Stripper's Guide

Mac Divot was a true original in newspaper comics; a serious continuity feature about a golfer. Golf was no stranger to comics at all -- earlier entries included The Dubbville Foursome, In The Rough, The Meadowlarks and others. But they were all played for laughs. 

But in 1955 creators Jordan Lansky, writer, and Mel Keefer, artist, noticed that while there were successful strips about baseball and boxing, other sports were for the most part unrepresented. Since both were avid, if not expert, golfers, they decided they might just have the perfect timing for a serious golfing strip. 

In the earlier 1900s golf had been a popular sport, but then the Depression and World War II put the damper on it. In the 1950s, though, Americans were once again beginning to enjoy more leisure time, and the economy was on the upswing. Golf became a newly popular way to spend both time and money. And then in 1954 an exciting young phenom named Arnold Palmer won the U.S. Amateur and created for golf another type of fan, the armchair golf aficionado glued to his or her TV all weekend.  

U.S. newspapers were generally slow at cluing in that golf was becoming important to readers, and now were caught searching for interesting golf content. Syndicates were similarly slow on the draw at creating it for them. Lansky and Keefer were perfectly positioned to jump into that void, and the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate wisely put these creators under contract when they brought the idea to them. 

With a few quick tweaks to the original concept the new daily-only strip was rushed out on April 18 1955*. The initial client list was very impressive, with some starry-eyed reports putting it around two hundred papers (E&P reported a more down to Earth 22). Compared to the general market for continuity strips, which was pretty well glutted at this time, that kind of debut was a notable achievement, even if the true number was just 22. Some client papers put Mac Divot on the comics page, but most wisely added him into their sports sections where it was more likely to find an appreciative audience.

The strip's plot was reasonably simple; Malcolm Mac Divot is the golf pro at Grassy Knolls Country Club, and his early-20s age son Sandy Mac Divot is a gifted golfer looking to make his mark on the circuit. Throw into the mix a love interest for Sandy in Marla Brooks, and things were off to the races. The strip concentrates mostly on Sandy going to tournaments, following the golf play with loving detail (or excruciating detail if you're not a golf fan). Sandy wins in skin-of-the-teeth fashion practically all the time amid improbable dramas and incredible shots on the links. Father Malcolm acts as the wise sage giving Sandy, and readers, words of golfing wisdom when the crises loom. In between tournaments, we meet various characters at Grassy Knolls, all of whom need the ministrations of Malcolm to improve their games.

The strip originally strove to offer not just golf action but off-the-links drama as well, especially regarding Sandy's romance. It was soon realized, though, that the strip's audience was not especially keen on soap opera, and Sandy's love life was all but forgotten. Girls out of the way, Mac Divot was pretty much wall-to-wall golf from then on, with practically all the drama confined to the course. 

An interesting aspect of the strip was that as Sandy became a world-class golfer, the creators decided that instead of making up fake tournaments for him to win, they'd have him play in real tournaments and rub elbows with the real leading lights in golf. Keefer's ability to draw recognizeable famous faces became another big plus, as golf fans could hardly pass a comic strip by if they saw Jack Nicklaus or Billy Casper making an appearance. The tournaments had their real names, but Sandy Mac Divot's exploits at them were, of course, entirely fictional. And so while famous golfers strolled through the strip constantly, readers never got to see Sandy beat the pants off Gary Player at the U.S. Open, but rather fictionalized equivalents. 

The Mac Divot comic strip cruised along with a decent number of papers, and new clients seemed to generally compensate, or even outnumber, cancellations. Client papers tended to stick with the strip over the long haul, showing an evident reader appreciation. But in 1973 the Chicago Tribune dropped the strip from their own pages, and that's seldom a good sign. Despite what seems like a still reasonably healthy client list, the strip retired to the 19th hole on February 2 1974**, falling just short of the two decade mark.

If Keefer or Lansky ever explained why the strip was cancelled, I can't find it. Has anyone got the straight skinny on this unexplained end to a reasonably popular strip? 

 * Source: Chicago Tribune.

** Source: Tampa Times.

Labels: Under The Radar

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 1 comments

For most gag cartoonists who reach the peak of the mountain, selling regularly to The New Yorker, there is generally little interest in pursuing other venues. Henry Martin, though, who had over 600 cartoons published in The New Yorker between 1964 and 1999, perhaps facing down a big pile of very funny but rejected cartoons, decided he could add a daily cartoon for newspapers to his output. 

Scribners had just published a book collection of Martin's business cartoons, titled Good News Bad News, and that became the name and pitch for his daily cartoon, one that would be at home on  newspaper business pages. I doubt that Martin had to shop the concept around very long, and he soon signed a contract with the Chicago Tribune - New York News Syndicate. The book was published in 1977 and the panel cartoon made its newspaper debut on March 13 1978*.

