Thursday, May 28, 2020
Obscurity of the Day: Phyllis and Fang
Phyllis Diller, one of the first female stand-up comedians, was near the top of her career in 1968 when she teamed up with the Register & Tribune Syndicate to offer a daily comic strip featuring her self-deprecating humor. If you are over 50 and had a TV growing up, you certainly remember her fright wig, loud dresses, cigarette holder, and cackling one-liners on the variety programs and celebrity game shows, in which a favorite subject was her lazy, boozing, good-for-nothing husband "Fang".
Her comedy, some of which was written for her by cartoonist ghost-writer Mary McBride, was full of one-liners, making it seem like a natural for comic strips. However, the constant references to alcohol and other quasi-adult topics probably made newspaper editors a little nervous. They also might not have seen the appeal of the artwork supplied by Marvin Myers. Myers' style was definitely avant-garde compared to the normal comics page fare, and it did take some getting used to. It certainly didn't help that due to some odd production problem the strip was often full of type lice, which make Myers' noodly lines look like an unholy mess (the samples above have had the problem corrected).
Phyllis and Fang debuted on January 29 1968 in very few papers, and it only took four months for the syndicate and creators to give up on the strip. In the Des Moines Tribune itself, home paper of the syndicate, which may be the only paper that ran the series from beginning to end, the strip ended on June 1 1968.
In case you are too young to remember Ms. Diller's striking stage presence, here's a little taste:
Labels: Obscurities
Comments:
Hello Allan--
Phyllis was funny, at least at first. I think she was oversold,until any novelty she had was drained out. Same thing happened to Steve Martin. Maybe you or some readers will recall her sitcom, "The Pruitts of Southampton"? They put her into something that erased her wacky, witchy persona and cast her as a member of a poor but lovable family of grifters that bluffed their many creditors while living in their mansion (the Biltmore Estate in N.C.!), sort of like "The Rogues". I know, few remember that show either, but suffice to say, it stunk, and gave Phyllis's career a blow.
I remember this strip, it ran in the Philadelphia EVENING BULLETIN. I liked it, although I was a child at the time. I'll guess that the strip was a failure not from the gags, but because it just looks so terrible. If I'm any judge of potential client editors, I would think Miss MacBride's amatuerish scrawl style was a quick turn-off.
If I recall it right, one day the Bulletin dropped it and offered an excuse like, "Phyllis and Fang are on hiatus while Miss Diller is on tour" or some such nonsense.
Phyllis was funny, at least at first. I think she was oversold,until any novelty she had was drained out. Same thing happened to Steve Martin. Maybe you or some readers will recall her sitcom, "The Pruitts of Southampton"? They put her into something that erased her wacky, witchy persona and cast her as a member of a poor but lovable family of grifters that bluffed their many creditors while living in their mansion (the Biltmore Estate in N.C.!), sort of like "The Rogues". I know, few remember that show either, but suffice to say, it stunk, and gave Phyllis's career a blow.
I remember this strip, it ran in the Philadelphia EVENING BULLETIN. I liked it, although I was a child at the time. I'll guess that the strip was a failure not from the gags, but because it just looks so terrible. If I'm any judge of potential client editors, I would think Miss MacBride's amatuerish scrawl style was a quick turn-off.
If I recall it right, one day the Bulletin dropped it and offered an excuse like, "Phyllis and Fang are on hiatus while Miss Diller is on tour" or some such nonsense.
# posted by 
: 5/28/2020 3:28 PM
: 5/28/2020 3:28 PM
The Register and Tribune's strips are always the worst-reproduced on any comics page. I discovered that they sent out a daily strip for Cecil Jensen's "Elmo" that had a hair photographed on it. I would guess they used the lowest-quality materials for whatever they supplied newspapers. They weren't alone--e.g., the newsprint proofs King Features sent to newspapers to shoot from. I've seen one for a week of "Bringing Up Father" daily strips.
