Friday Kurtzman Newsflash
In 1948 Harvey Kurtzman drew a short run Sunday only one tier gag strip called Silver Linings for The New York Herald Tribune. I have shown all known samples in a previous post. The gags were published irregularily between March and July of that year. Among Kurtzman fans there has always been speculation about the question if there might be other unpublished tiers from the weeks it did not appear in the Herald. All gags were also labeled with a notice from the Herald Tribune syndicate, so in theory it was possible that they were done every week, but only used as a filler if and when there was room for them. Maybe there were other papers running them and maybe they had another selection. Since nothing could be found, it was assumed that this was not the case. The other solution would be, that they were produced in a batch and published as there was room, without skipping over any gags in the weeks there was none.
This week I ran across an appearance of one of the gags in another paper - only two years later! In the Milwaukee Journal (which can be found on the now discontinued Google Newspaper site, which is no longer searchable, but you can find it if you have kept the adress (which I have) I came across only one tier from March 26, 1950.
Unfortunately Google News doesn't have the Sundays for April and May, but I don't think you'll find any others there. I also found single samples of two other Herald Tribune single tier fillers and I think the paper was using some sort of free set of samples without buying any of them. Still, if anyone has access to these papers and would care to have a look, I'd love to be proven wrong.
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