The daily cartoon was never a huge seller, but then not terribly many newspapers have ever jumped on the business cartoon bandwagon. For the newspapers who did have the smarts to pick up Good News Bad News, they offered their business section readers consistently and genuinely funny gags with a distinctive New Yorker flavour. Perhaps some smartly wry Henry Martin cartoon even kept a few businessmen from jumping out the high-rise window on a bad business news day. 

Good New Bad News went out of business as Martin was beginning to retire from professional cartooning in general. It seems to have ended in February 1993**.

 * Source: Dave Strickler's LA Times index.

** Source: Hackensack Record, which did not run it every day

Labels: Obscurities, Under The Radar

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

Being over a hundred years old, Muggsy could certainly qualify as an Obscurity of the Day, but I think he is a better fit for Under The Radar since the strip had an incredibly long run for those days,  two whole decades. 

You may be thinking to yourself, if the strip ran that long, and I've never heard of it, was it some local thing? Nope, it ran in lots of higher profile papers. What makes it utterly forgotten is the fact that it was pretty literally the SAME DARN GAG for its whole long run. The question, then, is why it lasted so long, and for that question I have no answer, but I'd sure like to know why myself. 

Muggsy, as you'll see when you peruse the samples above, is not only the same gag over and over, but the art is clunky to boot. The cartoonist, Frank Crane, came onto the comic stripping scene in 1900 with this full-fledged style of his, and it never grew or changed appreciably over his entire career. 

Muggsy may have only had one joke, but he didn't have only one syndicate. He debuted in the Philadelphia North American on December 1 1901* and ran there until April 20 1902. Crane was actually a much more important player at the New York Herald at this time, and apparently decided Muggsy was too good for the less auspicious comic section of the North American. He moved the strip to the Herald starting there on May 18 1902.

Whether the Herald tired of the strip, or the North American balked at the loss, it remained there only a short period. It ended in the Herald on August 24 1902, and reappeared in the North American on October 12. 

From then on the strip ran consistently, 99% of the time as an interior half-pager, in the North American section, except for one long hiatus from April 15 1906 to August 25 1907, coinciding with Crane taking on some extra work for the Boston Herald with Val the Ventriloquist. 

Muggsy kept up his ultra-repetitive shenanigans until the Philadelphia North American's Sunday comic section ended on July 4 1915**. At this point Crane went back to the New York Herald, where he tried out several new strips. None of them caught on though, and Crane seems to have retired from newspaper cartooning in 1916, and he died in 1917. 

But even that couldn't keep Muggsy down; World Color Printing bought the backlog of quite a few North American strips and ran Muggsy in reruns from 1916 to 1920, rounding out the total run for this strip to a nice even twenty years.

* Sources: All dates from Philadelphia North American, except New York Herald dates from Ken Barker's Herald index, and World Color Printing info from various papers in my collection.

** A comic section I'd dearly love for my collection -- the North American strip characters all get blown to kingdom come by fireworks.

Labels: Under The Radar

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 2 comments

This post is the inaugural episode of a new occasional series, Under The Radar*. The theme is to discuss newspaper comics that are not obscure, because they ran for many years in a relatively substantial number of papers, but were never celebrated or even noticeably popular with readers. These were not necessarily bad features, and evidently feature editors saw some value in them, but they never inspired reprint books during their time, never seemed to get much promotion, and rate hardly a mention in books about newspaper comics. 

Carmichael is a pretty good example of this thesis. It ran for an impressive 28 years, and in its better years was claimed to have a very healthy 150+ newspaper clients. Yet other than the obligatory promos that a few papers ran when they initially bought the feature, I can find hardly a word about Carmichael or its creator, Dave Eastman. 

Carmichael debuted as a daily-only feature on March 3 1958, and was sold by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate on the basis of its unusual tall one-column format. The feature was also unlike the run of the mill panels in that it always consisted of depressive one-liners from a middle-aged sad sack character; unusual for the time.  The drawing was initially a little more cartoony than the samples you see above, with Carmichael's face more rounded and, dare I say, almost verging on cheery. But soon Eastman had perfected the look of his mouthpiece, giving Carmichael both the look and the one-liners of Rodney Dangerfield (who he was not copying -- this is before Dangerfield became well-known). 

The promos for Carmichael say that Eastman was born in 1924 in Indiana, and moved to LA in 1948 after serving in World War II. He had extensive art training and his early cartooning endeavours were focused on selling magazine gags. Carmichael was his first syndicated newspaper feature. 

 Carmichael maintained a healthy client list through the 1960s and early 70s, but faltered thereafter. He lost his home paper, the LA Times, in 1976, and is seldom seen in the 1980s. It is tough to get an exact end date, because Carmichael, as designed, tended to be used as a filler panel. But I do have two papers that last ran new material in May 1986, and one of them, the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, switched over to reruns after their last new panel ran on May 30. I think it reasonably safe to say that the series ended on May 31 1986. 

Eastman would have been 62 when Carmichael was cancelled, but I have no idea if he went on to other things, retired or passed away. I can find not a word about him  except in those early promos.

* I'm all ears if you can come up with a catchier title!

Labels: Under The Radar

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 10 comments