Your point is well taken, that sometimes the KFS proofs were less than perfect, but as the onetime archives for the syndicate, I must hasten to add that, considering the hundreds of thousands of them I have seen and worked with, from the 1920's onward, the really defective ones were in a very small minority.
The worst problem seemed to be that sometimes, when we issued everything on slick clay stock, they would be improperly stacked, before the ink dried. Then they would stick together and prove from hard to impossible to fix. These would be of course, replaced by us, but if the deadline for the client was too close, they might use a messed up strip anyway. I imagine all the other syndicates had problems now and then, too.
Probably the whole process bypasses printed proofs now, computer generated ones go directly to the client paper.
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The worst problem seemed to be that sometimes, when we issued everything on slick clay stock, they would be improperly stacked, before the ink dried. Then they would stick together and prove from hard to impossible to fix. These would be of course, replaced by us, but if the deadline for the client was too close, they might use a messed up strip anyway. I imagine all the other syndicates had problems now and then, too.
Probably the whole process bypasses printed proofs now, computer generated ones go directly to the client paper.
# posted by : 5/29/2020 11:36 AM
: 5/29/2020 11:36 AM Monday, May 25, 2020
Obscurity of the Day: Men Who Made The World
Once J. Carroll Mansfield's Highlights of History proved itself a surprise hit, other syndicates began dipping their toes in the history comic strip genre. John F. Dille was keenly interested in educational features anyway, so he was one of the first to jump in with a me-too strip.
Dille's offering was called Men Who Made The World, and the daily strip offered biographies of important figures in history. The strip debuted as early as September 21 1925*, though many papers started it later. The strip began under the helm of Granville E. Dickey, who was billed as an historian, but whose only other credit I can find is editing Dille's weekly college humor round-up page. Art was provided by a complete unknown, Chester Sullivan. In a bizarre twist, Dickey's name was stricken from the feature after a mere five dailies and the new writer was "Dr. Elliott Shoring, Noted Eminent Historian." That eminence is debatable, or at least I can find no other proof of the fellow's existence other than this single credit.
Despite being put together by a pair of questionable unknowns, the strip was actually pretty darn good. They started off with a biography of Alexander the Great, which managed to be both entertaining and quite thorough. The bio ran for 33 strips, with lots of well-written text accompanying Sullivan's reasonably attractive art.
When Alexander the Great ended, a much longer bio of Napoleon ensued, but the art chores were taken over by Dick Calkins, a Dille go-to guy who would later rocket to fame as the artist on Buck Rogers. Calkins was a good fit for the assignment, since his art tends to look a bit like woodblocks out of a medieval manuscript, a nice look for a history feature.
The next story was Joan of Arc, which caused some clients to rename the strip Personalities that Made the World given the subject personage. Many clients seem to have given Joan a pass; whether that was an anti-Catholic bias, an anti-woman bias, or just because the art on this story was by a rather unappealing anonymous hand (or two, actually -- I think Calkins might have been brought in to finish off the story), I don't know.
For the remainder of the series, though the art was very rarely signed, I'm pretty confident that it is mostly or all Dick Calkins. Here's a rundown of the stories and their lengths:
| Story | Artist | # of Strips |
| Alexander | Chester Sullivan | 33 |
| Napoleon | Dick Calkins | 69 |
| Joan of Arc | Anonymous artist possibly followed by Calkins | 27 |
| Julius Caesar | Dick Calkins | 45 |
| Fernando Cortez | Dick Calkins | 59 |
| George Washington | Dick Calkins | 55 |
| King Richard I | Dick Calkins | 55 |
| Sir Francis Drake | Dick Calkins | 60 |
| Peter the Great | Dick Calkins | 48 |
| Louis the XIV | Dick Calkins | 41 |
I have yet to find a paper that runs this strip with perfect regularity or runs all the stories, but if such a paper were to exist, the series would have ended on April 16 1927. Although Dille closed up shop for new biographies, he certainly didn't stop trying to sell the ones he had. I have seen parts of this series running in papers as late as 1947!
