Comic Strip History

Vesta West was the last new strip to appear in the Chicago Tribune’s Comic Book section. It debuted on August 30 1942, about seven months before the section itself was cancelled. Vesta West survived the section, but not for long, ending on October 31 1943 along with most of the other refugee features from the Comic Book.

The strip was a pretty conventional present-day Western, with a little added sex appeal from a girl heroine. The strip was created by Fred Meagher, whose excellent bio on Yesterday’s Papers is highly informative, except on the point of why he turned the strip over to Ray Bailey after just two months. I’m afraid I’m no more in the know on that issue. The fact remains, though, that Bailey took over with the strip of October 11 1942, and stuck with it until the end. Before this assignment Bailey had primarily been an assistant, working on Terry and the Pirates and The Gumps, both Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate properties.

Mister Ex was some sort of a secret agent, forever embroiled in international intrigue of all sorts. The stories, breathlessly told with no time wasted discussing background, tell us just about nothing about our hero. His gimmick, I’m told, is that he was a master of disguise, but that seldom figured into the plotlines in any significant way.

At the beginning of the series,which debuted January 19 1941,

our hero was bearded, a rarity in those days. Bert Whitman, the creator of the strip, probably thought it would be a great way to identify his main character. However, I guess the American public just wasn’t ready for a hirsute hero, and the soup strainer disappeared in less than six months.

The strip started off slow, with Ex in a small-time drama regarding a mistreated kid. It wasn’t long, though, before the hero was getting involved in a banana republic revolution, then pretending to be a Nazi to infiltrate a spy ring, then going for a nautical adventure hunting German subs. It was all very exciting, and once Whitman got into the groove he wrote a pretty good little adventure strip. Once the Comic Book section ended, though, Mr. Ex only made it a few months in the regular comic section, ending July 4 1943.

But that’s not quite the end of the story. In the final panel of that July 4 Sunday it was announced that the strip would continue, renamed The Whizzer. However, the next Sunday no whizzing was to be found in the Trib’s comic section. It wasn’t until September 5 that a strip bearing that name appeared. The renamed strip only ran once more, on September 26, before it disappeared for good. Question is, did The Whizzer appear on a regular basis elsewhere? All I can say is that I haven’t found it anywhere. Anyone? [I originally posed this question way back in 2006, and I haven’t heard anyone yet volunteer any additional information]

Among the better features of the Chicago Tribune Comic Book was Captain Storm. In a line-up designed to appeal to comic-book crazy kids, and to compete with The Spirit pull-out section available from the Chicago Sun, there was a lot of second-rate stuff  in the ‘comic book’, but Captain Storm was a cut above. The strip barely got off the ground, though, running just five months from November 13 1940 to March 2 1941

The strip was nominally about the skipper of a freighter ship, but the heroic Captain Storm seemed to spend more time everywhere else, because the first story arc has him losing his ship to thieves.The writing, the art and the plot are all top-notch work and I don’t doubt that they were reader favorites.

The strip is by Ed Moore, whose work resembles another Chicago-trained cartoonist, Dick Moores, enough that I get the two confused. Ed Moore did some assisting work on Dan Dunn and Don Winslow prior to creating Captain Storm, the only newspaper strip on which he got credit. However, Moore was also working at the same time in comic books. Perhaps he found that to be more lucrative or less demanding than Captain Storm, and that explains its short run. Moore worked in comic books and assisted on newspaper strips into the 1960s, then switched to advertising work, according to Ron Goulart in The Great Comic Book Artists, Volume 2.

Hy Score was one of the new features introduced in the Chicago Tribune Comic Book. I guess the comic book was somewhat of a success because it remained a part of the Tribune for three years. The gimmick had to be what kept it alive, because the contents tended to be less than inspired. Case in point is Hy Score, which was added to the comic book on June 30 1940. At first this feature was truly awful, with ridiculously text-heavy narratives and exposition laden plots.

The strip was also at times titled Secret Agent Hy Score, Adventures of Hy Score and Hy Score in Arabia. An unmemorable one-panel ‘topper’ called Hy Score Comic Book Quiz was added in October 1942. 

