Wednesday, May 08, 2024
Toppers: Jungle Bedtime Stories
January 10 1926 was an important date for Sunday comics. This was the Sunday that the first wave of Hearst Sunday features added toppers. Some lagged behind, but it was on this date that Boob McNutt, Toots and Casper, Tillie the Toiler, Bringing Up Father, Happy Hooligan and Katzenjammer Kids led the charge to a new era of Sunday comics. (Well, actually there is one much earlier outlier, but we'll save that special case for some other day.)
The Katzies first topper was Jungle Bed-Time Stories, which, like all the original Hearst toppers that started in early 1926, was soon replaced. But this one was fine while it lasted, offering up gags starring jungle animals. Harold Knerr pulled this one out of a very old bag of tricks. Way back in 1911, for the very obscure Publishers Press/C.J. Mar syndicate, he'd contributed one of their best-looking features, Zoo-Illogical Snapshots, which covered the same territory.
Jungle Bed-Time Stories ran until May 2 1926, which happens to be the sample above. And speaking of the sample above, if anyone can decode the gag on this one I'm officially in Comics I Don't Understand territory. The next week Knerr produced a one-shot topper called Naughty! Naughty!, and then settled into the very long run of Dinglehoofer Und His Dog Adolph.
Labels: Topper Features
In the first Episode of "Dinglehoofer and his dog" his name was "Dinglegoofer", thereafter, it changed to the regular spelling until it ended in 1952. So I guess that could be technically a "one-shot" too.
: 5/08/2024 1:08 PM https://archive.org/details/bruceofcircle00titurich/page/26/mode/2up?q=%22it+takes+lots+of+sand%22