* Source: Windsor Star
Labels: Obscurities
Tuesday, May 19, 2020
Obscurity of the Day: Thorn McBride
Frank Giacoia never had much luck picking a blockbuster newspaper strip; part of that was his choice of syndicates. His first two strips, Sherlock Holmes and Johnny Reb and Billy Yank, were distributed by the New York Herald-Tribune, which had great taste in features but couldn't sell them to save their souls. His third try, Thorn McBride, managed to find an even worse distributor. Copley Press, which operated a substantial chain of newspapers, couldn't even seem to convince their own papers to run their strips. Now that's pathetic.
Maybe with Thorn McBride those Copley papers weren't so dumb. Giacoia's art, always superbly professional if not especially flashy, was paired with the awful writing of a fellow named Kanneth Simms. Simms was in love with what he thought was snappy dialogue. He obviously wanted to be the next Milton Caniff, but what came out on the page was confusing, herky-jerky and worst of all, verbose. Poor Giacioa sometimes has to shoehorn talking heads into panel corners just to remind us that it's a comic strip. To his credit, though, he worked hard on this dog. Check out the extra bits of business Giacoia adds in some of these strips above that could have been just a series of talking heads.
Debuting on September 12 1960* as a daily-only strip, Thorn McBride concerns the adventures aboard a US Navy nuclear submarine. This was a hot topic at the time because the USS Nautilus, the world's first nuclear sub, had just made headlines by 'sailing' under the North Pole. There was also a big budget nuclear sub movie in the works, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. The concept seemed like a surefire hit for a strip, but the quality of the writing combined with the inability of Copley to sell their wares had this ship sinking a lot faster than subs ought to.
Frank Giacoia jumped ship after just four months, handing the reins over to another fine cartoonist, Mel Keefer (see the final example above for a Keefer strip), on January 23 1961**. Keefer proved much more game to ride on the Thorn McBride ship, and lasted until its demise on December 29 1962***.
Copley advertised the availabiltiy of the strip in 1963, but someone there was apparently a little behind on reading company memos. As proof I can offer that one paper ran a blank space for a week after the cited end date, with the text "Thorn McBride has been discontinued by the Artist."
One other minor postscript; Copley was seemingly unable to handle the distribution of a daily comic strip themselves, so they recruited United Feature Syndicate to handle the distribution.
* Source: Charleston Daily Mail
** Source: Washington Star
*** Source: Hayward Review, Long Beach Press-Telegram.
Labels: Obscurities
Thursday, May 14, 2020
Obscurity of the Day: The Marsoozalums
Pinpointing important firsts in the newspaper comics world is seldom simple. What is the first newspaper comic strip? Well, long story. How about first adventure strip? For that you can get arguments that put it anywhere from the 1890s to 1929.
One first that seems a little simpler is first science fiction strip. Buck Rogers, right? Well, some folks disagree. There is a faction that points to a much earlier feature, Mister Skygack from Mars (debuting 1907), but as much as I love that delightfully witty feature, I'm sorry but it is a panel cartoon, not a strip, and so therefore, doesn't qualify in my mind.
In StripScene #13 (Fall 1980), Mark Johnson offered a few additional contenders. He suggested 1902's Sandy Highflyer, an airship pilot who sometimes travels through space, as the first SF strip, but he noted that there are even a few earlier contenders. Along with a mention of 1901's Professor Gesla, a mad scientist strip by Dwig, he brings up a feature by Jimmy Swinnerton called The Marsoozalums, saying it is "about a clan of spacemen living on a far-off planet. It started on February 24 1901 for Hearst."
There was no sample of The Marsoozalums with the article, and I had no samples, but the Johnson brothers are as trustworthy as it comes so I did include a listing for the feature in my book, though it was a listing full of question marks.
