Last week I showed some of Charles Raab's daily strips of Ap's Patsy in Hollywood (which had been started by Mel Graff). In the late forties the strip was taken over by Bill Dyer, who used a far less serious style and has been ignored by the comic hostorians for not being Graff, Raab or Sickles. As I have shown before with the Sundays I colected and scanned, his verson of the kid's adventure strip actually worked quite well and it is no surprise it ran until well in the the fifties. For some reason there Sundays from some AP strips are ultra rare. Frank Robbins' Scorchy Smith is impossible to find and if you do they are very expensive. Likewise, the Bill Dyer Patsy Sundays are not easy to come by (thogh cheaper). Four of these have Scorchy Smith Sundays by A. C. Hollingsworth on the back, a rare treat. The Sundays from his predessor Edmund Good are a bit more common (and they were reprinte din one of the comic book series that used newspaper strips). But the most uncommon strip must have been George Tuska's Scorchy Smith Sundays. When I was ooking for microfiche copies of his daily version, believing he had never done Sundays, I found to my surprise he dis actuallt do two years of them, following Hollingsworth, stopping about two years agao before the daily stopped. SInce finding microfiche copies of those, I have actively looked for and never found any actual dailies in color.
2 comments:
I think the AP Sundays are scarce because AP strips seem to have sold mostly to smaller papers, many of which didn't publish on Sunday. When I was a kid the daily from the nearby city (population 40,000) only appeared Monday through Saturday. To get Sunday comics we had to buy the Seattle papers (which, incidentally, carried some nice strips including Tuska's Buck Rogers).
And here I was hoping that it may have sold to one or two larger papers that payed so well that they didn't have to find more. The Tuska Rogers pops up oftener, probably because it sold outdie of the AP package. The Tuska Scorchy though... never! It is so scarce that it is one of the few dates Alan Holtz got wrong in his exellent book on American Newspaper strips. He lists the Sunday as runnig just as long as the daily but all my information says it ended in December 1955
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