Obscurity of the Day: The Quality Kid

 

 

 

John R. Bray is remembered today as a pioneer in the field of animation, but he also had an earlier career in newspaper comics. Most of his work was for the McClure Syndicate, but he was not so greatly in demand that he wouldn’t jump on other offers of work. 

That would be the case with The Quality Kid, a feature he created for the short-lived Publishers Press Syndicate. We’ve discussed that syndicate before in connection with Harrison Cady’s Jolly Jumpers. Bray came late to the party, when Publishers Press was close to gasping its last. The Quality Kid debuted on June 1 1913, and it went down the tubes with the comics section itself on September 7 1913*. 

The Quality Kid concerns itself with a rich kid and two ragamuffin street urchins. Most comics that put together rich and poor kids have the poor ones outsmarting or just plain bullying the ‘quality’ kid, but in Bray’s strip the kids are partners-in-crime, with all the kids out to pull pranks, sometimes on others, sometimes on each other. A running gag is that the butler, James, is not the intended butt of these goings-on, but often gets caught up in the tide much to his detriment.

The series was attractive but quite repetitive, but it probably mattered very little to Bray. He was busy forming his new animation studio at essentially the same time as The Quality Kid was hitting the few remaining client papers of Publishers Press. Bray’s first cartoon short, The Artist’s Dream, was released in July 1913. 

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* Sources: Running dates from Atlanta Constitution and St. Paul Pioneer Press.

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