Many years later Cole Johnson sent me a scan sample of The Marsoozalums, as shown above. I was disappointed to find that Swinnerton had merely added some antennae to his oft-used tykes, or bears, or tigers, and called them Martians. Not much of a sci-fi spectacle, really, but we do have aliens and a rocket ship, so I can certainly see them as a contender. Only problem is that, just like Mister Skygack, it is a panel feature, not a strip. But Cole's short message, which I didn't really clue into at the time, is alarming. He says "Here's a weird one from Swinnerton. The first extra-terrestrial series? Or is it a one-shot?"
Now that I'm finally trying to tie up the research on this feature, decades later than I should have, I'm faced with the possibility that the panel was a one-shot! I first checked the interwebs to see if someone else had any information about the feature. About all I could find was Luca Boschi's website, and to my horror he offers the very same sample of the feature as Cole did. That led me to be practically convinced that Cole's intuition was right -- we have a one-shot.
Finally, though, I combed through records in the OSU Bill Blackbeard collection, and found that he had a Chicago American for February 24 1901, and the cited title was indeed different from our sample: "The Marsoolazums. A Funny Scene That Swinnerton Saw Through a Telescope on the Planet Mars". I breathed a sigh of relief, and did a bit more poking around. I had already checked Alfredo Castelli's superb book, "Here We Are Again", and had been disappointed to find yet again the same strip installment that I already had. But a second more thorough look revealed a second sample elsewhere in the book. Lo and behold, that one had the February 24 title. I can't show it to you here, because the PDF is locked, but it is a panel of the same sort of alien hijinks as the sample above.
Did the panel run any additional times than those two? I don't know for sure, but I tend to doubt it. Does anyone know of any more?
EDIT: Alex Jay found the second installment of The Marsoozalums in the Denver Post. Note that it ran as a weekday strip there, not in the Sunday comics section:
Labels: Mystery Strips, Obscurities
Comments:
Wish I could add something here. I'm guessing that the sample Cole sent you was from a St.Louis Globe-Democrat, by the crumbly edge and that its in black & white. Had about three months of single pages from that period. So hard to find any available papers on file that carried a Hearst or even partial Hearst Sunday section that early, outside of the chain.
Beyond of the G-D, the only other one that comes to mind is the Boston Post.
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Beyond of the G-D, the only other one that comes to mind is the Boston Post.
# posted by : 5/14/2020 3:15 PM
: 5/14/2020 3:15 PM Wednesday, May 13, 2020
Obscurity of the Day: Tucker
Joe Martin has had a long career as a syndicated comic strip creator, and was once even crowned by the Guinness World Record people as the most prolific newspaper cartoonist*. His first foray into the newspaper cartooning biz didn't turn out too well, though.
On April 24 1978** Joe Martin's first syndicated strip debuted, a daily and Sunday offering distributed by Field Enterprises titled Tucker. The concept was simple; Tucker runs an employment agency and deals with all manner of oddball clients. With such a rich vein of humor to mine, Martin should have had a successful strip on his hands. I like the strip well enough; the only criticism I would make is that Tucker is saddled with a brainless idiot client/pal named Bustout, and I find him about 90% annoying and only 10% funny. Would have liked to see him given the pink slip. Otherwise, a good strip with pleasant art and good gags. Nevertheless, it was not to be. After only two years in syndication*** Field evidently pulled the plug.
According to Joe Martin in Cartoonist Profiles #123, he self-syndicated Tucker for a short while after Field dropped the strip. I haven't seen a self-syndicated version of the strip anywhere, but Martin certainly does like self-syndicating -- he took over syndication of all three of his strips in 2005. Has anyone seen the self-syndicated Tucker?
