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.