We first discussed the New York Herald-Tribune filler strips back on this post. These one-tier strips were mostly pretty bad, with a few notable exceptions. Pookie isn’t anything particularly special, except that it replaced Mal Eaton’s long-running ‘regular’ Sunday, Peter Piltdown.
Peter Piltdown ran in the Herald-Tribune’s Sunday comic section for over a decade, and Pookie was a character in that strip. Eaton’s full-size strip, though it had a healthy run, was never a syndication success, and that’s probably the reason for its demise. Pookie, as a filler strip, wasn’t offered for syndication. It ran, space permitting, from 12/22/47 through 2/29/48, in addition to Eaton’s new full-sized strip Tizzy, also not a syndication success.
Is this really obscure, when Peter Pitdown and Pookie moved over to BOY’S LIFE magazine – the official Boy Scout magazine, as Rocky Stoneaxe (hope i have that right) around 1950 – lasting at least 20 more years?
Steven Rowe
Casting aspersions on my obscurities, eh? I didn’t know that the Pookie character continued in Rocky Stoneaxe, but a quick check of the files did bear that out. Of course, the obscurity here was the filler strip, not the character, but thanks for the info on its continuation. Interesting that Eaton had to change the name of his main charcater, but that Pookie was allowed to go on as before.
–Allan