* A declaration like that seems an invitation for a footnote full of nitpicking from me, but I have to admit the Guinness people may well have the situation dead to rights. In 2000, the year that title was bestowed, Martin had three seven-day per week strips running -- Willy 'n' Ethel, Cats with Hands and Mister Boffo. I certainly can't come up with any cartoonist who can make the claim of producing 21 syndicated comic strips every week -- can you?
** Source: Washington Star
** I can trace the strip through the end of March 1980, and I'm guessing with a second anniversary coming up the next month, Tucker got the axe. Does anyone have a definitive date?
Labels: Obscurities
Comments:
According to the 300 paper list. Three papers were running Tucker in 1980. Here is the rundown. Irving Daily News was running it by March 31 but that where the paper information comes to end. The Vancouver Sun ran the daily to April 5. The last paper Journal Gazette (Mattoon, IL) ran the daily until April 12.
# posted by : 5/13/2020 9:18 AM
: 5/13/2020 9:18 AM
There's a week a Tucker's Job Emporium dailies at the Boffo website, along with samples of some other dead strips.
If memory serves, Martin's son had a strip some years ago. It was a bit like Calvin and Hobbes, except the kid's imaginary friend was clad in black bodysuit and mask like a superhero/villain. We had it in the San Jose Mercury News, replacing B.C. There was a reader backlash, small but of unusual vehemence. The complainers claimed we were replacing a "Christian" strip with satanic one. B.C. came back and the new strip vanished from the Merc; I don't know if it persisted elsewhere.
If memory serves, Martin's son had a strip some years ago. It was a bit like Calvin and Hobbes, except the kid's imaginary friend was clad in black bodysuit and mask like a superhero/villain. We had it in the San Jose Mercury News, replacing B.C. There was a reader backlash, small but of unusual vehemence. The complainers claimed we were replacing a "Christian" strip with satanic one. B.C. came back and the new strip vanished from the Merc; I don't know if it persisted elsewhere.
The strip you have in mind is "Tommy" by Jay Martin, here:
http://strippersguide.blogspot.com/2017/08/obscurity-of-day-tommy.html
--Allan
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http://strippersguide.blogspot.com/2017/08/obscurity-of-day-tommy.html
--Allan
Monday, May 11, 2020
Obscurity of the Day: Farmer Judkins
Jack "GAL" Gallagher came up with lots of series for the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1900s, then later specialized in taking over strips for cartoonists who parted ways with the newspaper.
Here is a series from the first part of his career, Farmer Judkins. It's your typical hayseed farmer strip, though as usual for GAL he was cribbing gags from any and all sources, so you have strips like the top one that really don't have any real connection to the character. GAL wasn't the greatest cartoonist ever, but he did have a flair for portraying physical humor; he does a great job getting everything he can out of the weak gags in the strips above.
Farmer Judkins appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday sections from May 5 to December 22 1907, but it was one of those strips that ran longer in their syndicated section -- latest I've found outside the Inquirer is May 24 1908, in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.
Labels: Obscurities
Comments:
I think a problem with the Inquirer was that somewhere along mid decade,(1900's) they offered an extra page of comics, that didn't appear in the Inky itself, and might appear on the back of the Mag section in client papers. They weren't exclusive extra page series either. When Cole was recording the sections in the Globe-Democrat, he'd find odd extra installments of series like Big Scalper or Percy Vere.
The big disappointment was that the micro files of the G-D didn't bother recording these worthless comic pages most of the time, and the little edge visable from whatever page preceeded them, proved this was intentional. About 1915, the entire comic section is passed over too.
The big disappointment was that the micro files of the G-D didn't bother recording these worthless comic pages most of the time, and the little edge visable from whatever page preceeded them, proved this was intentional. About 1915, the entire comic section is passed over too.
