Fred Wagner is known for successfully taking over features (Grin and Bear It, Animal Crackers, Catfish) but does have one original series to his credit, Shambles. The daily and Sunday gag panel with no continuing characters debuted on September 24 1979. Despite Wagner’s wonderful loosey-goosey art the feature made no impression whatsoever. I’m not sure the Field Enterprises salespeople ever got the memo to try selling this one. It ended sometime in 1981 with hardly a newspaper reader in the country any the wiser.
Looking into Cynthia and the work of Irv Novick I keep running into the same bio bit mentioning a failed newspaper strip called The Scarlet Avenger. Would that not be a comic strip or do you know it?
This indicates it was actually from the comic book Zip Comics #1