Friday, July 26, 2024

 

Obscurity of the Day: The Hoodoo Nickel - Who Gets It Next?

 



The little remembered cartoonist Foster Follett occupies a pretty high standing in my mind, a cartoonist who really knew his stuff and made the most of what he did. For instance, without bothering to read the strips above, and trying to ignore that awful printing quality, look at the animation and energy of the characters, the staging of the panels, the seemingly effortless, even careless, drawing. Follett never wowed us with pyrotechnics, but he was a quiet and assured master of the form. Which makes it doubly unfortunate that his work was presented like this above, with bad printing and parts of panels lopped off*. 

The Hoodoo Nickel - Who Gets It Next? is a rare 1900s foray into comic strip continuity. Follett traces the adventures of a cursed nickel, which gets anyone who has it into serious hot water. Each week the nickel moves from one victim to another, telling a continuous story, but with a self-contained gag in each strip. We aren't told why the nickel has a "hoodoo" on it, but eventually the series personifies the curse with a flying ghoul who watches the proceedings with apparent glee. The series finally ends when one recipient recognizes that it is cursed and disposes of it for good. 

The Hoodoo Nickel - Who Gets It Next? ran as a quarter-page strip in Pulitzer's New York World from October 13 to December 15 1907. 

One melancholy comment about this strip. For many years I felt that Frank King's Gasoline Alley topper, That Phoney Nickel, was an overlooked stroke of genius. However, when I finally saw examples of this rare Follett strip, and the similar 1909 strip Adventures of a Bad Half-Dollar, I reluctantly had to downgrade King's strip into a mere revival of a great idea that had a much earlier life. Sorry Frank, this is one laurel you may not wear, as it belongs to Mr. Follett ... or are there even earlier versions?

* You can thank the Detroit Free Press for this execrable work. No doubt the strips were presented properly in the New York World.

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# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM
Comments:
This got me thinking of O' Henry's 1881 The Tale of a Tainted Tenner. Was conscious/anthropomorphic money a thing back then?
# posted by Anonymous Whygh : 7/26/2024 3:12 PM
 
That's very interesting; I don't recall that short story, but it certainly covers the same ground. Now I know O.Henry wasn't writing in 1881, amost all of his work was in the late 1890s-1900s, so it would be very interesting to know if it was around 1906-07 and Follett appropriated the idea when it was freshly published.
# posted by Blogger Allan Holtz : 7/26/2024 3:49 PM
 
The comments under the post about "Adventures of a Bad Half-Dollar" include a comment by a reader by Patrick Murtha stating that "[t]he idea of following the adventures of an inanimate object had quite a vogue in the 18th Century, when there were many of what scholars now call 'it-narratives' actually told by the objects in question. Charles Johnstone's 1760 'Chrysal, or The Adventures of a Guinea,' narrated by a coin, was one of the earliest and most popular it-narratives." It seems that conscious money was indeed a popular theme.
# posted by Anonymous Doug : 7/26/2024 10:42 PM
 
That should be "by a reader named Patrick Murtha."
# posted by Anonymous Doug : 7/26/2024 10:45 PM
 
You're right. I saw 1881 somewhere and it seemed odd but I didn't check. The story was published in The New York World Sunday Magazine, 12 Nov. 1905, p. 14, and the tenner itself is a "ten-dollar Treasury note, series of 1901".
# posted by Anonymous Whygh : 7/27/2024 1:42 PM
 
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