Wednesday, June 05, 2024
Obscurity of the Day: Robin Hood
We've covered some of the series that were rushed into print when Hearst decided to experiment with tabloid Sunday comics in 1935, and here's one of the most obscure of the bunch. Bearing some hallmarks of a series that was produced in a hurry, Robin Hood nevertheless had a lot going for it. Charles Flanders was a terrific adventure strip cartoonist, but he's obviously not up to his usual level of work here. The art rather reminds me of Dick Calkins on a time-reversed Buck Rogers -- very stiff, flat and tableau-like. But I suppose you could make a case that Flanders was trying to evoke the sort of art that was produced in the medieval period, and if so, I'd say he rang that bell.
The story is of course just a rehash of a few episodes in the Robin Hood legend, and so readers don't need a lot of blah-blah-blah to follow along. As befits a Sunday-only strip featuring a well-known character, the story progresses at a breakneck pace and the action is non-stop. You'd almost swear it was influenced by Errol Flynn's The Adventures of Robin Hood, but that movie was still three years away from hitting the theatres.
Robin Hood was a fun strip, but it evidently was only there to take up space while other projects were developed. The strip ran less than three months, from March 24 to June 16 1935*.
* Source: All dates from Jeffrey Lindenblatt based on New York Journal and New York American.
Labels: Obscurities
The Hearst tab-only fiasco of 1935 required a lot of new titles, I suppose this was considered an attraction of the new size tab size Puck section, appearing only in the Hearst chain. But all these new strips were inconsistent in quality,(ever see "Pebbles, the Stone-Age Kid?") and were apparently too many to appear in all the papers. Most of America never saw a lot of these new ones.
Rose O'Neill's revamped Kewpies strip I've only seen in the Boston Advertiser, Dr. Seuss's "Hadji" was in the Seattle Post-intelligencer, but I never saw it anywhere else.
Most of these new titles didn't even last as long as the Tabloid experiment. The only one of them that ever became a success and joined the regular line up was Mandrake the Magician.
: 6/05/2024 12:46 PM 
