Stripper's Guide

 Those of you with a long memory might remember an announcement back in April 2022 that I was working on a new website for Stripper's Guide. Over two years later that project has finally come to fruition! I have a lot to say about this new website, but if you don't want to read my yammering about it, here's the link, go on over and check it out:

COMICSTRIPHISTORY.COM

For the past 19 years, Stripper's Guide has been hosted on a platform called Blogger, which is run by Google. It's a good platform, but limited in a lot of ways. There were things I wanted to do with the website that needed the flexibility of a more robust platform.That platform is called WordPress, and it pretty much allows for just about anything my li'l heart could desire. The downside is that with that kind of flexibility comes a lot of complexity, and with complexity comes all sorts of weird problems that need to be solved. And that's why this project has been grinding on for so long. 

The big stumbling block was that I wanted 19 years worth of posts to come with me to the new site. There are tools for moving blogposts from Blogger to WordPress, but those out-of-the-box tools are basically toys, not designed to deal with nearly 6000 posts and 10,000 images! And they're also not designed to deal with old posts that Blogger stored in various oddball different ways over the years. 

Anyway, many, many expensive programmer man-hours later, the new website has every single post and image from the current website. You'll also find all your great comments preserved as well (except for those made in the last three weeks -- sorry). But of course that's not all; the new site offers these new features:

• An extremely robust search capability that allows you to search by post category and month and year. Also, the search is exact -- not fuzzy. In other words, if you search for BLONDIE you won't also get posts that have the word BLONDE. You can also choose the number of posts you see per page, and you can sort the posts in ascending or descending date order, so now you can see a series of posts in the order you would want to read them!
  
• Ability to add the blog onto your RSS feed, which will soon be supplemented with the ability to sign up for new post emails, so you never miss a post even when you forget to visit. (This feature was supposed to work right now, but last minute bugs intervened and we need to work on it). 
• Unadulterated images! Blogger monkeys with the images I upload, dropping their resolution and often shrinking them as well. On the new site you should see the images exactly as I uploaded them. If an image is fuzzy or too small to read, it ain't Blogger's fault anymore, it's mine. 

So now I need some help from you folks. I'd really appreciate it if you not only visit the site, but try navigating, look at images, try some searches. If you find anything is amiss, or even just things you think could be done better, please let me know. Consider yourselves my software testers, and try to break that new website! 

So assuming the new website works properly, this will be the last post on Blogger. Goodbye Blogger, it was great while it lasted! 

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

The first time I ran one of these Moving Picture cards, which Hearst papers gave away in 1906, I asked readers to explain to me how the movement was supposed to happen, because I failed to get the concept. DBenson explained in great detail how the silly things were supposed to work, and now I get it ... I guess ... but colour me underwhelmed. 

Mark Johnson also offered help, suggesting I take a look at one of his Ask The Archivist online columns which addressed this exact subject. Well, maybe that column was in its pristine state back in 2019, but today look at the poor thing! The images are gone, and the text, at least on my browser, is so faint as to be illegible. Hey King Features, get your act together and fix these superb columns by Mark Johnson! They're fading away before our very eyes!

Labels: Wish You Were Here

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 2 comments

 Big announcement Monday, please mark your calendars, call in sick to work, and get a sitter for the kids. 

I know the anticipation is killing you, so here's a preview. The announcement will be one of these four things:

1. We're going on hiatus as I have to go to Hollywood. I have been tapped as technical adviser on the movie set of EKS MARKS THE SPOT: THE GENIUS OF EDDIE EKSERGIAN. Look for the gala release  next Christmas.
2.  The U.S. Government has appealed to Canada to stop me from writing Stripper's Guide. Reason: I am stealing jobs from U.S. newspaper comics researchers, who should take precedence. Canada, of course, capitulated.
   
3.  Stripper's Guide, Inc. has been bought out by Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. Turns out newspaper comics fans are the hottest marketing targets since tweens. I'm sad to see the site go, but my 300-room castle in Scotland, super-yacht, and personal jet will help to heal me. Thanks guys!
4. None of the above.
   

