Comic Strip History

I have a batch of 1983 United Feature weekly syndicate books, and I found in one issue two weeks worth of a panel cartoon called Misery Is… by Scrawls (Sam C. Rawls). My run of the books is by no means perfect, but I cannot find this feature anywhere but in the May 16 edition, and I have other weekly books from April, May and June, though not all of them. 

In the May 16th book there are two weeks worth of the feaure, slated for publication in papers of May 16-21 and May 23-28.

This is obviously a very short run feature, and I have no printed examples in my collection. I cannot find any mentions of it in E&P or in interviews/articles on Sam Rawls. I checked the online archives of the Atlanta Constitution, where Rawls was the editorial cartoonist at this time, and a spot check did not find them running the feature. 

So this one is a misery, er, I mean a mystery. If anyone has a printed example, or knows of a run of it somewhere, don’t keep it to yourself. Let’s get this one into the books as a feature that made it into papers.

Here’s a real headscratcher from my collection. I have a bound portfolio of these strips, titled Sonny Boy and Troubles. Each full-page colour strip is copyright by Alltone Company and dated 1924. The art, however, is uncredited. The binding, which offers no additional information, is what I might call semi-professional. Probably not something done on someone’s kitchen table, but also probably not destined for retail sale, either. The pattern-decorated boards are bound with a gauze strip which covers the stapled spine. The book is 12.25″ wide and 16.5″ tall. Each of the 12 leaves is printed on one side only. 

The Alltone Company that copyrighted these strips may be one I tracked down from this era in Milwaukee Wisconsin. They were some sort of printing concern. 

The simple stories vary between fantasies like above and the more mundane. They are all told in rhyme. The writing is good enough for what it is and the stories are imaginative given that they are just eight-panels with no continuity from page to page. The art is sometimes a bit stiff, but the layouts and especially the sumptuous colouring make each page a real beauty. 

I can find only one reference on the web to this material: three eBay listings by a single seller offering individual pages of strips that appear in my book. The seller claims that their pages were associated somehow with a grocery store in Minnesota (found there by the seller I assume?). The seller says his are on “cardboard poster” stock. Mine are on slick coated paper. His sheets are a bit taller and skinnier than mine. The skinnier width might be because the stapled binding has been cut away, but the photos clearly show that his pages have a taller top margin than mine. 

It seems a shame that no one took credit for these impressive pages, and of course, the mystery of how and why they came to be is tugging at me. But I’m all out of avenues to pursue. Anyone have any ideas?

Here’s a strip that seems like it ought not to be mysterious. The March of Science was apparently a weekly strip offering of Science Service, with my only examples (above) from mid-1937. Now I will grant you that Science Service isn’t exactly King Features, but they were a well-respected smaller syndicate that specialized in distributing science news and offering columns and inforgraphics on scientific subjects. Yes, a strip is a little off their regular radar, but it seems like a natural for them, and with their other material pretty popular, you’d think this strip would have attracted some clients.

However, beyond the two examples above, found in a small Virginia weekly paper, I cannot find any other evidence that this feature ever existed. Nothing on newspapers.com, nothing in E&P. Technically I can list a feature with as little as two known examples, but I would like to hold out for better data on this feature that SEEMS like it ought to be slightly less rare than teeth on a chicken. 

If you have any examples of this feature in your collection, or can run some online searches at other archives, please let me know if you find anything!

Winter is coming on and that means outside projects finally get put on hold and the Stripper gets to spend a lot more time in his archives. And what work awaits him there? Giant teetering piles that must be put under control, itemized, categorized, inventoried and put to bed in their rightful places. And what that means is that he turns up mysteries at a fair clip. 

Today that mystery goes beyond a comic strip, it started out as a whole doggone newspaper. What I have here is the May 6 1933 edition of the New York News. Nothing mysterious about that, you say? Nah, I didn’t say Daily News, just News. It’s a black newspaper published out of New York City, a city that already had a black “News” paper — the Amsterdam News. At first I wondered if the Amsterdam News experimented with this as a new name, but no dice there. Finally I found a slight mention of a paper called the New York News and Harlem Home Journal on WorldCat, but the listing offers no information except that it was published in the 1910s-30s. Jumping to my books on black journalism history, I find that not one of them mentions this paper, at least as far as the indexes are concerned. Jumping over to the Library of Congress listings, I learned that there are only two reels of microfilm for the paper known to exist, partial years from 1921 and 1927. Now that’s what I call a newspaper that flew beneath the radar. 

So here’s the front page headline area and the indicia, plus a snippet of a tirade against other black papers below the indicia. 