# posted by : 5/11/2020 1:11 PM
: 5/11/2020 1:11 PM
Farmer Judkins is a pretty lousy strip, all right. In fact, I can't even follow or figure out the supposed joke in the top one (about the park). I cannot tell what the people are doing, or why. I can even less understand, if that's possible, what the dog is doing, or where it moves to and what it's problem is in the last panel. No cartoonist wants to be called incomprehensible (I believe). I think Gallagher's problem may have been is that he didn't know whether or not he was incomprehensible, and didn't care. The second strip was maybe 1% more coherent. What a couple of loser strips.
# posted by : 5/12/2020 2:03 AM
: 5/12/2020 2:03 AM
Hi Katherine -- the joke, and I'm sure you'll be rolling on the floor once you see it, is that Judkins mistakes the Asian gent's long thin braid for the leash of the dog and yanks on him pretty badly. Har-di-har-har.
I knew that braid had a name, but had to Google it. It was called a queue or cue.
--Allan
I knew that braid had a name, but had to Google it. It was called a queue or cue.
--Allan
"Gal" was a lousy cartoonist, but was a real workhorse for the Inquirer.
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# posted by : 5/12/2020 1:16 PM
: 5/12/2020 1:16 PM Wednesday, May 06, 2020
Obscurity of the Day: Glen Forrest
After World War II, the Chicago Tribune's Midas touch with comic strips ended abruptly. That Midas had a name, and it was Joseph Medill Patterson. After he died in 1946, you'd swear the syndicate execs went into such deep mourning that they intentional picked strips that had no hope of selling, as a memorial to Patterson's genius.
Case in point is Glen Forrest, which was obviously meant to be a "me-too" feature to feed off the popularity of Mark Trail. At the helm was William Ferguson, who had certainly proven his mastery of all things in the natural world with a successful two decade run on This Curious World, a panel serving up odd facts about nature. Ferguson was not only a nature expert, but he was also a darn fine cartoonist with a clean and sensuous style. What could go wrong, you wonder?
Well, as it turns out, Ferguson's Achilles heel (yes, it's mythology day here on Stripper's Guide) was that he hadn't even the slightest understanding of how to write a comic strip. This Sunday-only strip started on September 14 1952 with this episode:
Why do we join our hero on the second day of his journey? Have we already missed an episode? Nope. Ferguson has succeeded in confusing his readers with the VERY FIRST sentence of his strip. It won't get any better.
Ferguson proceeds to try to tell his herky-jerky manic stories on a starvation diet of a third-page once per week. In fairness, this is a task that few cartoonists can pull off, but Ferguson practically gives a class on how not to do it. Characters are not so much introduced as just appear with no explanation. If you look at the color samples up top, there's not a strip in there that offers a synopsis of any kind, off-stage character names are bandied about constantly, and there's a general assumption that you, dear reader, have made it your life's work to take notes on the strip every week so that you can follow the unfollowable. And what a shame, because Ferguson's excellent art makes us want very much to like this strip.
Believe it or not, the Tribune stuck with this train wreck for almost two years. Glen Forrest was finally put to rest on May 30 1954, right smack in the middle of a story (the last color sample above is that last strip). I wasn't sure if some other papers might have run it longer, but I've since reviewed two other papers that ran it and they ended it on the same date.
By the way, the topper strip Catesby (seen in the black and white sample above) was offered throughtout the run, but rarely did anyone use it, including the Chicago Tribune.
Labels: Obscurities
Comments:
The title may be something of an inside joke, since Forest Glen is one of the neighborhoods of Chicago (Northwest Side).
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Tuesday, May 05, 2020
Obscurity of the Day: Girl Wanted - Nothing But Trouble at Home
At the turn of the century, many in the newly emerging middle class were making enough through papa's salary to keep a live-in maid. The wages were affordable on a modest income because a good portion of the maid's remuneration was considered to be her room and board. If you had a spare bedroom you were already a long way toward getting housekeeping and cooking help.
The burgeoning market for live-in help, and the not necessarily outstanding character of women who were interested in such arrangements, made a good maid a prize like few others. Roy W. Taylor created the series Girl Wanted - Nothing But Trouble at Home to chronicle the lengths to which Joe and Jane Bougeoisie might go in order to procure such prize help.