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 1:58 PM 1 comments

Here's a comic strip by A.T. Crichton that ran in the February 7 1897 edition of the New York Journal. Not much to the gag, I guess, but it certainly comes in an attractive package.

Labels: One-Shot Wonders

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

 On Monday! 

Can't you just feel the anticipation? Like waiting for that (blecch!) ketchup to come out of the bottle? Like smelling a nearby paper plant?  Like the palpable dread of a thousand philosophy majors looking for jobs the day after graduation?

That's right. Monday!

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:47 AM 4 comments

Here to close out our mad professor week is Professor Knix, a Jimmy Swinnerton short run series that appeared in the Hearst Sunday comics from April 3 to July 17 1904*. As seems to happen to all of our mad professors, Professor Knix can depend on having the you-know-what beat out of him by the end of each instalment, whether as a side effect of his invention, or by the innocent bystanders he enrages. 

What I find interesting about this strip, and other early strips featuring mad professors, is that it is common for them to have German accents. I would have thought that trope, the idea that Germany was a fertile ground for off-the-wall geniuses, would have blossomed in the aftermath of Albert Einstein. But evidently Einstein only served to feed an already existing stereotype, and perhaps focus it with the wacky unkempt hair adding to the picture. 

*Source: Atlanta Constitution

Labels: Obscurities

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

Norman Ritchie (who signed himself just 'Norman') was the longstanding editorial cartoonist of the Boston Post. When comic strips became the new rage he was pressed into service to provide homegrown Sunday funnies for the paper as well. A few months ago we covered one of his earliest strip series, 1904's Exploits of Mama's Angel Pet, and I pointed out that he was still feeling his way with this new assignment, and that his grasp of how to construct a good comic strip gag was still in the early stages. 

Well, here we are less than a year later in 1905, and Norman Ritchie has figured out how to produce a good and proper Sunday comic. I won't say that Professor Si N. Tific is a lost masterpiece by any means, but I think it interesting to see just how fast an old pro like Norman Ritchie (he was about 40 at this time) was able to adapt to his new job. 

Professor Si N. Tific ran in the Boston Post Sunday comcs section from April 16 to September 24 1905.

Labels: Obscurities

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 4 comments

 It's Mad Professor week here on Stripper's Guide, featuring three, count 'em, three, wacky genius inventors. Leading off with ...

 It's impressive to me that there was a time when a freelance cartoonist, probably a kid who had just completed a mail order course, could walk into a newspaper of the first stature, like the New York World, get an appointment to see the features editor, and sell him on a new comic strip series. 

I know basically nothing about E. Burton Johnson, the cartoonist of today's obscurity, but given that Scientific Sam - Have You Met Him? is his only known newspaper credit, it seems likely that he somehow managed to get that much sought after audience with an editor, and with a not particularly original series, and decent though by no means spectacular cartooning, got himself a berth in one of the globe's highest circulation papers. Wow, that's an incident that would strain the credulity of even Horatio Alger

I suppose you could say the same thing is possible today, but the odds against you seem almost infinitely worse. But as far as I know, you can still show up at The New Yorker and get yourself an audience with the cartoon buyer. Or, with a lot of chutzpah and luck, you could see a features editor at the New York Times, or the Washington Post, and maybe, just maybe, they might take pity on you. But you better arrive with something a lot better than Scientific Sam!

Anyhow, Scientific Sam - Have You Met Him? ran as an occasional weekday feature in the New York Evening World from August 16 to October 6 1909. What happened to Mr. E. Burton Johnson after that? Did he keep on as a cartoonist in some other capacity? Sorry, I haven't a clue. But hopefully he didn't use up his whole lifetime's quota of luck at the New York World, and the rest of his career was also replete with bright spots.

Labels: Obscurities

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

Here's an Outcault postcard from the J. Ottmann Company, published in 1905. My batting average on this card is a perfect .000. I don't get the gag at all -- is Company G a Thing of some sort, or ... ? And then, in the sender's message, what in the world is a "poultry wall", and why's she asking about it????

