The Fabuleous Fifties

The Irish Connection

Thursday Story Strip Day.

A week ago regular visitor and comment guest Jeff Overturf scanned a whole comic section from June 1955 and put it on his blog. I've put the link along the side. He comments on each strip. Biggest surprise is a full color tabloid page from Jack Sparling's Mr. Mumbles. I had known about this trip for a long time, but have never seen a color sample. Sparling was a very familiar atist in the fifties, tuning up a all kinds of publishers, mostly doing war an romance stories. For Mr. Mubles, he created (or cocreated with a wriiter, more likely) a bearded leprachaun. I wondered if there as a specific culturl event that made a newspaper syndicate think this could be a good and saleable idea. The announcement I found, shows that althoug leprachauns were all over the place in the midfifties (where artists of Irish decent were often well represented) but my guess is the movie Finian's Rainbow had a lot to do with it. The strip started on Monday April 18th, 1955 and it doesn't seem as if the Sunday started until May 15. But there could have been one earlier in other papers. The quality of these sans aren't the best, but a least you can see how the strip got it's start. I may share more later.