Stripper's Guide

For Hogan's Alley magazine issue #10, published around the turn of the century, I wrote an article tracing the origins of the newspaper adventure comic strip. Starting from what are often thought of as the firsts, Buck Rogers and Tarzan (which in an amazing coincidence started on the same day in 1929) the article worked the true origin backward in time. 

Any serious comic strip fan can probably name a few precursors to these popular strips, but I like to think that I surprised one and all by tracing the form back almost two full decades to 1911. It was on August 21 1911 that the Pittsburg Leader, a comparatively minor paper in that city, offered its readers a new homegrown comic strip, Bobby the Boy Scout. The Leader probably couldn't afford much syndicated material, so they picked a fellow out of the art bullpen and dumped the job in his lap. F.E. Johnston was a cipher to me then, but Alex Jay has since fleshed out his bio here in an Ink-Slinger Profile. As a cartoonist he was no more than adequate, and working at a second rate paper in Pittsburgh for most of his career ensured that his name would be forgotten in cartooning lore. His important contribution, unheralded in his own time and instantly forgotten, would be hidden in the microfilm record for the next eighty years. 

It was pure serendipity that prompted its rediscovery. I was in Pittsburgh on other business and carved out a half day to visit the Pittsburgh Public Library. My primary target was to view the microfilm of the Philadelphia Inquirer. I had already indexed the early years of the paper in the State Library at Harrisburg, but I found that the microfilmer of that version had consistently left comic sections off the microfilm after about 1916. I hoped that the version housed in Pittsburgh would include those later Sunday sections.  

As it turned out, this library had a copy of the same version of the Philadelphia Inquirer microfilm. Disappointed but with a few free hours on my hands, I decided to do some spot-checking of the modest selection of papers the library had on microfilm. I spent a lot of time, mostly wasted, on the major Pittsburgh papers, finding little of interest in them. Then just for the heck of it, I pulled out a few representative reels of minor Pittsburgh papers, including the Leader. And there it was, this very unusual comic strip about a Boy Scout. It was immediately obvious that this was no typical comic strip of the 1910s, but rather one that was based on blood-and-thunder dime novels and cliffhanger movie serials. Little did he know it but Mr. Johnston had created a new genre of comic strips, one that wouldn't get rolling outside the pages of the Pittsburg Leader for many years. 

Bobby the Boy Scout is not an outstanding adventure strip by any means, but it does pre-figure the rules for the genre. It is a story with a sustained narrative from day to day, it has characters confronted with real perils, and it is not played for laughs but is intended as a serious story. It even goes the normal adventure strip one better in that Johnston had a self-imposed rule that there must be a cliff-hanger situation at the end of practically every single strip. While that makes the story absurdly melodramatic at times, and outright ludicrous on occasion, you have to doff your hat to his ingenuity. 

What is also amazing about Bobby the Boy Scout is its longevity and consistency. In an era when the typical daily strip ran its course in a matter of months or a few years, and many still weren't dailies at all but just ran on miscellaneous weekday schedules, Johnston's strip ran over six years as a true daily. And its end, on November 21 1917, may have only been because Johnston's health was failing. He would die a little over a year later. 

In Hogan's Alley I was only able to show a few examples of the strip, and they had to be run at very small size. Not much for readers to sink their teeth into. I did make some quite decent photocopies off the microfilm back then, and recently came upon them in the stacks. So now after just a short wait of 20-plus years, I'd like to present to you the first month of Bobby the Boy Scout, which will be run here over the next ten days. Because the captions are quite hard to read on these copies, I have added better quality printed captions underneath them.

Labels: Bobby The Boy Scout

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM