Stripper’s Guide to Newspaper Comics History

Toppers: Draw It Y’Self

Posted on: October 2, 2026 by Allan Holtz

Until late in the game Gene Byrnes popular Reg’lar Fellers Sunday page never had a topper. The New York Tribune syndicate, where free agent Byrnes had signed a five-year contract in 1927, was an outlier that never showed any interest in adding toppers to their Sundays, even at the height of their popularity. But Byrnes’ contract was up at the end of April 1932, and he decided to jump ship, signing a new deal with Famous Features Syndicate.

Choosing Famous Features seemed like a questionable move, because comics were really not part of their portfolio. Their bread-and-butter was fiction and celebrity material. But despite seeming like a dark horse in the sweepstakes to attract Byrnes, they not only were first to the finish line but turned out to do a fine job selling his Sunday strip, which prospered in the 1930s.

Reg’lar Fellers gained a topper on the very first week that Famous Features distributed the strip (May 1 1932)¹, so evidently they saw that as an important marketing plus. They chose to use a one-tier strip, which was used in the full, tab and even by some papers in the half-page format. The strip, called Draw It Y’Self, offered one-off gags with no continuing characters, with the novelty that the punchline would only be revealed once the reader filled in a connect-the-dots puzzle.

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a Reg’lar Fellers Sunday tearsheet where the connect-the-dots has been filled in, so even in the 1930s when kids seemed to have a real yen for these simple activities, I guess Byrnes wasn’t really reaching them. So I went through a short stack and tried them myself², so that I could offer you a knowledgeable opinion — this is just how seriously I take my role as arbiter of all that is good and bad in forgotten old funnies.

My report is that, first, I am impressed how well Byrnes was able to conceal the subjects of his punchlines. With connect-the-dots you can often figure out the picture just by imagining the outline created by the sequence of dots. But Byrnes was often quite good at concealing the subjects, notwithstanding the sample above, in which a brick can be inferred without even so much as looking at the final panel. And occasionally the novelty works tremendously well. For instance, in one Draw It Y’Self we only see a pair of legs sitting on a log, then in panel two the legs are stretched out flat on the ground. Huh? Panel three’s dots really offer no obvious clue. After we complete the connect-the-dots, though, we see that the image is a tobacco pipe. Ah! A kid was trying out pa’s pipe on the sly, and ended up sick as a dog and desperately wishing he hadn’t. Cute! A gag that wouldn’t really cause much impression works much better because the reader ‘solved the mystery.’

Draw It Y’Self ran with Reg’lar Fellers until September 2 1934³. The next week it was replaced by a new Sunday page format in which the main strip would be relegated to half-page status, sharing the spotlight equally with the new topper Daisybelle.

Source: Editor & Publisher, April 9 1932. ↩︎
Not on my tearsheets, of course, but by printing out the panels from online sources. ↩︎
Source: Brooklyn Times-Union. ↩︎

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Under the Radar: Tizzy

Posted on: September 30, 2026 by Allan Holtz

Teenagers have been a popular topic for newspaper comics since Harold Teen kicked off the genre in 1919. Before then, if comics were your only glimpse of the world you might well think that bratty kids grew directly into adults overnight, with practically no stage in between.

Although teen comics proved popular, the genre didn’t really start getting dangerously overcrowded until the mid-1940s and ’50s, when the staggering popularity of Archie had every syndicate trying to emulate that success. We certainly did seem to get a bumper crop of them, and many were little more than me-toos. On the face of it, Kate Osann’s Tizzy is just as much a me-too as any of them, but I feel it was a cut above.

The NEA syndicate, the nation’s premier blanket service, already had Freckles and his Friends, which was originally a kid strip but had let its star grow into a teenager. But frankly that strip, though still inexplicably popular with newspaper editors, had about as much in common with the Archie style of teen strip as Foxy Grandpa. So NEA was looking to fill that vacancy. Since NEA for the most part kept to a standardized number of strips and panels, they were willing to get rid of Funny Business, a panel, so they were looking for something in that format.

