Stripper's Guide

Hobo and tramp comics were quite popular in the early years of the last century, then went through a fallow period. But they came in for a popular revival in the 1930s for the obvious reason that the Great Depression made them a newly common facet of American life. Perhaps the most successful of this new wave was Pete the Tramp, from the talented pen of C.D. Russell. Russell had done newspaper and magazine work in the 1920s, and found that one of his favorite subjects were the tramps he saw around New York City. He eventually became known for his tramp cartoons, and as the Great Depression really got rolling, King Features decided that they wanted him to produce tramp cartoons for them.

King Features signed him to a contract to produce the Sunday strip Pete the Tramp, which debuted on January 10 1932*.  Along with the new strip came a topper about a terrir dog called Bumps who lives with a nameless family. There was nothing particularly original about the strip, but it was affable enough, treading the well-worn avenues of dog humour. 

In fact about the only interesting thing to say about it, from a historical point of view, is that the strip had its original name taken away from it around June 1932, and from then on it was known as Pete's Pup, even though the dog remained with his same unnamed owners -- as far as I know he never met Pete the Tramp in his strip. I long thought this name change had something to do with another King strip wanting the title -- Harry O'Neill's topper strip to Broncho Bill was also titled Bumps. But when I finally got off my duff to actually check on that, I realized that the O'Neill Bumps strip didn't start until over a year after Russell renamed his topper. So never mind. 

Pete's Pup ran atop Pete the Tramp until February 24 1935**, when it was replaced by The Topper Twins. 

One postscript to this story for you tearsheet collectors out there. If you are impressed by the gorgeous colour work on the samples above, thank the New York Mirror. When the Mirror started running Sunday colour comics they opted to produce them on a rotogravure press. These presses and the slick paper they used were capable of producing far more nuanced colours than regular four-colour presses, and the Mirror recoloured their Sunday strips to take advantage of the high-end colour capabilities. Sadly the roto press funnies didn't last long (ending in early 1933 I think?)

* Source: New York Mirror, via Jeffrey Lindenblatt.

** Source: Chicago Record-Herald.

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

As a kid I was absolutely fascinated with dinosaurs, reading everything I could get my hands on about them. I recall elementary school teachers being gobsmacked when I could properly pronounce their names and reel off all sorts of information about them when other kids were barely past sounding out the adventures of Dick and Jane.  

I guess I was far from the only one, because evidently lots of kids loved Alley Oop, even in its pre-time travel days. Of course there were actually no cavemen in the time of the dinosaurs, but we kids in the know were willing to look the other way about that inconvenient fact, just so long as we could fantasize ourselves meeting up with these amazing monstrosities of prehistory. 

V.T. Hamlin must have understood that fascination, because some of his Sunday toppers were on the subject of real dinosaurs. Dinny's Family Album, the first and longest-running of Alley Oop's toppers, was a panel devoted to actual information about actual dinosaurs, and boy oh boy, I would have eaten it up if I was growing up in the 1930s. 

Dinny's Family Album debuted along with the new Alley Oop Sunday page on September 9 1934*, and ran until February 7 1937**. It was replaced by more prosaic topper fare, perhaps because Hamlin had run out of interesting dinosaurs to cover after two and a half years. 

* Source: Buffalo Times.

* Source: NEA Archives.

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

Before World War II it seemed like the Chicago Tribune had the Midas touch when it came to introducing new Sunday comics features. After World War II things took a 180 degree turn, and everything they tried fell flat on its face. Wild Rose, Ned Handy, Surgeon Stone, John West, Dawn O'Day ... the list of failures goes on and on. But there's no mystery in what had changed. Joseph Medill Patterson, the guiding hand behind the greatest pre-war Tribune comic strips died in 1946, leaving the shepherding of new features to his hand-picked successor, Mollie Slott. Unfortunately she just didn't have his unerring grasp of what newspaper readers wanted to see on the comics page. Patterson seemed to know what readers wanted even if those readers themselves did not yet know what that was.

Slott had been heading the syndicate for almost eight years before she could finally tally a hit Sunday strip, and it was a very unlikely success, too. The Old Glory Story debuted in February 1953 in what was originally slated to be a limited run series. Artist Rick Fletcher and writer Athena Robbins were going to tell the story of the creation of the U.S. flag and that was to be the end of it. But features editors really took to the strip and by popular demand it was turned into an ongoing series encompassing the complete saga of the founding of the country. The strip then branched out far and wide to tell other dramatic stories from American history. 

The strip was originally formatted only for half pages but once its popularity grew the syndicate knew that a third page option was going to be needed to keep clients happy. On December 13 1953* the third tier of the half page strip was changed to a topper, Flag Facts and Fables. This allowed papers to drop the topper to get their third page option. 

