Ephemeral Assays: The Funnies (Part 1)

Brief mention was made in the Summer 2006 issue of my Mother of All Paper Hordes house call in a piece on pulp magazines. This family saved everything in a dry basement, and I couldn’t get it all home in one trip. As the distance was far and I wouldn’t be back for some weeks, and things you buy and leave often sprout legs, I decided to take away the pulps, vintage magazines and other paper, and to retrieve fifty or so boxes of old Sunday newspaper comic sections on the return journey. I calculated they had the least value and interest, incorrectly.

Once safely home where I could spread them open on my outside work tables (more room, good light, better ventilation, Mother Nature), I quickly realized how wonderful and ephemeral they were. Here were the color comic sections of great New York Sunday papers, syndicated locally all over the country, like the Brooklyn Daily Times, the Sunday News, the Long Island Sunday Press, the New York Journal American (which printed color comics on Saturday and a huge section called the Comic Weekly on Sunday), the Sunday Mirror, and several others, many in duplicate. They were all nicely packed flat in old cardboard boxes with flaps on the top, which was the key to their survival, suppleness, and strong color (with occasional edgewear and some age toning, but not much different from when they were printed). The dates ran from around 1928 into the late ‘50s.

My only complaint with their stewardship is that a good number of the sections were disassembled for some reason. I put as many of these back together as I could, taking great care not to arrange any false marriages. This often involved looking for the small date in one of the strip panels, making piles by date, and reassembling them that way, which was trickier with the early sections that did not use page numbering. After several months of this I counted myself as perhaps the leading expert in the country on collating mid-1900s newspaper comic sections.

The next challenge was marketing. I soon found out how well they did on eBay, but there were time-consuming steps involved. It pays to list every single strip, as you never know what people collect. One guy insisted on the subtitle for each Hawkshaw the Detective (e.g., “The Episode of the Pickle Barge”), though I gained the impression he was more of a bibliographer than a buyer. Some of the very early sections were only four or six pages long, but as time went on they expanded to 12 to 24 pages, and up to 36 in this batch if I recall. A rare Dr. Seuss full page from a short-lived 1935 strip called Hejji went for $315 (some guy asked me if he could Buy It Now for $25 in time for a birthday present for his wife—ha!), and Krazy Kat often realized over $100 per, but queries came in about even the most obscure titles, so all were listed. You’d think templates for certain newspaper eras would help, but most of them changed the strip order from one issue to the next by design or necessity, and it became easier just to retype than to do all that cutting and pasting. Some examples follow.

LONG ISLAND DAILY PRESS NEWSPAPER COMIC SECTION (4/28/1928).~ Complete four page section, comic strips include Laura; Felix; The Nebbs; Nicodemus O'Malley; Just Kids; Dizzy's Eating House; and Freddie the Sheik.

SUNDAY NEWS NEWSPAPER COMIC SECTION (1/25/1931).~ Complete eight page section, comic strips include The Gumps; Old Doc Yak; Harold Teen; The Absent-Minded Professor; Little Orphan Annie; Private Life of a Cat; Moon Mullins; Kitty Higgins; Winnie Winkle; Looie Blooie; Little Folks; Baby Sister; Smitty; Herby; Gasoline Alley; and That Phony Nickel.

NEW YORK JOURNAL AMERICAN COMIC WEEKLY NEWSPAPER COMIC SECTION (1/14/1934).~ Complete 16 page section, comic strips include Rosie's Beau; Bringing Up Father; Jungle Jim; Flash Gordon (Flash and Dale catch a break when their ship crash lands into an Earth-threatening comet at full speed, they survive the impact, and they don't even need oxygen once outside); The Van Swaggers; Tillie the Toiler; The Family Foursome; Blondie; Sentinel Louie; The Ambassador; Always Belittlin'; Skippy; Bunker Bugs; Way Out West; Mister Jack; Little Jimmy; Bill by Rube Goldberg; Boob McNutt; The Kid Sister; Tim Tyler's Luck; Bunky; Barney Google; Laura; Felix and Felix Funny Film Strips; Dinglehoofer Und His Dog Adolph; and The Katzenjammer Kids; advertisements include full page Ralston Tom Mix Lucky Spinner offer; etc.

NEW YORK EVENING JOURNAL NEWSPAPER COMIC SECTION (8/17/1935).~ Complete 16 page section, comic strips include Popeye in Thimble Theatre; Buck Rogers; Just Kids; And So They Were Never Married; Polly and Her Pals; Brick Bradford; Mandrake the Magician; Donnie; The Pussycat Princess; The Kewpies by Rose O'Neil; When Mother Was a Girl; Krazy Kat; Ted Towers Animal Master; Tippie; Snorky; Pete the Tramp; and Mortimer; advertisements.