I don’t know how long they were actively looking to fill that hole, but they got lucky that they were looking at the same time that Kate Osann found herself out of a gig and looking for new venues. Osann had been submitting gag cartoons to magazines since the 1940s, and in 1953 she had established a relationship with Collier’s magazine to regularly publish her teenage girl cartoons under the running title of Tizzy¹. You can find a wonderful assortment of them over here at Mike Lynch Cartoons. The only problem with this sweet deal for Osann is that the darn magazine went belly-up in January 1957.

Tizzy in Collier’s. Image shamelessly stolen from Mike Lynch’s website

Having gotten used to the steady paycheck, Osann tried shopping Tizzy around, and NEA was a willing consumer for two reasons. First, the character came with a built-in audience from her magazine appearances. Second, Tizzy fit well with NEAs generally gentle, wholesome preference in features — she wasn’t drawn as a teenage hottie, and her dealings with boys were far more chaste and ladylike than some other teen girl comics.

Oh wait, there’s a third and fourth reason: Kate Osann really knew how to write a gag, and her art style was delightful. In terms of the writing, it’s amazing how many times Osann could go to the same old teenage subjects of allowances – dating – school – parents, and most of the time her gag lines seem fresh, unlaboured and authentic. It’s really a wonder. And the art I love, too — her simple outlines and minimal yet expertly placed blacks remind me of Chon Day, Gluyas Williams or Rea Irvin, but in her case it somehow has a folksy aura that keeps it from seeming too cosmopolitan and cold. Osann never seemed to be calling attention to her art, and yet if you really pay attention you realize how marvelous it is.

No doubt you’ve heard of the writer (supposedly Blaise Pascal) who said “If I had more time I could have written a shorter letter.” My dear departed buddy Jim Ivey liked to adapt that sentiment to cartooning, saying that for every line he eliminated from a drawing he went through torture. Osann definitely gets that. She’s no madwoman about it — she is willing to fill in her backgrounds with all the bits and bobs needed to establish the scene — but every line in those cartoons is there for a reason. She knows exactly what it takes to pull the reader in, and then not one single solitary more line is drawn.

Tizzy debuted on the NEA roster on May 27 1957² as a daily-only panel³. Here’s the promo printed in many NEA client papers, this one in the Macon News:

It’s always hard to gauge the popularity of an NEA feature, because so many papers will print it simply because it comes with the package and fills the same hole that used to contain a previous feature. But if editors really don’t like a certain feature from NEA, you can generally get a sense — despite it being ‘free’ some just aren’t willing to waste space on it. I see very little of that behavior with Tizzy, so I can only assume that the feature was generally perceived as an asset to papers.

Further proof of popularity comes from reprint books. Tizzy and More Tizzy were paperbacks published by Berkley in 1958 and 1960, respectively, and Scholastic Book Services issued a different book under the Tizzy title in 1967. The Tizzy cartoons were also used extensively in Sharon Sherman’s 1969 The Baby-Sitter’s Guide, also issued by Scholastic.

The Tizzy daily panel ended on December 5 1970, even though it seemed to be maintaining its popularity. My guess is that Osann had simply tired of the heavy workload. NEA decided not to let Tizzy rest, though. In August 1971 their weekly service, Community Enterprise Features, began including one reprint panel per week in their blanket service. This proved reasonably popular, keeping the feature in circulation for almost another five years. The release of April 4 1975 was the last one.

Osann lived for many years in retirement around Orlando Florida, where I was too clueless to realize that she ought to be subjected to an interview. Jim Ivey did get her to come to the first OrlandoCon, but I wasn’t at that first one. I don’t think she returned in later years. She later moved to Alabama, and her 1996 obituary in the local paper failed to mention her being a famous cartoonist. Luckily the Orlando Sentinel wasn’t quite so clueless:

Because I think Tizzy was a terrific feature, I hate to bring up that fact that this deal with Collier’s has a tinge of nepotism involved. So I’ll spill the beans in a footnote. Kate Osann was actually Katherine Osann Chessman, and her husband William Chessman just happened to be the editor of Collier’s. To be fair, Osann never sought to hide the fact, and freely discussed it in promos. ↩︎
Source: All dates from the NEA archives at Ohio State University. ↩︎
A few papers, notably the Pittsburgh Press, colorized the feature for running on Sundays, but this seems to have been an in-house project. NEA never advertised the feature as being available in a Sunday format. ↩︎

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Obscurity of the Day: The Airship Man

Posted on: September 28, 2026 by Allan Holtz

Long before the Wright Brothers proved that sustained powered flight was practical, writers, dreamers, inventors and, yes, even cartoonists, were contemplating the possibilities of such technology. While Leonardo da Vinci had a bit of a jump on the cartooning brethren in that regard, you will occasionally find cartoonists broaching the subject at least as early as the 19th century.