Mr. Score was an FBI agent who got into all the familiar scrapes of the genre. He solved murder mysteries, foiled espionage, and generally brought all sorts of miscreants to justice. The strip was penned by someone signing themselves as George Merkle, of whom I know nothing. Merkle’s stories improved over the life of the strip, as he slowly but surely pared away at the paragraphs long captions. His art was alright, except that he had a real blind spot (heh) about drawing eyes. Most of his characters run around with eyes firmly shut, and when he did attempt to draw them open you can understand why. The strip looked best when the cartoonist was swiping from Alex Raymond, which he did often. According to Jerry Bails, there never really was a George Merkle — he says that this is a pseudonym of George Marko, a fellow who worked in comic books.

Hy Score managed to outlast the Tribune comic book, albeit for just half a year. The strip was put to bed on 10/31/43.

The last thing you’d expect to find in a comic strip about cavemen is tenderness and tranquility. Yet Frank Engli’s Rocky the Stone-Age Kid is just about the gentlest comic strip imaginable. I don’t mean saccharine sweet either; I just mean that everyone treats everyone else with genuine love and respect. There’s no violence to speak of — certainly no club to the noggin slapstick — and about the only characters that get hurt are the fish that Rocky’s family catches on their frequent fishing trips. Peacefulness isn’t easy to do in the context of a funny comic strip, and, to be frank, Rocky isn’t all that funny. It is, however, heartwarming, pleasant and an enjoyable read.

Frank Engli, better known to comic strip fans as Milton Caniff’s long-time letterer, was at the helm for this strip, which ran in the Chicago Tribune‘s Comic Book section starting August 25 1940. It ran there until the Comic Book section folded, and then graduated to the main Tribune comic section, ending October 31 1943.

Kit Cabot may not have had the makings of the next blockbuster hit, but I’m sure intrigued and wish it had stuck around awhile. I ask you — how can you go wrong by making your lovely heroine an artist who undresses on panel at least once per week?

Kit Cabot was added to the Chicago Tribune Comic Book section on June 8 1941. At first it might have seemed an odd choice, because the strip has a lot in common with Brenda Starr, with which it shared space in the Comic Book section. Both were strong female ‘working girl’ characters, and both always seems to have a moment to peel down to their skivvies in the middle of the action. However, after three weeks sharing space, Brenda was graduated from the Comic Book section into the regular comic section, making it obvious that Kit Cabot had been intended as her replacement here in the Comic Book when the elder strip went on to bigger and better things.

However, Kit Cabot didn’t last long. The strip was dropped from the Comic Book on April 26 1942, less than a year later, when the section was downsized from 24 to 16 pages. Ah, all the undergarments we never got to see…

The strip was penned by someone named Gene McNerney, a name that means little to me. All I know is that he (?) also tried syndicating a couple features through the elusive Watkins Syndicate, neither of which have ever turned up in my research.

A quasi-historical imagining of Daniel Boone’s adventures in founding the town of Boonesboro/Boonesborogh/Fort Boone, this feature was by C.C. (Carlisle) Cooper. Although the strip is quite good and consistently entertaining, it suffers from excellent but cartoony art that just isn’t appropriate for a blood-and-thunder adventure strip like this.  There’s also the matter of the name, which it seems to me implies that the strip is actually told from the viewpoint of Boone’s adversaries. Although that concept might have some merit for being out of the ordinary, in fact the badly worded name was meant to indicate that the strip was about those who fought alongside Boone.

In the early strips, Boone’s partners are a couple of hunters cum sidekicks named Bear-Dog and Pierre Perue. Later, the focus shifts to Boone’s young friend Catfish (seen in the samples above), who periodically elbows Boone out of his own strip. It’s all good fun, with just enough historical accuracy to keep the historians from taking up arms against the cartoonist.


Fighting with Daniel Boone debuted on October 27 1940, and ran about a month past the end of the Comic Book itself, ending on May 9 1943. As far as I know, this is Cooper’s only newspaper cartooning credit, and that’s a shame as it seems to me he would have been really good handling the art on a humor strip.