Labels: Wish You Were Here

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 4 comments

Here's a collection of gag cartoons that ran in the New York Evening Journal on April 14 1904. Starting at upper left and going clockwise, we have a Jimmy Swinnerton cartoon, two by H.B. Martin, a silhouette cartoon by J.K. Bryans, and another two Martin cartoons. 

These are all pretty weak gag cartoons, but the reason I wanted to feature this array is the cartoon in the upper middle by Martin. You may be wondering what the heck is going on there, and rightly so, and there's an interesting explanation. The Indian is dressed in drag, that's him on the right. Why? There was a momenatry fad in 1904 having to do with crossdressing Indians, and Martin was certain enough that everyone was in on it that he didn't need to explain. The fad was brought on by the publication of a novelty song, My Dandy Dainty Redskin Brave, in which the (male) singer is fooled into wooing a high-society Gibson girl type who turns out to be a Native American man. The odd fad song had its very short moment in the sun then disappeared into the mists of time.

Or, maybe the cartoon just had the wrong caption printed with it.

Labels: One-Shot Wonders

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

Hobo and tramp comics were quite popular in the early years of the last century, then went through a fallow period. But they came in for a popular revival in the 1930s for the obvious reason that the Great Depression made them a newly common facet of American life. Perhaps the most successful of this new wave was Pete the Tramp, from the talented pen of C.D. Russell. Russell had done newspaper and magazine work in the 1920s, and found that one of his favorite subjects were the tramps he saw around New York City. He eventually became known for his tramp cartoons, and as the Great Depression really got rolling, King Features decided that they wanted him to produce tramp cartoons for them.

King Features signed him to a contract to produce the Sunday strip Pete the Tramp, which debuted on January 10 1932*.  Along with the new strip came a topper about a terrir dog called Bumps who lives with a nameless family. There was nothing particularly original about the strip, but it was affable enough, treading the well-worn avenues of dog humour. 

In fact about the only interesting thing to say about it, from a historical point of view, is that the strip had its original name taken away from it around June 1932, and from then on it was known as Pete's Pup, even though the dog remained with his same unnamed owners -- as far as I know he never met Pete the Tramp in his strip. I long thought this name change had something to do with another King strip wanting the title -- Harry O'Neill's topper strip to Broncho Bill was also titled Bumps. But when I finally got off my duff to actually check on that, I realized that the O'Neill Bumps strip didn't start until over a year after Russell renamed his topper. So never mind. 

Pete's Pup ran atop Pete the Tramp until February 24 1935**, when it was replaced by The Topper Twins. 

One postscript to this story for you tearsheet collectors out there. If you are impressed by the gorgeous colour work on the samples above, thank the New York Mirror. When the Mirror started running Sunday colour comics they opted to produce them on a rotogravure press. These presses and the slick paper they used were capable of producing far more nuanced colours than regular four-colour presses, and the Mirror recoloured their Sunday strips to take advantage of the high-end colour capabilities. Sadly the roto press funnies didn't last long (ending in early 1933 I think?)

* Source: New York Mirror, via Jeffrey Lindenblatt.

** Source: Chicago Record-Herald.

Labels: Topper Features

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

Robert Ripley didn't know what he was unleashing on the newspaper world when he created his Believe It Or Not series, offering readers entertaining odd and unusual factoids. Not only was he copied whole cloth by a long list of me-too cartoon series, but he was followed also by a whole industry of specialty imitations, where the creators limited themselves to some niche subject. 

The most popular niche, by far, were the Believe It or Not clones which limited their subject to a specific state, region or locality. I admit I'd be hard pressed to prove it, but I feel reasonably confident that there was no point on the U.S. map that was not served by one of these newspaper series at one time or another. 

Today we take a look at one of these series that (at first) covered the state of Alabama. Clint Bonner, a Birmingham artist and sign painter created his first newspaper panel series in 1931 for the Birmingham News. How He Got There was a full pager that ran on Sundays, telling the backgrounds of local politicos, celebrities and businesspeople.