Considering how the race to conquer the air was heating up near the end of the 19th century, I find it mildly surprising that no one created an ongoing newspaper strip about the subject until May 25 1902¹. It was on that date that not one but TWO comic strip series began that featured powered aircraft. A decade and a half ago we introduced you to Albert Bloch’s Professor Wayupski, which sustained itself only to the tune of three episodes. The professor initially had a motor-propelled balloon, but then traded it in for a metal submarine-looking contraption that apparently stayed in the air through the agency of tiny fore and aft propellers. Oddly enough, for the third installment he was back to Airship 1.0 — perhaps because of that fender-bender he had with the Moon with his new contraption in episode two.

Today we cover the Professor’s competition for aerial supremacy. The prolific Charles W. Kahles debuted a new Sunday strip in the Philadelphia North American on that very same date. His strip posited a common pre-Wright airship design; basically a blimp with a propeller to guide it. Such airships are little more than mere balloons, because their hot air, hydrogen or helium contents make the crafts lighter than air. So technically speaking Professor Wayupski takes the crown for first strip about powered flight, but only for his second episode! We’ll forgo beating ourselves up about the philosophical, etymological and technical conundrums brought up by these two entries, and just say that they’re close enough for the funny papers.

Kahles’ strip had pilot Sandy Highflier fly all over the world on his aerial adventures, but having come up with this technological marvel it seems a pity that his favorite use for it was merely to play gags on the earthbound. But these are the comics after all, so I suppose Mr. Highflier was contractually obligated.

The title of the strip changed a number of times. It debuted as Cruise of the Good Airship Skyrocket, but was then often shortened to just The Good Airship Skyrocket starting on August 10 1902. On September 21 of that year the title was changed again, this time to The Airship Man². This title stuck for the longest, but then from August 2 1903 on it was usually lengthened to Sandy Highflier, The Airship Man. That titling stuck until the strip last appeared on January 10 1904.

I have commented before that I find Kahles’ work a bit too stiff and repetitive for my taste. But I get the distinct feeling that he quite enjoyed producing The Airship Man, as it is sometimes — not always — more loose and freewheeling than his typical fare.

Approximately a year and a half before real life history was made at Kitty Hawk. ↩︎
As you can see by the samples above, the episode titles were often much more wordy — I’m just referring to the common repeating portion of the longer titles. ↩︎

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Wish You Were Here, from Albert Carmichael

Posted on: September 27, 2026 by Allan Holtz

Here’s another Carmichael postcard from the Samson Bros. “If” series, aka Series 262. Here are the other “If” cards we’ve seen on Wish You Were Here.

The Carnegie Medal for civilian heroism was inaugurated six years before this postcard was issued. Depending on how you view the robber barons, it was either Carnegie honestly wanting to recognize worthwhile people, or a shameless attempt to secure positive publicity.

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One-Shot Wonders: One of these Chorines is not like the Others

Posted on: September 26, 2026 by Allan Holtz

High-kicking action on and off the stage adorns this NEA Everyweek magazine cover, originally published November 10 1929. Whoever is casting this revue really likes blondes, will grudgingly accept a redhead, but will have no part of any brunettes.

Dorothy Urfer provided many magazine cover illustrations for NEA in the 1920s and 30s. She didn’t do a whole lot of comic stripping, but did originate the long-running Annibelle strip for NEA, though she left shortly after it moved from the Everyweek magazine to the Sunday comics section.

