do. I'm a glutton for punishment.)
* Source: Editor & Publisher, July 25 1925.
** Source: Editor & Publisher, August 21 1926.
*** Source: Editor & Publisher Syndicate Directories.
**** Source: Editor & Publisher, November 27 1943.
Labels: Obscurities