The topper offered factoids about early US flags, state flags, and military flags. This was a naturally somewhat limited subject, and after about a year it was decided that The Old Glory Story would thenceforth be offered only in the third-page configuration. Flag Facts and Fables was last included on November 21 1954.

*Source: Topper running dates from Syracuse Post-Standard.

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

Comic strip fans like to talk about records, and the discussion of the longest lasting series is a favourite. We tend to ignore toppers when having these discussions, though, and of course there's a good reason for that -- without the main strip there's no need for a topper, so they are automatically disqualified from being the longest running series. 

But what is the longest running topper? this can be a tough question in and of itself, because the longest running series were still being produced into the 1960s and even 1970s, but they appeared in vanishingly few papers. Some, I'm convinced, were produced but never ended up being printed anywhere. 

By the 1960s the third page strip was the de facto standard, and that format almost never included a topper. By then you would generally only see a topper on some tab or half-page formats. So few papers used these formats, especially for strips that used toppers, which practically begged to be cut down, that tracking the toppers becomes next to impossible. In fact, for my research I've often had to base my end dates on original art, which is often the only place you're going to see toppers of these late years. 

The Sunday strip of Moon Mullins added its topper Kitty Higgins* around the same time as the other Chicago Tribune strips. The first strip, seen above, ran on December 14 1930. The strip was quite obviously an afterthought, with the gags (even the very first) being real mouldy oldies. No doubt production of this strip was by Frank Willard's assistant Ferd Johnson, and neither of these guys wasted too much brain juice on the feature. Although the first strip was done in a two-tier format, it would quickly settle down into a one-tier affair for its many years underneath the main strip (yes, they're still called toppers when they run at the bottom of the page). 

The Chicago Tribune-New York News Sunday strips hung onto their toppers much longer than the products of other syndicates. Most of their A-list strips kept doggedly including toppers into the early 1970s, even though they were used by maybe one out of a hundred papers that ran the main strip. For the longest time I thought Kitty Higgins ended in 1973, because that was the last year that it appeared in the Editor & Publisher Syndicate Directory. It wasn't until recent years that I saw the original art for the May 26 1974 strip, which included the topper and so upgraded the end date to sometime after that. 

Finally I found a newspaper online that actually ran Moon Mullins consistently as a tab in 1974, the Elizabethton Star. The last Kitty Higgins I can find is the release of September 1 1974. The September 8 issue, sadly, is missing the comics section, but on the 15th the topper is gone, and Kitty is co-starring in the main strip -- perhaps she had an appearance contract? 

What is either the final or penultimate Kitty Higgins is here, from digitized microfilm:

That gives Kitty Higgins a forty-four year run, a very impressive accomplishment, especially considering that no one, including the creators, really cared much about the strip for that whole time. Does Kitty get the crown as longest running topper? I can think of one or two toppers which might just possibly edge it out. What do you think?

* Technically that was not Moon Mullins' first topper, but that's a tale for another day.

Labels: Firsts and Lasts, Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

 Imagine you are a criminal in the 1910s or 20s. You are really in the catbird seat, because whenever you rob or kill someone, your successful escape from the area is practically assured by having a car, even if it's a lowly tin lizzy. In those days if a policeman discovered your crime even just moments after you left, you are practically uncatchable. The police officer can find a telephone or a call box to report the crime to headquarters, and he might even know what kind of car you drove, but then what? Yes, some cops did have cars, so they could chase you, but assuming they were out on patrol and not lolling around the stationhouse, there is no way for headquarters to tell them to look for your Model T with license plate thus-and-such. 

The reign of terror would finally be over for you, you rotten criminal, when in 1933 the Bayonne New Jersey police force was the first to use a two-way radio link-up between the station and their cars, which came to be known as radio cars. (Detroit had a one-way version in 1928, but it was not nearly as effective in crime-fighting as the two-way version). Now when you committed a crime, the word was out to the entire force of radio cars as soon as the crime was reported, and if they knew where you were, or knew what you were driving, well, your chances of getting away with it just went to bad odds. 

This incredible and impressive use of new technology came at a moment in American history when crime was rampant, so the two-way radio quickly became well-known and the roll of captured criminals a long one. Police "radio cars" were quickly incorporated into all popular media, including comic strips. 

Artist Charlie Schmidt and writer Edward Sullivan came up with a kid detective strip Pinkerton Junior, debuting on August 7 1933 in the Hearst-owned Boston Daily Record where both of them were editors. The strip was popular enough that news of it filtered through the Hearst organization, and it was decided that it might succeed in national syndication. However, what appealed to the syndicate were the radio car cops who co-starred with Pinky. The strip was renamed Radio Patrol when national syndication began on April 10 1934, and the new technology was now the acknowledged star of the show.