SUNDAY NEWS NEWSPAPER COMIC SECTION (11/26/1939).~ Complete 20 page section, comic strips include Dick Tracy; The Gumps; Moon Mullins; Kitty Higgins; Smokey Stover; Pepsi and Peta; Spooky; Harold Teen; Tiny Tim; Smilin' Jack; Terry and the Pirates; The Ripples; Winnie Winkle; Looie; Sweeney & Son; Smitty; Herby; Little Joe; Gasoline Alley; and Little Orphan Annie; ads include Lionel; Tom Mix Parachute Plane; Erector Set; etc.

SUNDAY NEWS NEWSPAPER COMIC SECTION (4/25/1943).~ Complete 16 page section, comic strips include Dick Tracy; Little Orphan Annie; The Gumps; Harold Teen; Smilin' Jack; The Ripples; Terry and the Pirates; Sweeney & Son; Smitty; Herby; Smokey Stover; Tiny Tim; Winnie Winkle; Gasoline Alley; The Teenie Weenies; Moon Mullins; and Kitty Higgins; ads include Camel WW II Alligator armored vehicle; Cheerios Mischa Auer; Dumb Dora for Ralston; Coca-Cola Ask the Paratrooper; etc.

NEW YORK JOURNAL AMERICAN NEWSPAPER COMIC SECTION (1/27/1945).~ Complete 16 page section, comic strips include Popeye in Thimble Theatre; Johnny Hazard; Brick Bradford; Pete the Tramp; Just Kids; Teena; Polly and Her Pals; Mandrake the Magician; King of the Royal Mounted; Elmer; Buck Rogers; Tarzan; Walt Disney Mickey Mouse; Sergeant Pat of Radio Control; Etta Kett; Rocky Mason; and The Pussycat Princess; advertisements.

NEW YORK JOURNAL AMERICAN COMIC WEEKLY NEWSPAPER COMIC SECTION (1/11/1948).~ Complete 16 page section, comic strips include Snookums; Bringing Up Father; Flash Gordon (Flash and Dale escape Kang's clutches in the unused tunnels of the undersea mongonium atom mines, which are lovely that time of year); Dick's Adventures; Blondie; Prince Valiant; Uncle Remus; Little Annie Rooney; Tim Tyler's Luck; Seein' Stars; Room and Board; Dinglehoofer Und His Dog; Tillie the Toiler with great doll cut-out; Right Around Home; Tippie; Buz Sawyer; Jungle Jim; Little Iodine; The Little King; Donald Duck; Barney Google and Snuffy Smith; The Lone Ranger; Ripley's Believe It Or Not!; The Phantom; and The Katzenjammer Kids; advertisements include Wild Root Adventures of Sam Spade; Bub bubble gum.

SUNDAY MIRROR NEWSPAPER COMIC SECTION (9/26/1954).~ Complete 16 page section, comic strips include Li'l Abner; Steve Canyon; Mickey Finn; Kerry Drake; Long Sam; The Flop Family; Bobby Sox; Rex Morgan, M.D.; Louie; Priscilla's Pop; Captain Easy; Henry; Freckles and His Friends; Hector; Boots; There Oughta Be a Law; King Aroo; Dixie Dugan; Our Boarding House; Out Our Way; and Joe Palooka; ads include a great full page Superman Playsuit; Wheaties Bob Lemon of the Cleveland Indians; etc.

The other key was taking good, uncropped photos of the front page, several sample strips, and any special advertising, the most notable of which are cereal premiums and celebrity endorsements, depending on the celebrity. Anything three dimensional or bigger than my scanner bed is shot outside in bright sunlight on a secluded green shuffleboard court in a large and beautiful town park. Clouds and wind cause some delays, so you look for those perfect 400-500 digitals days that should last right through the winter liked canned preserves. An Asian woman hits golf balls very far away but there’s always a slight chance she could brain me. I was shooting some cheesecake stuff once and before I knew it a girl’s track team ran right around me like a herd of wide-eyed does. I feared for the safety of an out-of-place Goth who went into a hot July day porta-potty on the horizon once for half an hour! Other than those minor alarms, it’s a safe and quiet place hard up against some nice woods. There was the time I was approached by an older fellow carrying dried milkweed who said he has wondered for years what I’m doing, and I ended up taking all his books in two different sessions.