Taylor's weekday series appeared in the New York Evening World from October 15 to November 13 1906, appearing for a total of eight installments in that time.
Labels: Obscurities
Tuesday, March 17, 2020
Obscurity of the Day: Little Coronations at Home
Frank Leet, the yeoman of the NEA bullpen gang, produced the weekday series Little Coronations at Home, for publication between about May and June 1914. As much as I like to offer exact dates, that's the best I can do with the NEA offerings of these early years because (a) the papers that took the NEA service published stuff as and when they liked, and (b) the NEA archives at Ohio State University are a mess for these early years of the service, and unless I missed it, this series was MIA.
The Wichita Beacon published all their installments of this series in June 1914.
Labels: Obscurities
Comments:
This series originally ran in 1911, to coincide with big news occasion of King George V's coronation on 22 June that year.
It ran in the Scripps paper The Tacoma Times from 20 May to June 19, though the last episode, the one you show at the top today, was titled "THRILLS OF AN AIRSHIP RIDE WITHOUT THE PERILS."
It ran in the Scripps paper The Tacoma Times from 20 May to June 19, though the last episode, the one you show at the top today, was titled "THRILLS OF AN AIRSHIP RIDE WITHOUT THE PERILS."
# posted by : 3/17/2020 11:09 AM
: 3/17/2020 11:09 AM
Allan! Where are you? Are you all right? You've been MIA for three days now. With the end of the world on its way, we want to keep everyone accounted for. It's important that nobody in the Strip Community is snatched away. Please speak up! Or bark! Or something!
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# posted by : 3/20/2020 1:18 PM
: 3/20/2020 1:18 PM Monday, March 09, 2020
Obscurity of the Day: Mortimer Mum
Gag cartoonist Bill Sakren had a string of syndication series that never really went much of anywhere in the 1950s and 60s, but long before that, in 1935, was his debut on newspaper comics pages. The young Sakren jumped into the deepest end of the pool, offering a pantomime daily feature called Mortimer Mum through the George Matthew Adams Service. Writing pantomime gags is tough, and doing six of them a week is a task not to be taken on lightly.
Sakren did a creditable job with this feature about an odd little man who gets into crazy situations, but Sakren's timing was incredibly bad. Mortimer Mum debuted on April 15 1935*, which put it in competition with two pantomime juggernauts, Henry and The Little King, both of which debuted in 1934 and caught fire right out of the gate.
Mortimer Mum limped along with a small client list until September 10 1938** when Sakren threw in the towel. The syndicate immediately began selling the strip in reprints, but that didn't last too long. I've found them running into 1940.
The normally reliably Ron Goulart says in his book The Funnies that this was a Sunday-only strip, but it was definitely a daily, and if there was a Sunday version, I haven't seen it.
* Source: Boston Evening Transcript
** Source: Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader
Labels: Obscurities
Comments:
There were several others in the pantomime field, "Adamson's Adventures"(or "Silent Sam" if you prefer), the Swedish import, was here starting in the early 1920s, and Frank Tashlin's "Van Boring" was in place starting in 1934. In Fact, the New York Evening Post carried Mortimer Mum and Van Boring on the same page, for a while.
It's hard to keep a strictly "silent" character going. Even Henry once let out a howl of pain from a Bee sting. (1935). Sakren came to depend on another character to carry the ball, that being "Gabby", a tall, loud-suited guy with glasses, sort of a Walter Catlett type, who did lots of talking.
I wonder if Mortimer Mum was the inspiration for "Mr.Mum" of later decades.
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It's hard to keep a strictly "silent" character going. Even Henry once let out a howl of pain from a Bee sting. (1935). Sakren came to depend on another character to carry the ball, that being "Gabby", a tall, loud-suited guy with glasses, sort of a Walter Catlett type, who did lots of talking.