Radio Patrol is the very first adventure strip to star uniformed cops, says Ron Goulart, and I'm inclined to agree. There were lots of earlier cop strips, but they were generally played for laughs. When it came to adventure, the police detectives seemed to have cornered the early adventure strip market. So Schmidt and Sullivan had a unique tiger by the tail. Strangely, though, Radio Patrol never did all that well in syndication, appearing mostly in Hearst-owned papers. It wasn't for lack of quality, either, because both the art and storytelling were firmly in the grade of B to B-, no classic but eminently serviceable. 

Anyway, all this discussion was to get to the one and only topper that ever ran with the Sunday Radio Patrol, and it came and went so quickly you'd need a radio car to chase it down. The reason for the lack of toppers is that Radio Patrol was only available in half or tab format, eliminating the need for Hearst-required toppers on the full size. Tabs did often use toppers, but they were not an absolute requirement, and so Schmidt and Sullivan generally eschewed their use except for the short experiment that was Public Enemies Through the Ages. 

The criminal history strip Public Enemies Through The Ages began on May 26 1935*, about six months after the Sunday page itself had been added, and the first story reached back a thousand years to tell the tale of Hassan Sabbah, leader of the Order of Assassins. His reputation these days is pretty thoroughly scrubbed of wrongdoing (see the Wiki write-up), but the Radio Patrol version of his life story is of a bloodthirsty criminal mastermind. The story was well-told but I imagine of very limited interest to readers of Radio Patrol. Well, readers didn't have to put up with it for long. While still in the middle of the Hassan Sabbah bio the topper vanished, last appearing on July 6 1935**. The tabloid Sundays reverted to offering the whole page to the stars of the show, and no other topper was ever used again for the life of the Sunday page, which ended in 1946. 

* Source: San Francisco Examiner

** Source: Honolulu Advertiser

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 1 comments

January 10 1926 was an important date for Sunday comics. This was the Sunday that the first wave of Hearst Sunday features added toppers. Some lagged behind, but it was on this date that Boob McNutt, Toots and Casper, Tillie the Toiler, Bringing Up Father, Happy Hooligan and Katzenjammer Kids led the charge to a new era of Sunday comics. (Well, actually there is one much earlier outlier, but we'll save that special case for some other day.)

The Katzies first topper was Jungle Bed-Time Stories, which, like all the original Hearst toppers that started in early 1926, was soon replaced. But this one was fine while it lasted, offering up gags starring jungle animals. Harold Knerr pulled this one out of a very old bag of tricks. Way back in 1911, for the very obscure Publishers Press/C.J. Mar syndicate, he'd contributed one of their best-looking features, Zoo-Illogical Snapshots, which covered the same territory. 

Jungle Bed-Time Stories ran until May 2 1926, which happens to be the sample above. And speaking of the sample above, if anyone can decode the gag on this one I'm officially in Comics I Don't Understand territory. The next week Knerr produced a one-shot topper called Naughty! Naughty!, and then settled into the very long run of Dinglehoofer Und His Dog Adolph.

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 3 comments

Boots and her Buddies by Edgar Martin had debuted as a daily strip in February 1924 and NEA clients seemed to really take to it. It was essentially a flapper strip, which could have been strictly a me-too affair, but Martin put his own stamp on it by making Boots an interesting and multi-faceted character and populating the strip with an interesting troupe of second bananas, too. 

By 1926 Boots and her Buddies was firmly ensconced as an NEA A-lister and it could easily have merited a Sunday strip. But NEA at the time was uninterested in supplying more than a 4-page Sunday comic section*, considering that the majority of their clients didn't even publish Sunday editions. But there was a simple solution to that problem when toppers became the latest fashion; make Boots and her Buddies into a topper. For presumably no reason other than a roll of the dice, the Boots topper was paired with Our Boarding House, and the two were wed on September 12 1926**. 

The pairing lasted for five years until NEA finally started relenting on the four-page Sunday strip limit and expanded their Sunday offerings. The final Boots and her Buddies topper ran on October 18 1931. The new topper to Our Boarding House was The Nut Brothers, which was produced by Gene Ahern himself.

An interesting footnote is that the new Boots full page Sunday had already debuted over a month earlier, on September 6, so there were actually two Boots strips running simultaneously for that short period. And that explains the mystery of why the new Sunday page was initially titled Girls rather than Boots and her Buddies. It was to avoid confusion about the duplicate strips.

* The four Sundays were Out Our Way, Freckles and his Friends, Our Boarding House and Salesman Sam.

** All dates from NEA archives at Ohio State University.

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 1 comments

George McManus' juggernaut comic strip Bringing Up Father featured the topper strip Rosie's Beau for many years. But in 1944 after a run of nearly twenty years sitting above Jiggs and Maggie, I guess McManus decided it was time to try something fresh. 

The new strip, Snookums, might have been new as a topper, but it was anything but actually fresh. Snookums the spoiled baby had come onto the comic strip landscape nearly forty years earlier in 1906. 