Anyway, I really got into these things. These are funnies like I used to glance at a few decades ago, with the difference being that they are actually interesting and funny. Give me the slapstick everyman lunacy of early Louie over the angsty devotionals of late Dondi any day. They were big, bold, colorful, racy (especially before WW II), and often politically incorrect or subversive. Sexism on one page would be followed by female empowerment on the next (though racial equality did not fare so well). Some of these strips were dumb and offensive, of course (to each his/her own), but it’s surprising how many were truly touching or laugh out loud funny, and how many of the mediocre ones had their great panels and nice moments. They provided tips on living, they lampooned, and they helped people get through the week. You notice all kinds of interesting little things. An amazing number of strips used the words “little” or “tiny” or “teenie” in the title. What’s up with that? Dinglehoofer Und His Dog Adolph turned into Dinglehoofer Und His Dog when Hitler started misbehaving. Many had associated one line “toppers” like Maw Green that usually ran at the bottom of the full page Little Orphan Annie. Momentous events in the strips like births or marriages could employ an enormous single panel. For a while in the 1930s cut-outs were all the rage. The advertisements are hilarious by today’s standards, like all those athletes pimping for Camels, and they also serve as great documentation of our mid-1900s goals and insecurities. There must have been many rivalries between the artists. The early noirish Dick Tracy strips were really fantastic, and when he knocked The Gumps or Moon Mullins or whoever off the front page in the 1930s, I felt the same little thrill many around the country must have noted at the time. “Look, Marge….”

Many of these vintage comics are memorialized in fan websites. I got a kick out of the early debonair aviator Smilin’ Jack, for example, which ran in some form from 1933 to 1973. His creator, Zack Mosely, attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the Chicago Arts Institute, and was an accomplished pilot. The following excerpt comes from a site hosted by his daughter Jill.

“Smilin' Jack kept current with all the latest developments in aviation. He traveled all over the world getting ideas and information for all the different episodes that Jack was involved in, whether it be the Air Force, CAP, Navy, Army, Space Flight, Air and Sea Rescue, Undersea Research, World War II, Vietnam War, Sky Diving, Car Racing, Water Skiing and on and on!

“Some of the most remembered characters are: Fat Stuff, Downwind, Stretch, Joy, Jungle Jolly, Cindy, Dixie, The Head, The Claw, Limehouse, Teekeela, Tomaine, Tish the Dish and many others!

“Jack was in a number of different disguises over the years (Powder, Hammerhead, Nevada Jack to mention a few). He was first married to Joy, that is an exciting episode! She is lost at sea, rescued, becomes the Coral Princess on a south sea island, where she gives birth to their son, Jungle Jolly. Of course, Jack almost marries Mary, Dixie and Cindy but something always comes up to keep the ceremony from finishing! Later he marries Sable (taken after my mom) and they have a daughter, Jill (after me). Later on, she becomes a stunt flyer, not after me! I chose to marry young and was blessed with three wonderful children and now grandchildren. That would have been too boring for the strip!”

This site also reprints fan letters.

Dear Ms Mosley -

I just had to tell you that I am 72 years old, a pilot for many years and Zack Mosley has been, and still is, my hero. As a child on a farm in Maine, I was (and still am) obsessed with airplanes. Not having electricity or telephones, we were quite cut off from the world. However, we did buy the Sunday edition of the local newspaper which contained your father's famous cartoon. There was no one in my life as important as Smilin’ Jack and his creator. Zack's beautiful drawings of the airplanes of the thirties and forties were absolute treasures to me. I would cut them out and save them. I would study them by lamplight and imagine myself in the cockpit flying so high in those gorgeous chines. Your dad filled a great void in my otherwise drab farm life and his cartoon inspired me to become a pilot, in spite of almost insurmountable obstacles. I owe him a great debt. I repeat again, he is my hero.

And from another letter.

Why did I like Smilin’ Jack so much? Well because it had very good story lines, gorgeous gals, wonderful humor and PLENTY of action!!! Jack was a far cry from the much dreaded politically correct heroes that we see everywhere nowadays. There was no “message” in Smilin’ Jack. He was a man of action. Whether it was delivering a good knockout punch to the bad guys, or turning a spoiled heiress over his knee for a well-deserved lesson in manners (if a hero did that today you could just imagine all the letters that the newspaper editors would get), yes indeed Smilin’ Jack was certainly a man of action!!!

There is also a funny and informative Wikipedia entry on Smilin’ Jack, as there is on most of these strips, and Mosley wrote an illustrated autobiography entitled Brave Coward Zack.

