Run, Sparky, Run

Thurday story Day.

When Boody Rogers went into the army in 1942, he stopped writing and drawing his newspaper strip Sparky Watts, which had been running for two years. Almost immediately his syndicate repacked the strip as part of a set comics page for weekly papers. Last week I showed you the first couple of that reprint run. Here are the last few. I have no idea if that is also the last of the original run or if the weekly page just was remodelled and Sparky dropped (maybe because Rogers had returned from the war). I am still hoping a Boody Rogers collector (such as Craig Yoe, who has a new book on Roger's most succesful comic strips coming out) will tell me if these strips were ever reprinted in the first comic books.

Boody Time

Thurday Story Day.

I have never been attracted to the work of Boody Rogers. He was included in several anthologies the last couple of years and even managed to get a book of his own remarkable superhero work. Now a new book has been announced about his more intentionally funny and satirical comic bok work, including that of Sparky Watts and Babe. It always seemed to me that his 'weird' mstyle may have been weird for comic books, but it wasn't that rare or even remarkable in terms of newspaper strips. Rogers clearly was of a certain school of bigfoot cartooning and his style ows more than a little to that of Zack Mosley (for who he assisted for a while) and even Dick Tracy's Gould.But now that I have read some of his stories I must confess that he has a funky writing style completely his own as well and that may be the real attraction. This week one of Sparky Watts fans, Pappy, has put up two later comic book stories of Sparky Watts and it seemed like a good time for me to show you the newspaper strip version of that strip. According to most online sources, Rogers started Sparky Watts as a newspaper strip, which ran from 1940 to 1942, when Rogers joined the army. It seems that as soon as he left for the army his syndicate included Sparky Watts in a weekly comics page syndicated to smaller (weekly) papers. My samples are all from that period. I have here the start of what seems to be Sparky Watts' first sequence, in which the hero is given a serum by a professor whih makes him superstrong, superfast and a lot more. Some of the newspaper dailies were also used in the first comic books of Sparky Watts, but other collectors wil have to say if these were inlcuded in that as well. I tried to put these strips in the right orde after I saw the scans I downloaded didn't have dates on them. Storywise it seems to fit, but I think it is strange that there seems to be a monday episode after the first seven but not after the first. And two of the strips have their original publication date still on them and there is a one date gap there as well.