One of McManus' earliest successes was a strip called The Newlyweds, which was about a pair of lovebirds who are so heady with romance that nothing else matters to them. After a few years of playing with that subject, McManus decided it was time for Mr. and Mrs. Newlywed to take their next step in life. He dropped the strip for a little over nine months, and then brought it back in late 1906 as The Newlyweds and their Baby. 

What had been a popular strip all of a sudden became a hit on the level of the biggest titles of the day. The Newlywed's new baby, Snookums, despite being butt-ugly, was of course the apple of his parents' eyes. Mr. and Mrs. Newlywed took adoration of their baby to off-the-chart levels, producing hilarious strips that made the baby into a pop culture phenomenon. 

This strip ran until 1916 and had the rare honour of running with two syndicates at the same time from 1912 to 1916. McManus had created the strip for the Pulitzer organization, but when he jumped ship for Hearst in 1912 the strip was considered too valuable to lose. Albert Carmichael continued the original version for Pulitzer, while McManus renamed it Their Only Child for the Hearst version. 

In 1944 you would have had to be about forty years old or more to remember the original series, and I have no doubt that the newly minted Snookums topper was a great hit of nostalgia for middle-aged and better newspaper readers. The new topper strip featured a modernized Mr. and Mrs. Newlywed and baby, but otherwise the gags pretty much followed the same pattern. 

Okay, so I told you all that so I could tell you this. In 1951 either McManus, his superb assistant Zeke Zekley (who probably did 90% of the work on the topper), or the syndicate decided that the strip needed a shake-up. It was decided that baby Snookums, who was about 45 years old in reality years, needed to grow up a bit. But how do you do that? You can't very well just have Snookums as a baby one week, and then next week advance his age until he's in elementary school, now can you? Well, I suppose you could, but McManus and Zekley took a sneakier approach. Here is the Snookums topper for May 6 1951 featuring the familiar baby version:

Another week passes, and on May 20 the toddler has advanced to growing a mop of hair:

By October 21 Snookums miraculous growth spurt finally ends, placing him in elementary school, where he will stay for the rest of the strip's life:

So now that we've had this fun little jaunt through the remaking of a comic strip character, we end with a mystery. According to King Features' internal records, the Snookums topper was dropped at the end of 1956. But that's wrong, because I have found samples as late as 1961. My wild guess based on no evidence is that the King Features date might reflect the end of Snookums being distributed as a topper to Bringing Up Father, and after that perhaps the strip was sold on its own merits as a standalone feature?

But no matter how the marketing went on, the important question is this: When did this important strip end? Can anyone help?

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 2 comments

In 1936 Joe Palooka's Sunday formatting took the topper away from the tabloid version, so that only the full broadsheet format still included it. Even then if a paper ran Joe Palooka on their front page, as was quite often the case with the popular feature, a large masthead would knock the topper out. So while most Palooka fans got to read the previous topper, Fisher's History of Boxing, fewer had the chance to learn how to box from the main strip's star in Joe Palooka's Boxing Course. 

Which wasn't a terrible loss, because it seemed like Fisher just transcribed a basic text on learning to box, and added a few illustrations of Joe going through the motions. Not too exciting. The course began on June 27 1936 and ran until May 1 1938, almost two full years of learning to float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. 

Okay, so the topper's not too exciting, but the sample above is a very interesting one. In case you're not aware, the whole craze for hillbillies in comics, which began in earnest with Li'l Abner, actually had a precursor in Joe Palooka. Big Leviticus and his mammy and pappy starred in a sequence of Joe Palooka in late 1933, and after Li'l Abner became a huge hit Ham Fisher started a feud in which he claimed that Al Capp ripped off his creations. Here above we see an early (the earliest?) public shot fired in that long-running feud; check out the box in panel one of the main strip. 

Rather than recount the circumstances of the feud here, I suggest you go read R.C. Harvey's exhaustive discussion of it over at The Comics Journal. It's a long article, but I assure you the bizarre story of Al Capp vs. Ham Fisher is a juicy and fascinating read. 

For what it's worth -- very little -- my take on the feud is that it doesn't matter at all who came up with Big Leviticus. If he was such a great character, the equal of Abner, the syndicate would have made Fisher bring him back as a regular, or even given him his own strip. They didn't, and Fisher evidently saw no great future for him, either, until Capp showed the way. The simple fact is that Al Capp, for all his faults, was undeniably a cartooning genius. I have no doubt that he could have taken ANY idea and made a phenomenon out of it. Whether it was hillbillies, prankster kids, barnyard animals, or even grains of sand reciting Proust, Al Capp was destined to make great comic strips out of it. It's a shame that Fisher couldn't see that and wish the man well, rather than trying pathetically to cut him down.

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 4 comments

The Sunny Side didn't last long, and my guess is that it was seen at the syndicate as offering a little more adult-skewed gags than they'd like to see on a property like Felix. The panel only ran on the Sunday from February 24 to March 31 1935*. After that the third topper feature was dropped on Felix, with Laura going back to taking the complete upper third of the page. Although it too would soon be changed to a new strip, Felix never went back to offering a double-helping of toppers. 