These comic strips were so captivating because they had an entire third, half, or full page to develop plot lines, and because the artwork and coloring were often spectacular. Comics helped sell the paper, so competition was fierce. This was high entertainment before radio (at first), television and countless other modern entertainments and distractions that led to their general demise. The industry had its roots in political cartoons and stood on the shoulders of Richard Outcault’s late nineteenth-century The Yellow Kid and all his imitators and descendants, and the first comic books were actually compilations of comic strips. In the beginning they were in the “gag a day” format, but thrilling adventure serials and soap operas helped ensure reader interest from one issue to the next. Favorite comic strip artists passed away, and big cities went with a smaller tabloid format that could be read on the subway, but the real killer was dwindling page space, beginning with WW II rationing, followed by changing tastes and attendant cuts. Prince Valiant was the last full page holdout, falling to the editorial sword in 1971.

To me, modern comic strips are highly anemic. I guess certain ones are beloved, but I just can’t get into them with the exception of a few political strips, and occasional oddities like The Far Side (1980-1995). Bill Watterson’s frustration with the modern constraints placed upon his Calvin and Hobbes (1985-1995) is a good case study in the degradation of the art form. In my genuinely humorless weekday newspaper comic page today, for example, the strips get two pages, but they are shared with Dear Abby, a horoscope, crossword and Sudoku puzzles, etc. It is very hard to be funny or touching in two to four small panels. The only relics I see from among hundreds that once roamed freely in syndication are Beetle Bailey and Blondie (they are both using computers on the day I looked even though the humor is mired in the 1950s). Last Sunday’s color section was equally unimpressive. It brings to mind the new adage, “Where have all the interesting people gone, and why have they been replaced by Paris Hilton?” This is not to say that the old ones were uniformly great, or that dumb humor or old fashioned serials are necessarily better than today’s more sensitive and ironic content which you can go to the newspaper’s comics blog and make sensitive and ironic comments about, but something’s missing. Maybe it’s the little history lesson you get from old stuff, or maybe there is something more social and romantic about gathering around the radio or a comic section like people used to do than there is about iPods and cell phones and other modern modes of detachment. I think it’s largely about the space and the overload though. They used to have acres of space on which to paint their canvasses, and mental stimulation was in shorter supply than it is now.

Some of the vintage strips like Dick Tracy have been preserved in scaled down reprints of their runs, and a few are even full sized (Tarzan, Little Nemo, and Prince Valiant), but how much of this “sequential art” has been lost forever? Newspapers are hard to store and difficult to protect, which is why they have earned the special scorn of most libraries, even though they are the most logical repository for something so ephemeral. That institutional disdain goes double for comic sections, even though they reflect the times as much as the articles and the advertisements do. For further reading on this topic, Nicholson Baker—novelist extraordinaire and patron saint of library periodical and newsprint preservation—turned a personal rescue mission (the British Library was about to deaccession and break up one of the last remaining sets of the greatest American newspaper ever published) into a splendid large format book entitled New York World: Graphic Art on Sunday (1898-1911) (NY: Bulfinch Press, 2005).

The other logical place newspaper comic strips will reside is with collectors, of course, and the hope is that these experts will place them in a good repository at the end, rather than scattering them to the winds again. The one regret I had during a couple years of selling these sections, besides letting go of them to begin with—though I kept some good samples and I have thousand of digitals—is that at least one of the buyers was a breaker, slicing them up into individual strips. It used to pay to massacre magazines for advertising tearsheets this way, but those prices have plummeted, and hopefully the same thing will happen with newspaper comic strips, as most discerning collectors would rather have them in context than in taxidermy.

In a world with decent priorities, all of these old newspaper comic sections would be viewable online for free, and full sets of originals would be safely housed in multiple locations.

I began to learn which bidders liked which strips, and I accommodated them by combining shipping, sending (adding, actually) extra pics upon request, and providing brief summaries (the Flash Gordon collectors were very serious, for example, and would ask questions about the content like is there a space gun in the strip). Toward the end I thanked all of the bidders and issued a brief homage to the swell items we were trading in. “Let us take a moment to appreciate the wonderful artwork of these vintage comic strips; the mighty newspapers that published them; the historic immediacy of popular art in a hurry; the glow of youth and the corny freshness of the era; the hopes and dreams of the 1930s; the patriotic themes as the war drew to a close and we knew we would be safe and soon home; the euphoria and materialism of the 1950s; and the young man who saved all this stuff beginning with 1920s pulps and who watched me from his sick bed as I carried it all up and out; his simple but effective preservation efforts; and his wife for not making him throw it all away over the decades. Well done all!”

I somehow limited myself to thirty examples of comic strips below. The next time we will feature close-up panels, and the time after that examples of premiums and special offers from the pages of these great smelling good selling fantastical newsprint survivors.

Shawn Purcell operates Balopticon Books & Ephemera and can be contacted at http://www.balopticon.com.