I wonder if Mortimer Mum was the inspiration for "Mr.Mum" of later decades.
# posted by : 3/09/2020 1:34 PM
: 3/09/2020 1:34 PM Thursday, March 05, 2020
Obscurity of the Day: But He Changed His Mind
New York Evening World bullpenner Jack Callahan got a hankering to try panel cartoons in 1914, and he liked the same kind that I quite enjoy, the ones where the cartoonist asks us to imagine what came next. He more or less did two weekday series of this type in tandem; Then He/She Turned Around, and today's obscurity, But He Changed His Mind (obviously titled But She Changed Her Mind instead when the target was of the female persuasion).
This series began on March 24 1914, a few months later than his similar panel series, and ended September 29 1914, a few months later.
Labels: Obscurities
Monday, March 02, 2020
Obscurity of the Day: The Inquisitive Bunnies
The Inquisitive Bunnies began on W.R. Bradford's second week supplying the Chicago Tribune with practically an entire Sunday comics section, November 17, 1901. Brad's art was pretty amateurish when he first came to the Trib, but evidently the powers that be appreciated the antic wackiness of his writing, which was already in full flower -- this stuff is completely unreined.
The less said about Brad's painfully bad poetry the better, but thankfully Brad gave this series the heave-ho in short order, dropping it with the installment of December 15 1901. His other Tribune series smartly stuck mostly to prose.
Thanks to Cole Johnson, who supplied scans of the first and last installments of this series.
Labels: Obscurities
Comments:
Hello Allan-
The figures atop the fence in the second sample are all from the Trib's feeble lineup of characters, obviously the little girl in the Tam was the star of the the debut Tribune comic section. I can't recall what her name was, Alice, perhaps, and Boggs the optimist is the one being clonked at the far right end.
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The figures atop the fence in the second sample are all from the Trib's feeble lineup of characters, obviously the little girl in the Tam was the star of the the debut Tribune comic section. I can't recall what her name was, Alice, perhaps, and Boggs the optimist is the one being clonked at the far right end.
# posted by : 3/02/2020 1:24 PM
: 3/02/2020 1:24 PM Thursday, February 27, 2020
Obscurity of the Day: Danny Dumm
Harold Russell had been working for the Cincinnati Enquirer for over a decade when, in his role as sports cartoonist, he got the idea to create a mascot. He came up with Danny Dumm, who was introduced to Enquirer readers on April 13 1926. Danny started out in the standard role of a cartoon mascot, making wry comments from the corner of the day's cartoon. It wasn't long, though, before Russell decided to expand his role. On June 3 1926 he placed his first horse track bet, and from then on Russell tracked his purse, just the way that Bud Fisher had in 1907 when he created A. Mutt for the San Francisco Chronicle. Starting on June 26, Danny Dumm was awarded a regular daily comic strip adjunct that ran underneath the sports cartoon on a daily basis.
Unlike Mutt, a pretty consistent loser at the track, Danny generally held his own, and often came up smelling like a rose. And he didn't just bet on horse races, but also at the dog track and perhaps other venues as well. His good luck may have not made him quite as sympathetic character as A. Mutt, but his bets certainly did impress the gamblers, who no doubt took Danny as something of a betting oracle.
Russell's creation attracted the interest of John Dille, who in 1928 advertised Danny Dumm as a daily strip syndicated through his National Newspaper Service. It is unknown if the offering was successful, though, as I've never seen the strip appearing anywhere outside the Enquirer.
The Danny Dumm strip took occasional breaks from Russell's cartoon, especially during prime sports season, but ran pretty consistently until March 12 1932. After that his gambling purse was chronicled in a panel adjunct to the main cartoon, and eventually was dropped altogether. The character Danny Dumm was then reduced back to the role of mascot and commenter on all things sports. Russell would eventually put in over 40 years as the Enquirer's sports cartoonist.
Labels: Obscurities