Addendum: I didn't realize when I wrote the post about the Laura topper that Messmer finally dropped the gags about the parrot learning to repeat phrases. As you can see in the sample above, by 1935 that strip was engaged in a light continuity with the parrot now inhabiting a funny animal world, not interacting exclusively with humans. The post has been corrected. 

* Source: Columbus Dispatch.

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 2 comments

William Randolph Hearst was an enthusiastic lover of comics, and he usually had a good eye for quality. Most famously, he championed that oddball strip Krazy Kat and kept it running despite dismal sales. But everyone can have a blind spot, and to my mind Hearst's was The Nebbs. According to old stories, Hearst absolutely loved the strip, and though he did not syndicate it, insisted that many of the Hearst papers run it. 

I, on the other hand, cannot see the attraction. To me it reads like a weak-kneed version of The Gumps or The Bungle Family. The comparison with The Gumps is apt because the writer of the strip, Sol Hess, got his start ghost-writing for Sidney Smith. But whatever magic he brought to The Gumps was lost when he decided that his own strip would have less abrasive characters and more down-to-earth stories. Dull as dishwater, in other words. 

Perhaps I'd give the strip more of a chance if the art by Wally Carlson wasn't like fingernails on a blackboard to me. And I don't know what it is about it that I hate! It's perfectly capable work, if a little sterile and perfunctory, but for some reason I can't stand it. (Just to get it off my chest, Jimmy Hatlo's art has the same effect on me.)

Anyway, Mr. Hearst and I will simply have to agree to disagree. The Nebbs was undeniably a successful strip, and not just in Hearst papers. In the 1920s and 30s it has been claimed that it ran in over 500 papers, and even back then that was an impressive number. So somebody must have liked the darn thing. 

Anyway, this post is not just a pointless whining session. It's about the main topper of The Nebbs, Simp O'Dill. This strip about a simpleton began on February 24 1929* as a small one-tier topper, as was the style with Bell Syndicate at the time. He had no real personality, he just acted out 'dumb guy' gags straight out of joke books. He seems to have appeared out of nowhere, or at least I am not aware of him ever being a character in the main strip. 

On September 16 1934, Simp O'Dill was enlarged to a two-tier format, becoming a full-fledged half-page strip. The strip did not really change in any way except that it took twice as many panels to tell the same bad jokebook gags. The idea, of course, was to make The Nebbs a better-selling Sunday by making it easy to substitute a half-page ad for the topper. Newspapers seemed to really appreciate this format, and I imagine it gave Sunday sales of The Nebbs a nice little bump. 

In 1936 Hess decided to add activity panels to the topper mix, but generally they just shaved a single panel off of Simp O'Dill to squeeze them in. Simp, just like The Dude, abides.

In 1941 Sol Hess died, but his duties were continued by Betsy and Stanley Baer, and both The Nebbs and Simp O'Dill soldiered on without a stumble. Though newspaper readers began to lose interest in The Nebbs in the 1940s, the Sunday half-and-half setup allowed Simp O'Dill to survive when many other toppers got the axe. But to all good, bad and indifferent things there must be an end, and so it was with Simp O'Dill. It last ran on January 4 1948**, and The Nebbs Sunday was thereafter no longer available in a full page format.

* Source: Tucson Citizen 

** Source: St. Cloud Times

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 1 comments

When E.C. Segar was battling leukemia and only sporadically able to work on Thimble Theatre the show had to go on, and other hands kept the franchise running. In much of 1938 someone other than Segar handled the Sunday much of the time, but Segar rallied and penned (or at least signed) the Sunday strip from July 17 to October 2. During this short period he came up with his last new contribution to the Sunday toppers, the Wiggle Line Movie. 

Unlike earlier activity panels like Funny Films that theoretically gave kids a moving picture but didn't really succeed, the Wiggle Line Movie actually offered a successful but extremely limited animation. In each installment you got a funny face and a wiggly line; put the two together in the prescribed method and you get a wacky face with moving eyes. Worth the effort? I dunno, but the feature didn't last long so maybe the syndicate wasn't too impressed. 

Wiggle Line Movie ran with the Sundays of September 11 through November 13 1938, during which time (on October 13), Segar died. After October 2, Segar's last signed Sunday, the art and writing may have been in the hands of King bullpenner Doc Winner, which seems to be the consensus opinion. But I wonder, given that the art and writing is a cut above what I would expect of Winner, if perhaps Bud Sagendorf or others were involved. In Sagendorf's book Popeye - The First 50 Years he says that he started working on the activity panels "after 1938," but maybe he jumped in a little earlier than he could recall many years later. Any Thimble Theatre scholars out there who can shed some light?

