Sidelined

Saturday Leftover Day. 

The New York Herald Tribune had a lot of filler strips in their Sunday sections in the late forties. Various cartoonists (include some who also had their own strips in that same paper) did one tier 'specials' that rarely ran longer than a year. Some were expanded into actual Sunday only half page features, like Irv Spector's Coogy or Gill Fox and Selma Diamond's Jeanie. But most came and went (as interesting as they may have been, like Harvey Kurtzman's Silver Linings). By the fifties this practice stopped, but at that point the (tabloid sized) New York News picked it up. All through the fifties and sixties various fillers were used, but this time each was a half page. They included Cindy Wood by Mel Casson, Bibs an' Tucker and later This Man's Army by Henry Arnold, a full cartoon page by Reamer Keller and my personal favorite Bumper To Bumper by Gill Fox. Each arrtist left a stack of these things at the office, which were then used to fill out the issue in case there were less advertisements or in one or two of the editions (there were three, two in the city and one rural) if an advertiser only wanted to be in the other one.

Anyway, that is all a long preamble to show you another homegrown strip, which appeared as a filler in the Seattle Daily Times in the later years of WWII. The artist was the paper's sports artist, who apparently wanted to try and see if he could get something going alongside that. Cute as it was, Picklepuss stayed a filler for a year or so and disappeared without a trace.

A Plinth Of Sundays

Sunday Surprise Day. If I was ever able to work with of even from the Billy Ireland Museum at Ohio State University, I would take advantage of their huge collection of The New York Herald Tribune to write the definitive series of posts (or even a book) about their syndicate and their unusual appraoch to fillers. They are seen as a failed syndicate, because many of the strips they launched did not reach the broader audience. But If I had lived in New York between 1945 and 1955 their comics page would have been the first thing I looked for every morning. Not only did they have an outstanding roster of talent in various strips, they also bought a huge selection of one tier filler strips for their Sunday paper. Some made it into a regular strip, such as Irv Spector's Coogy and Gill Fox's Jeanie. Jeanie even went daily for a while. Some reached fame among connaisseurs and collectors, such as Harvey Kurtzman's Silver Linings. But there were many, many more. Here are a few I came across, when finally sold my Sundays on Ebay this year.

Spoogy

Saturday Leftover Day.

Coogy is one of my altime favorite strips from the early fifties. It was drawn and written by Ir Spector for the Haerald Tribune and a stand alone Sunday only. The first year it was done as a one tier color strip, but after that it continued as a full half page strip until wlel into 1954. I came across a couple of samples of this are strip, which was not distributed outside of the Herald Tribune. It's fun, it's satirical and yes, it resembles Pogo - but it has a charm all of it's own. Later in the run, Spector even took on a couple of larger literary targets nd did four week parodies of The Old Man and The See, Mary WOrth and George Bernard Shaw. I have shown quite a few of these, but I never could get hold of a longer run - until I was at the Billy ireland Museum in 2017. They had two bound newspaper volumes from Bill Blackbeard's collection, which had two complete years. I photographed all of them (as well as some other stuff), but when I got home I was sad to see that the resolution wasn't as good as I had hoped and the bound newspapers had made all my samples wavey. Here are two of them corrected as much as I could. What do you think, should I continue until I have done everything from those two years?

Saint John's Day

Saturday Leftover Day.

The New York Herald Tribune is one of my favorite Sunday papers. They had a unique line-up of great strips and always published them in the three tier half page format - even well into the fifties, when it became more common to use three strips to a page instead of three. Last year I was able to photograph a set of 1953/1954 papers, with some of my favorites. But photo's are not as good as scans. Bog as they are, they are still only 72 dpi and the paper usually isn't flat. To see what I can salvage of that lot, I have tried to cleaan and correct one of the more impressive pages (The Saint, 1953-02-08) I photographed. I am only partly satisfied with the result, but the page itself is great.

Out Of The Way!

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

The first time I saw Jay Irving's funny little policeman he was called Potsy. It was one of the not syndicated Sunday only strips that were done especially for the New York News. A charming half page strip with hentle jokes about a pudgy policeman. I liked it, but it was never scanworthy. Next to some of the other Sunday ony strips for that paper (like Gill Fox' Bumper To Bumper, which is why I bought those sections) it was a bit tame and oldfashioned. Recently I came across an earlier version of the strip, which was done in the late forties as another Sunday only not syndicated strip for the New York Herald Tribune. The Tribune at that time was a little more ambitious than the News was a decade later. Not a tabloid, it gave a full half page to such noteworthy strips as Irv Spector's Coogy, Gill Fox and Selma Diamond's Jeanie, the superb Harvey Kurtzman one tiers Silver Linings and Jay Irving's Willie Doodle. Willie Doodle was a precursor to Potsy and himself a continuation of the policeman cartoons Irving had been doing for Clliers ever since the thirties.

This time I was impressed. Taking into account that no strip has ever suffered from being seen in three tiers, I find this incarnation has all the charm and gentle humor of the ater version, but the drawing also impresses with great style and especially rythm. The gags are better when they are built up this way and the whole thing is just gorgeous.

The March 1947 gag is especially interesting to comic collectors. Stan Lee used the exact same gag for a short story in one of his horror quickies in Astonishing #17, drawn by George Roussos. I am not suggesting Stan Lee took the gag from Irving. They could both have thught of it independently if 'What do you think you are doing? Holding up the building?" is an actual New York saying. Or they could oth have gotting it from the same gag book.