Obscurity of the Day: If They Came Back and Did it Over Again To-Day


Here’s a title that’s a mouthful, but it certainly does a fine job of summarizing the plot. Jack Farr would pick a famous person from history, drop him or her into the present and see how they’d fare. Not well it seems. Farr imbued the proceedings with a fine sense of screwball humor, a trademark style that should have served him better in the newspaper strip world. Yet he always seemed to be jumping from paper to paper, and in the 1920s ended up providing bulk lots of comic strips to the US Feature Service, a company that mostly dealt in buying up old stock from other syndicates. What the problem was for Jack I dunno. He always seemed to be one great idea away from making the bigtime.

This series ran in the Sunday New York Herald from March 17 to August 11 1918.

4 comments on “Obscurity of the Day: If They Came Back and Did it Over Again To-Day

  1. Hi – great info on the elusive artist, A.L. Jansson, which I appreciated very much. I have some postcards he produced and would be happy to send you pix of them if you provide me an email address. Best wishes, T. Brown in Tampa Bay. (circa1910@verizon.net)

  2. Hey! I’m a highschooler trying to put together a website on old comics history and stuff like that. I just wanted to thank you, your site has been a big help.

  3. Hi,
    I would be very interested in any additional information you have regarding “Jack” Farr. He was a not-so-distant cousin of mine. His given name was William Gordon Farr, Born 18 Oct 1889 in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were William H. and Julia Ann (Munro)Farr.

  4. Hi fmfrey –
    I’m afraid I don’t know much about Jack other than his list of credits. I surmise from all the jumping around he did, and his working for grade-Z outfits in the twenties, that he may have had some personal demons of some sort. Did they keep him from the loftier positions that his talent would seem to have entitled him? Seems so to me.

    Thanks for the full name and birthdate. Do you know when he died, or what he did after he got out of the newspaper strip game?

    –Allan

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