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 7:00 AM 0 comments

While Ad Carter's Just Kids main topper was Nicodemus O'Malley for over twenty years, other ancillary toppers came and went more often. Let's talk about two of them today. 

Dream Land offers a pretty simple concept -- what sort of dreams do the members of the Just Kids gang have? It was a simple idea but a fun one with a practically endless well of subjects to fill the space. The Dream Land panel ran from December 31 1933* to December 12 1937**, a very respectable four year run. 

Dream Land ran with Just Kids in both full and tabloid formats, but our next topper, The Quinn Quintuplets, was used only in the tabloid format, and then only if the newspaper had a lot of unused vertical space. Most papers that ran tabloid sections had small ads or vignettes that ran along the page bottoms, and so there was often no room for The Quinn Quintuplets. It was also unusual in that other Hearst Sunday strips did not offer this sort of extra strip to run along the bottom of the main feature, so I think many newspapers didn't quite know what to make of it. These factors make this topper quite rarely seen. It's a bit of a mystery to me why Ad Carter even bothered with it. 

The Quinn Quintuplets trades off the fame of the Dionne Quints, born in May 1934 to a poor French family in Ontario Canada. As the only surviving quintuplets up to that time, the kids became a worldwide sensation. Unfortunately the children were horribly mistreated as a result of their fame, but that wouldn't be generally known for many years. In 1935, with their fame in the ascendency, the whole world was in love with them and couldn't seem to get enough coverage of their young lives. Ad Carter was only one of many who traded off their fame in various ways. 

The Quinn Quintuplets topper is rare enough that I do not have a definite start date. My earliest on hand, from the Chicago American, is the January 13 1935 episode. I suspect that the series did not start much before that. I do have a definite end date, though, which is June 9 1935. I know that because the next week the Chicago American ran Just Kids in an all-new tabloid format with no toppers at all. That new format would not last long, but by the time the other toppers were brought back The Quinn Quintuplets were just a memory, and perhaps that memory was confined to the readers of the Chicago American. Has anyone seen this topper running elsewhere?

* Source: Cleveland Plain Dealer.

** Source: Indianapolis Star.

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

As we've discussed before, the NEA syndicate had an unusual take on Sunday toppers -- they often had different artists work on them than the main strip. Here's an example of that, where Salesman Sam by George "Swan" Swanson was paired up with the topper Jo-Jo the Jester by Jim Lavery.

Lavery did occasional work for NEA, but this was his most visible contribution. Why he squandered the opportunity on this odd strip I cannot guess. Jo-Jo is a fellow who goes around in clown makeup, with no explanation why that might be. The other characters in the strip seem to find this to be perfectly normal street attire. This is the backdrop to tired jokebook gags that have little to recommend them. 

Jo-Jo the Jester did not last long as the topper to Salesman Sam. It debuted on October 10 1926 and ended one year later on October 2 1927, to be replaced by J. Disraeli (Dizzy) Dugan by another NEA bullpenner, Irving Knickerbocker.

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

The Sunday Joe Jinks went through a few toppers before it finally settled on a golf strip, Divot Diggers, for most of the 1930s. In the 1929-1930 period the Sunday page sported two or three different toppers -- depending how you count them -- that ran more or less concurrently. 

The first of the triad to debut was This an' That, a catchall title if there ever was one. The one-tier topper had no continuing characters and started on March 24 1929*. Creator Vic Forsythe apparently was unhappy with this topper running every week, and on May 19 he added a second strip, Bozo's Diary, in which diary entries from a little dog's perspective supply the gags. This was an absolute rip-off of The Diary of Snubs Our Dog, and it would not surprise me a bit if the gags were cribbed from that strip as well. At least he stole from the best...

This an' That last ran on March 2 1930, and was replaced on the 16th (after an intervening episode of Bozo's Diary) with It Seems That, an identically unthemed strip that perhaps should just be considered a title change for This an' That. 

Bozo's Diary last ran on September 28 1930, perhaps dumped after Paul Carmack or some of his fans voiced their objection to the me-too strip. From then on It Seems That ran alone, but it too was dumped after the installment of January 4 1931.

* Source: All dates cited from Detroit Free Press or San Francisco Chronicle.

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

Our headline above says "Topper" but today we've got a feature (or rather, three of 'em) that sort of bend the definition. To me a topper is generally a separate strip or panel included with a feature that, when discarded, helps to allow a paper to run the feature in various different formats. Know Your Navy/Merchant Marine/Sports doesn't fit that definition because I know of no format for Mickey Finn in which it has the function of being a 'drop panel' to assist in reformatting. With Mickey Finn, if you run the Nippie topper, you also get Know Your Navy/Merchant Marine/Sports, and if you drop Nippie, that extra panel goes away with it. In other words, that panel has no particular function except to make Nippie a five panel strip instead of six. 