This rather dry feature went on for the better part of three years, but then Bonner decided it was high time to do a cartoon that could sell to more than one paper. Thus he came up with a new weekly panel called Alabama Oddities, which sold to clients including the Birmingham News and Montgomery Advertiser. It debuted on May 12 1935. As the name implies, it offered intersting factoids about the state, its history and its people. 

Bonner proved to have a restless hankering for changing the name and focus of his feature. On March 15 1939 it was rechristed When The Stars Fell, a reference to the book and song When The Stars Fell On Alabama, a tale about a spectacular meteor shower seen throughout the state in 1833. The subjects of the weekly cartoon remained pretty much the same. 

But then on April 14 1940 the title changed again, this time to Debunking The Bunk. Now the feature began to cover historical and scientific fallacies, and the local aspect of the feature was dropped. Presumably Bonner hoped that his new subject would allow him to sell the feature outside Alabama. Evidently that wish did not turn into reality, and may have also annoyed his existing subscribing papers who wanted local content, not this essentially new feature. 

Bowing to client demand, a year later on April 20 the title and subject was changed back to Alabama Oddities. But Bonner was still chafing, hoping to sell the feature outside the state, so on January 4 1942 the title changed to Southern Oddities, taking in all the surrounding states. Apparently this opening of the scope didn't antagonize his Alabama subscribing papers nearly as much. 

On April 26 1942 a very slight title change was enacted, changing it to Oddities of the South. My guess is that someone else owned copyright to the title Southern Oddities and had complained. But Bonner still didn't seem to be gaining the client base he so fervently wanted, so a few months later he rejiggered the weekly page into a set of six separate equally sized panels. This layout allowed him to sell the feature either as a large weekly feature or as a daily panel. 

Another seemingly good idea, but yet another marketing failure. Bonner finally threw in the towel and the feature appears to have ended on January 31 1943, or February 6 for the daily-style version*. By this time Bonner had a new gig as a radio host going in Birmingham and he was running the Gulf States Art Schools; perhaps those proved the more rewarding activities. 

The ever-restless Clint Bonner would come back after the war with several additional newspaper features, but none of them proved to be his pot o' gold, either. One was a revival of this feature, but throwing it open to factoids about the entire country. Titled American Oddities, in the only paper I can find it (Montgomery Advertiser) it ran only January 6 to February 17 1946.

* Source: Tallahassee News-Democrat.

Labels: Obscurities

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

Little Abe Corncob was yet another Katzenjammer Kid rip-off, but of the low rent sort who couldn't even muster a brother to assist him in his pranks. What he did have, though, was a setting in farm country and he used that to great effect, enlisting farm animals to do the heavy lifting on many of his escapades. 

The strip debuted in the C.J. Hirt version of the McClure Syndicate Sunday comics section on October 18 1903*. The strip was very rarely signed, in fact the only time I know for sure it was signed was on the very first strip. A.D. Reed signed that installment, and I'm confident he was responsible for it throughout the run, which ended on June 17 1906**. That end date is when the Hirt copyright was last seen, and the next week the section was revamped and now copyrighted by Otis F. Wood. 

Little Abe Corncob reprints were sometimes used by McClure to fill holes in the 1910s, when their bullpen of artists was so shallow that  they sometimes couldn't fill the four pages. Known reprint appearances include occasions in 1912*** and February 8 to March 8 1914****.

* Source: Chicago Inter-Ocean

** Source: Washington Star 

*** Source: Battle Creek Moon-Journal

**** Source: St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Labels: Obscurities

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

Here's a Garfield card, designated P7520, from Argus Communications. Published in the mid-80s, as if that were much of a mystery given the thought balloon. "Let's do lunch", that infamous Hollywood brush-off, was popularized in the mid-80s and became so ubiquitous we were all sick of it in no time. Did Jim Davis get his foot in the door while it was still a popular meme? Well, the postcard is unused, so....

Labels: Wish You Were Here

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

Well, it's about doggone time that One-Shot Wonder Saturdays finally heard from the inimitable Eddie Eksergian, the rootinest, tootinest, wackiest cartooner that there ever was. Eddie's Sunday comic stripping was mainly for the St. Louis Star, but in 1904 he switched hometown teams and went over to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. The above strip is from the tail end of his comic strip career, appearing on April 9 1905, the week after the last of his Sunday series had bitten the dust. Eks stayed in the cartooning game for years more, but as far as I know, he never penned another newspaper comics series.