 Okay, so the newspaper is no longer a complete mystery, just very, very obscure. Why do we care? Naturally I wouldn’t be beating my typing fingers to the bone here if there weren’t comics somewhere in this story. And yes there are, in fact two of them. This issue include strips of Kampus Keeds and Whatta Life, both by a Lucille Fitzgerald. Being 1933, and assuming that Lucille was African-American, she would be the very first known published black female cartoonist, pre-dating Jackie Ormes by four years.

The only problem for me is that I’d love to put these strips in my database, but with only one sample of each I have no proof they were series. I know this is a real longshot, but any help out there??

Although the headline says this is a mystery strip post, this one’s not so much mysterious as just so exceedingly rare I don’t really know what to do with it.We’re going to cover the whole range of a syndicate’s offerings today, the comics of Argonaut Entertainment.

Never heard of them? Well, you’re not alone. I’d never heard of them until Charles Brubaker stumbled upon a whole page’s worth of unfamiliar comics in a 1994 issue of the Gaffney (SC) Ledger. Here’s a sample:

The lineup consists of Bots by Ron Matzov, Dagney by Kelly Kennedy, Franky and Ralph by Moira Manion, Grey Matter by London and Chianca, Hobnob Inn by Paige Anderson, Time Trek by Jack Warren, Pipo and Company by Tomé, Amber Waves by Dave T. Phipps, Off The Top by Carl Jung and David Evans, Everything’s O.K. by O.K. Elkins, Clancy by John Brundige, Carlos by Roy Delgado, Lunatic Fringe by Wardo, and Leadbellies by Thomas Burton. 

The only feature with which I was familiar was Phipps’ Amber Waves, which was later syndicated by King Features Weekly Service, and continues to this day as far as I know.

This lineup stayed consist through the entire run in the Gaffney Ledger. And here’s where we get to the problem. The Gaffney Ledger, a thrice weekly paper, ran the page from November 6 to December 4 in their ‘experimental’ Sunday edition (the longstanding Monday edition moved to Sunday and added a few extra features) — a total of five times. The paper announced after this five week trial run that the Sunday paper had not been the big seller they were hoping for, so they moved it back to Monday and dropped the extra features, including the page from Argonaut Entertainment. 

So not only did I have a mysterious page of ultra-obscure comics, but with a five week run I had to ask myself whether it qualified for listing in my Stripper’s Guide database. After all, I have said in the past that features that appear only in ‘test runs’ don’t qualify — they have to be used as regular features. They might have really, really short runs, but they can’t just be mere samples. 

So, more digging, and I eventually came up with another run, this time in the Charlottesville (VA) Observer. This was a year earlier, and lasted … hmm, what a coincidence … five weekly appearances. The page ran from August 5 to September 2. The line-up changed slightly each week. Here’s a sample page:

The complete line-up over the five week period was as follows (number in parentheses is a count of the times the feature appeared): Cuff & Rubin by Curt Brandao (5), The Brass & Fern by Steve Riehm (5), Dagney by Kelly Kennedy (2), Franky & Ralph by Moira Manion (5), The Purple Ort by Dan Fikes (4), The Art of Living by Valerie Costantino (2), Mum’s The Word by Dan Rosandich (2), Business As Usual by Steve Brackett (2), Carlos by Roy Delgado (3), Leadbellies by Thomas Burton (3), At A Glance by Michael J. Saporito (3), Everything’s O.K. by O.K. Elkins (4), and The Real World by Steve McNeon (1). 

Now with a second sample run in hand, we at least also had a syndicate name and the headline “Tomorrow’s Comics.” That was the clue that helped answer the big question, “Just what the heck is this stuff?”

It turns out that Argonaut Entertainment was primarily a creator of comic book inserts for college newspapers. The name of the comic book? Tomorrow’s Comics, of course. There are apparently seven known issues, and you can see one of them here appearing in the Oregon Daily Emerald, and here in the Miami Hurricane. The comic books offered readers short runs of a big batch of daily style strips by what they billed as some of the brightest young undiscovered cartoonists. It was actually not a bad idea, and the publisher obviously had standards, because most of the strips are gifted amateur to semi-professional level. Learning the name of the publisher also led me to this advertisement in Editor & Publisher, from July 28 1990:

And I found that the publisher’s Tomorrow Comics page was offered in the E&P listings from 1991-94. Whether they had any takers in mainstream papers beyond test runs is, of course, the $64 question. So please Please PLEASE if you know of a paper that ran the page on a regular ongoing basis, contact me so that all these features can find a permanent place in the Stripper’s Guide database. Or, if you know anything about the syndication, or are one of the creators, I’d love to hear your story.