This sort of feature is certainly not unique to Mickey Finn -- Dick Tracy's Crimestopper's Texbook and Heathcliff's Kitty Korner come to mind. This type of feature probably deserves its own name, but what would that be? Lagniappe feature appeals to me, but I imagine that would send a lot of people scrambling for the dictionary. 

Anyway, since I lump this stuff in with toppers in my book, and I know of no industry term for it, let's call it a topper and plow on. 

Mickey Finn's main topper, Nippie - He's Often Wrong, ran with the Sunday strip from 1936 to 1946. For almost all of its life it was a three-panel single tier affair, but on November 14 1943* it was upgraded to two tiers and the Know Your Navy panel was added, offering weekly factoids about that division of the armed forces. Since this is during World War II, there's no mystery about its appeal. Why in particular Lank Leonard picked that service branch, however, is unknown. Perhaps he looked around at all the other strips that had military components and decided that the Navy could stand a little more of the spotlight. 

At the conclusion of the war Leonard decided to change the focus. He renamed the panel Know Your Merchant Marine on September 9 1945** and began covering that somewhat obscure public/private naval service. 

The Merchant Marine panels no doubt told readers much that they did not know, but Leonard tired of it quickly. On December 16** the panel was refocused again, this time under the title of Know Your Sports. Panels explaining sports rules offered little to fascinate readers and the feature was dropped entirely on April 21 1946***. Nippie reverted to a single-tier affair, but it too would be dropped just three months later. From then on the Sunday Mickey Finn offered no toppers.

* Source: Atlanta Constitution

** Source: New York Mirror

*** Source: St. Petersburg Times

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 1 comments

The story of S'Matter, Pop?, Charles M. Payne's long-running strip about the relationship between a dad and his son, is a bit convoluted. It's a subject we definitely need to cover one of these days. But today we have a much easier bone to chew on, a topper to S'Matter, Pop? sometimes titled Johnny Bear. 

Although S'Matter, Pop? had spent time at both the Hearst and Pulitzer organizations, by the 1920s it was distributed by Bell Syndicate. Bell wasn't as consistent about wanting Sunday toppers as some syndicates, and when they did ask their cartoonists to add toppers they sometimes didn't seem to want them to have titles (see Cicero, for instance). S'Matter, Pop? gained a one-tier topper on September 12 1926, but in its early appearances it was just an extra gag starring the main strip's characters. 

On January 23 1927* Payne dumped that idea and switched to a group of animal characters. These characters harkened back over twenty years to a strip that Payne created for the Philadelphia Inquirer titled Bear Creek Folks. That was a strip heavily influenced by Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus Stories and featured a group of Southern-drawling animals. 

In the new topper the cast of Bear Creek Folks are in attendence, but the spotlight is definitely on Johnny Bear, the young cub. And it took a very long time, but finally in late 1930 the topper would get a small lettered title on occasion. It wasn't until March 1931 that a proper title panel was added, and it wouldn't last long. On April 19 1931 Payne did a real presto-change-o bit of magic and turned his main strip, S'Matter, Pop? into a topper, and changed the main strip to Honeybunch's Hubby, another artifact dug up from way back in the early 1910s. Out on their keisters were Johnny Bear and the rest of the animal cast, last appearing on the Sunday of April 12 1931**.

PS: In my book this feature is listed as Little Johnny Bear. Further research has revealed that this title is even more seldom used than Johnny Bear. 

* Source: Austin American

** Source: Klamath News

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

It's a good thing I don't actually talk about strips but type about them, because I would have shown an embarrassing gap in my knowledge when I pronounced the name of this strip. For years and years I thought the gal in the strip had a name that rhymed with "suits". Of course as you well know, her name rhymes with "puts". And if you didn't know, well, you're welcome. My wife, who has exactly 0.00005213% the interest in comics that I do, heard me say the name of the strip out loud and quietly corrected me without batting an eye. Yeah, she's a swell gal that way. 

Anyhow, to the subject at hand. Jimmy Murphy's Toots and Casper was a sort of melange of The Newlyweds and their Baby, the George McManus classic, and Blondie, which didn't exist until this strip was a decade old. Our two title characters are young marrieds, much in love, and dimwitted enough to make a hash of something every day just in time to give readers a guffaw or groan. Buttercup the baby came along early in the life of the strip, and the doting parents gained all those old McManus gags to reenact. 

Toots and Casper was a Hearst product, and in 1926 when the decree to add toppers came down,  Murphy stepped right up to bat with Hotsy-Totsy, wich debuted on January 10 1926* along with most of the other Sunday pages in the Hearst stable. 

Hotsy-Totsy was a ridiculously repetitive strip in which a pair of cooing sweethearts while away the hours because they can't bear to part. All that really changes from strip to strip is the location -- in a car, on the phone, in a park, etc. After a few months of that the lovers gain names, Gerald and Doris, and Murphy puts a little, and I really mean a little, effort into offering different gags. 