Labels: One-Shot Wonders

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 2 comments

When I think of Walt Disney and marketing, naturally my thoughts turn to Mickey Mouse watches and all the other untold bazillions of products emblazoned with the iconic faces of Mickey, Donald, Pluto, Goofy, and the rest of the Disney cast. 

But Disney was no stranger to cross-marketing, either. The company might have wanted its characters on nearly every product under the sun, but they knew where to draw the line. But if they wisely chose not to start a chain of Goofy Gas Stations that sell Mickey's Motor Oil, hey, if someone else wanted to run with that ball and give them a taste of the gate, go for it. 

And so in 1938-40 the Standard Oil Company of California (which I'm now told is distinct from the company that became Esso/Exxon, but still one of the conglomerate under control of old man Rockefeller) licensed the characters to appear on their advertising and on promotional materials at their stations. Disney provided some absolutely beutiful renderings of their characters for this marketing blitz, of which we have a small taste shown above (these were run in early 1940). I don't know if we have many Disney experts following along here at Stripper's Guide, but I bet some of those knowledgeable folk can even tell us the staff artist who created these lovely images. 

Oops, I should have known better. Disney being so well documented, I actually found a post about this ad campaign at the Disney History Institute website. Over there they seem pretty convinced that the Standard Oil account was serviced mostly with the artwork of Hank Porter.

Labels: Marketing Madness

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 3 comments

12/1933

Miss Pauline Moore Marries N. Y. Artist

Miss Pauline Love Moore, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. J. J. Moore, became the bride of Jefferson Machamer, New York artist, this week at the Methodist Church at Westminster, in the presence of the immediate families.

The pair left after the ceremony for a trip through the West, and after October they will reside in New York. Mrs. Machamer is a graduate of the William Penn High School and has played in a number of New York theatrical productions. Recently she has been posing for magazine covers. Her husband contributes comic strips to magazines and newspapers. 

Jefferson Machamer says too many people ask: “How do you ever get ideas for cartoons?” (Ideas like the one on page 50.) And he gives an answer. He says: “Well, an idea might bloom this way: Business demands me in Washington, D. C., for a few days and I ask my wife to help pack a bag.

“ ‘A bag?’ she stonies. ‘You’d better put a couple of windows in our steamer trunk and let me makeup a bed in it and-’

“ ‘Quiet!’ I yell, race for the drawing board and rough out a businessman starting for Washington with a combination trailer trunk. Which bears out advice Clare Briggs once gave me. ‘Listen to or watch anyone in the world for ten minutes, and they’ll say or do something funny enough to draw!’ ”

Machamer turned to painting after he wrote (and starred in) eight two-reel comedies for 20th Century-Fox. “I painted 60 oil and pastel masterpieces in three months at Los Angeles,” he says, “and had a one-man show, but he didn’t buy anything. . .

“Am now living on a wonderful old North Carolina plantation which we named Four Chimneys. It has four coal-burning fireplaces, three coal-burning stoves and a coal-burning furnace. I have to tend all and sometimes I just don’t know whom I agree with, Harold Ickes or John L. Lewis!”

5/25/1947

1/9/1949

Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles

# posted by Alex Jay @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

Smilin' Jack, the unique flying strip with a roll call of memorable characters and zany plotlines, was a fixture of the Chicago Tribune and a very healthy client list for just a hair shy of four decades. But it didn't start out with that name. The first Sunday, shown above, is how it debuted in the Tribune on October 1 1933. At the outset the strip was titled On The Wing, and the star of the show was a midwestern hayseed type named Mack.  

How the strip got into the paper in this fetal stage I don't know, but according to creator Zack Mosley, it wasn't long before Colonel Patterson, that midwife of great Tribune comics, sat down with him and brainstormed how to turn this instantly forgettable copycat aviation strip into one that flew higher than the competition and outlasted it by decades. 