I found a few other interesting tidbits while trolling the interwebs looking for more information. First one concerns  the comic strip Franky and Ralph, by Moira Manion. The strip was about a fox and snake that end up living in encroaching suburbia when their native habitat disappears. This, of course, is the central thesis of Over The Hedge as well, and in 2006 there was a minor flap about whether Fry and Lewis might have been inspired by this earlier feature; the story was covered by Minnesota Public Radio.

Besides Amber Waves, I found one other feature that lived beyond Tomorrow’s Comics. Hobnob Inn, in addition to becoming an early webcomic, ran weekly in the Virginia Gazette from June 28 1997 to October 10 1998. 

Thanks for much of this information from Charles Brubaker!

 I stalled out on this series with letter ‘R’ in 2013, but here are the ‘S’es and all it took was slightly less than a decade! 

Okay, here’s how this works, for those who haven’t been keeping up with the whirlwind pace. The Editor & Publisher Syndicate Yearbooks, published from 1924 until 2010, listed theoretically all the available syndicated features, including comic strips and panels. Those listings often included features that I’ve never been able to locate. Some of them, no doubt, never appeared anywhere and were just wishful thinking. But if you look at previous letters, and the later exclamations of discovery from myself and others, some of these features can and do let themselves be found by the most intrepid researchers.

Therefore your task, if you wish to accept it, is to go forth on a hard target search of every research library, online digital newspaper archive and the material in your own collection, and report back to Stripper’s Guide Central with your discoveries. 

A SOUTHERN CARTOONIST

Henry Muheim, cartoonist for the Florida Metropolis of Jacksonville, has been attracting considerable attention in the South through his bright and timely cartoons.

After graduation from the Providence School of Design, Mr. Muheim did cartoons under Sid Greene of the New York Telegram, but then in charge of the art department of the Providence (R.I.) Telegram. For the past eight years Muheim has been furnishing the cartoons for the Metropolis on national and local topics. These have been so good that they have been reproduced by the London Sketch, among other papers. His comic strip, “Alligator Joe” is known throughout Florida.

In Editor & Publisher, January 14 1911 (thanks to Alex Jay for digging this up), we get another glimpse of Mr. Muheim’s activities:

 “Alligator Joe” is a strip I cannot locate. Same with “Pete the Piker”, though it is less clear that it was a strip — character might have just been a sports cartoon mascot.

The Florida Metropolis is unavailable on microfilm, no doubt because in its day it was best known mainly as a real estate developers’ journal, and I don’t mean that in a good way — I mean folks selling swampland to gullible tourists. You’d think that a strip that was ‘known throughout Florida’ would show up in an occasional mention elsewhere, but my searches have turned up nothing. The title “Alligator Joe” itself seems unlikely — there was a pretty famous guy in Florida who exhibited and sometimes even wrestled alligators known by this name. Unless the strip was actually about that guy?

Anyway, Muheim was at least definitely at the Metropolis. Here’s a rare surviving cover page by him. Nice attractive style. Ironically, the cover of a special real estate section:

So, can anyone offer proof of the existence of “Alligator Joe” or “Pete the Piker”?

[the following article ran in the April 8 1961 issue of Editor & Publisher. The mystery in this case is not about the existence of the feature; Small Fry Diary was successfully syndicated for many many years. However, in my experience the feature never featured a panel cartoon by Reamer Keller; it was always a little text feature with a teeny tiny never-changing masthead. Granted, the masthead may well have been supplied by Keller, but this article certainly makes it sound like Small-Fry Diary featured a new cartoon each day. I’ve been able to verify that two of the papers mentioned in the article did in fact not run the feature with a cartoon panel. Can anyone solve the mystery?]

‘Small Fry’ Writes ‘Diary’

After 20 years of gag writing for cartoonists, N. E. Coan (1083 W. 37th St., Norfolk 8, Va.) is now syndicating his own feature, “Small Fry Diary.”

The panel drawing has appeared on the front page of the Norfolk (Va.) Ledger Dispatch for the last eight years and in the comics section of the Salisbury (Md.) Times for the last seven years. Since the first of the year, it has been appearing in the Bridgeport (Conn.) Post.

The short, one-column panel is drawn by a cartoonist friend of Mr. Coan, Reamer Keller, for whom Mr. Coan, an accountant, has written for 20 years. Mats of the panels are sent to papers with four weeks of gags in diary form.

“Small Fry” is about a precocious lad who writes a daring diary that reveals the provocative and humorous incidents engaging him, his mother, dad, brother, sister, uncle and aunt in gales of spontaneous laughter.

Samples of “Diary” copy: “Monday: ‘Every time my girl and I kiss, sparks fly. It’s not that we’re so romantic. We both wear dental braces.’ ” “Thursday: ‘Mother puts up the best jam, but she puts it up so high. I can’t reach it.’” “Saturday: ‘Tonight was a wonderful evening. The moon was out and so
was her parents.”