Just as Murphy was starting to give his young sweeties a little personality the strip was replaced with It's Papa Who Pays, which would run for the next thirty years. Hotsy-Totsy ended on April 18 1926*. 

* Source: Palm Beach Post.

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

Tailspin Tommy indulged the fantasies of kids who wanted to be fliers, and after Lindbergh's flight that was the dream floating around the heads of a LOT of kids. Kids ate, breathed and slept flying. If you went into the average middle school classroom in the late 1920s and asked for the top speed of a Curtiss CR-3 or which plane won the Thompson Trophy last year, you'd get a sea of hands shooting up in response.

The original topper to Tailspin Tommy was a sober affair, a one-panel history lesson titled Progress of Flight. However, when writer Glenn Chaffin left the strip at the end of 1933, artist Hal Forrest took on those chores and he evidently had no interest in writing scholarly features. Progress of Flight flew off into the sunset, replaced by a new slambang aerial adventure strip titled Four Aces on January 7 1934*. 

For what was just a single tier strip, Four Aces took on a ludicrously ambitious story of four fliers, one from each of the major allied nations of World War I. Larry Gale, the American, Ronald Newton the Brit, Anthony Garbilla the Italian and Maurice Dupont, the Frenchman. The story of the comrades-in-arms plays out like molasses at the rate of one quasi-daily strip per week, but manages to shoehorn plenty of action into each strip, if the story itself makes little headway. Eventually only the American flier is seen regularly, with the others functioning as the occasional deus ex machinae to get him out of tight jams as needed. The strip ran until June 16 1935* (episode #106), to be replaced by an instructional feature How To Fly. 

A bizarre footnote to this first run of the topper is that on two occasions it was signed by a different name than Hal Forrest -- the name signed to it on April 8 1934 and January 27 1935 was Harry Paul. Who is Harry Paul, you ask? Well, we don't really have to look far, because Hal Forrest was otherwise known by the full name Harry Paul Forrest.  Okay, so it's weird that the creator of the strip would occasionally use a pseudonym for himself, but what's even weirder is that in this period the last panel of the strip often has an empty box in the final panel, evidently for an artist signature, and it is blanked out. My pet theory? I think that blanked out box was originally enclosing the signature of a ghost, and Forrest generally just blanked it out, but in a few cases substituted his own name, albeit not in its familiar form. Why? Gee, I dunno. Anyone have a theory?

Four Aces returned on March 22 1936* once the How To Fly instructional feature had run its course. This time the strip was allowed a little elbow room, appearing as a two-tier strip. The strip also looks  a lot better now that Reynold Brown was assisting Forrest. Strip numbering was restarted at #1.

In the revived strip the war is now over and our four heroes are running a flying circus, touring the American midwest showing off their aerial prowess to the rubes. Of course they rarely have time for that once they become involved in busting up aerial criminal rings, chasing foreign saboteurs, and other high-flying adventures. In 1940 the aces were in a South American jungle when they picked up two new characters, gorgeous gal Nadine and her jungle boy pal Pogodanda. Forrest seemed so taken with this pair that they eventually evicted the aces from their own strip. 

The revived strip ran until the Tailspin Tommy Sunday itself was cancelled as of March 15 1942**, right in mid-story.

* Source: Casper Tribune-Herald.

** Source: McAllen Daily Press, via Jeffrey Lindenblatt.

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 1 comments

Keeping Up With The Joneses was already quite a venerable daily strip when it added a Sunday page on January 3 1932. The daily began in 1913, almost two full decades earlier. Associated Newspapers, the distributor, was primarily a syndicator of dailies, so it is perhaps not surprising that it took one of their better-known strips that long to take the plunge into colour. Or maybe the wait was for creator Pop Momand to find enough able assistance to take on the extra work. Who knows...

Whichever it was, the Sunday Keeping Up WIth The Joneses was not exactly a gangbusters success, but it did get enough clients to be kept running until both the Sunday and daily were cancelled in April 1938. In this seven-plus year run the strip had one and only one topper that ran with it every single week for the entire span, titled Holly of Hollywood. 

In the earliest few strips, the svelte tall beauty Holly was an aspiring Hollywood actress, but after just a few months she set her sights considerably lower and became a waitress in a greasy spoon. Holly might have been attractive, but her personality left something to be desired -- she was vain, self-absorbed, and lazy. From this Momand eked out the gags of this one-tier usually three panel strip. Typical situations involved her smarting off to the restaurant customers, sassing the other help, or going out on first dates (one can imagine second dates were pretty rare). 

Holly of Hollywood ran from January 3 1932* to April 10 1938**, the same running dates as the main Sunday page. For some reason for most of those years the name Holly in the title panel was lettered within double-quotes -- I have no idea why.

* Source: Brooklyn Times, via Jeffrey Lindenblatt.

** Source: Brooklyn Eagle

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM 5 comments