Patterson took a cue from Mosley himself, whose nickname was Smilin' Zack, and decreed that the strip and its hero would be renamed Smilin' Jack. With that simple reader-attracting hook in place he encouraged Mosley to write the strip to his own strengths, which ran to the quirky and tongue-in-cheek. The strip was Sunday-only at this time, and between the installments of December 24 and 31 1933, the title and character name change were put in place. The strip did not immediately turn into its zany mature self, but Zack started loosening up his cartooning style, began evolving his hero into the dapper ladies man, and the boring flying school stories were dropped in favour of more exciting fare.

Labels: Firsts and Lasts

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

Time to inflict on you another postcard by Cobb Shinn. Here's a case where the cartoon, for all its faults, has a recognizeable subject, but it just doesn't serve to bring home the gag that is alluded to by the caption. Cobb, oh Cobb, what are we going to do with you. 

 This one has no maker or copyright information, but it was postally used in 1911.

Labels: Wish You Were Here

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 3 comments

A very special guest star makes an appearance in this one-shot strip by Carl Anderson. It ran in the New York Journal on January 24 1897.

Labels: One-Shot Wonders

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 2 comments

Hans and Gretchen ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer from September 23 to November 4 1906*. It's an odd strip on several counts.

The strip is about a couple of stereotypical Dutch children, dressed in traditional garb right down to the wooden shoes. The strip tells its little storybook tales in verse, and the level of the writing and plots seems to be intended for very young children -- very simplistic, very banal. While this sort of material, meant for the smallest kiddies, wasn't totally unknown in the Sunday comics sections, in most cases it was jazzed up just enough so that the older kids and adults didn't feel cheated. In this series the stories are so shallow I'm really surprised that the Inquirer would run them. Of course, none of that criticism applies to the sample above, which was (perhaps not surprisingly) the final installment. I've certainly seen plenty of strips about cannibals in these early comics, but never witnessed a case of them actually chomping on a little girl. And in a strip that had, up until then, been intended for the smallest children, too! Get ready for kiddies having nightmares tonight, ma.

The other weird thing is that this series by "Allen" would seem likely to be T.S. Allen in some ways but not in others -- there's a number of pros and cons to that ID. The signature could pass for his, though its not quite a dead ringer. Also, T.S. Allen was famed for his cartoons of tough slum kids, not namby-pamby fairy tale children. The art is not typical for him -- he favoured a more sketchy style -- but he was definitely capable of modifying his style when the situation required. The timing of the strip's appearance is perfect for him, though, as late 1906 is when he seems to have been dropped by Hearst in New York, and he was very soon to spend some time at the Philadelphia Press. So a stopover at the Inquirer would be very reasonable. So is this T.S. Allen? In my book I gave him the credit, but now I'm not so sure...

* In my book I say it lasted until November 18, but it turns out on digital review that the extra strip on that end date is a one-shot titled The Little Hollander; nothing to do with this series other than the nationality of the subject. So nice to be able to compare strips without having to dig out a different microfilm reel!

Labels: Obscurities

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

Among the many comic strip series George Frink created for the Chicago Daily News was Buddy and Banty. At first glance it seems like yet another Katzies rip-off, but the plot had a little extra nuance to it in that Banty is a mischievous halfwit, and Buddy is a comparative angel. Of course in any setup of this type, the inevitable upshot is that poor Buddy pays dearly for Banty's hellraising. 

Even though this isn't exactly grade-A Frink material, he employs his gift for portraying anarchy to relatively good effect. In this sample strip, I particularly like the graphic device of being able to see an X-ray view between the two floors of the house, a nice touch. 

Buddy and Banty ran on occasional weekdays on the Chicago Daily News back page from June 9 to September 22 1906. Then after a long layoff it came back for a single engagement on February 21 1908. 

A footnote on this sample strip is that Frink had a series starring Uncle Bellamy back in 1902-03. But this doesn't seem to be a return appearance of his old character, who had rather unique muttonchops that stuck out from his head like overgrown cat whiskers.

Labels: Obscurities

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

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