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Obscurity of the Day: Robby-Bobby in Mother Goose Land

Posted on: September 25, 2026 by Allan Holtz

Although it isn’t on my official list of feature categories that I don’t track, I have to confess that when I see children’s submissions appearing in a newspaper I generally ignore them. Most of these are in the paper not so much to entertain readers as to encourage kids and stroke parent egos, and I don’t figure we need to pat junior on the head one more time when he’s now gumming pablum at the rest home, or pushing up daisies.

Robby-Bobby in Mother Goose Land, penned by a girl in grade nine, is quite frankly not such a standout in quality that it attracted my attention; rather it was the name of the girl credited — Wanda Hazel Gag. The name rang the dimmest of bells; it was such a faint tinkle that I wondered if I was just intrigued by the funny name. But a check with Senor Google reveals that Miss Gág would go on to become an artist of some repute. Her main claim to fame is the phenomenally successful 1928 children’s book Millions of Cats, but she wrote and drew many others as well. She was also a force to be reckoned with in the fine art world, where she showed off an impressive style that is somewhat akin to Thomas Hart Benton’s.

Wanda Gág’s personal story is an interesting one. I found this well-produced video which was enlightening and entertaining:

Getting back to our obscurity of the day, Robby-Bobby in Mother Goose Land ran in the Minneapolis Journal as a b&w Sunday page for an impressively long run, considering Wanda was just a kid — May 2 to July 4 1909. It is certainly not memorable for its own sake, but interesting to see early work by an amazing artist.

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Obscurity of the Day: Little Audrey

Posted on: September 23, 2026 by Allan Holtz

If you grew up in the heyday of Harvey comic books (Richie Rich, Hot Stuff the Little Devil, Casper the Friendly Ghost, etc.) you no doubt remember Little Audrey. Her comic book series ran for over 200 issues. Though her popularity perhaps lagged behind some of the top Harvey characters, I daresay that anyone who grew up in the 1950s-70s could easily ID her without batting an eye — those Harvey comics were absolutely ubiquitous.

Those of my generation just naturally assume Little Audrey was a Harvey comic character from the word go, but turns out t’aint so. She debuted in 1947 in a series of theatrical cartoons produced by Paramount Pictures:

And that isn’t even her ultimate origin, because before this there was the “Little Audrey story,” a joke in which a little girl “just laughs and laughs” over some dreadful or horrific situation. Here’s a taste:

Little Audrey was visiting the South Seas when she was kidnapped by a tribe of headhunters. The headhunters took her back to their village where they started a pot to boiling to cook her up. As Little Audrey was thrown into the boiling water she just laughed and laughed because she saw that she would make far too small a soup to feed the whole village.

Paramount appropriated the name, but not the gags (thank heavens!).

What I really love about Little Audrey is the character design, which was reportedly by animator Bill Tytla. The cockeyed pigtails and the tiny skirt over tubular legs are wonderful elements, but the real showstoppers are the wide-set almond-shaped eyes. They seem to tell us implicitly that this girl is wide-eyed and innocent but full of mischief, too. Why they toned down that aspect of the character design for the comic books I don’t know.

Little Audrey proved to be popular enough in animated cartoons and comic books that no less a syndicate than King Features decided she was a worthy candidate for newspaper stardom as well. Despite a very disappointing client sign-up for the strip, it debuted as a daily-only strip on December 18 1950¹. The strip was absolutely delightful, translating Audrey’s character perfectly for the medium. Why more papers didn’t pick it up is a mystery, though I do wonder if due to the licensing cost of the strip the syndicate was forced to ask premium prices. That’s the typical problem with licensed comic strips — there are just too many hands in the pot to make it financially worthwhile for anyone.

The Little Audrey comic strip was officially credited to “Al Buck,” who doesn’t exist. I am assured by a promo article in Editor & Publisher, December 16 1950, that the strip was actually produced by gag-writer Tom Johnson and drawn by Steve Muffatti. I also have a note that animator Larry Silverman was involved in creating the art, but I don’t know where that tidbit came from, or how definite it is.

Little Audrey took her final bow exactly one year after her debut, on December 15 1951².

Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer. ↩︎
Source: Latrobe Bulletin, thanks to Jeffrey Lindenblatt. ↩︎

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Lincoln Features: Farmyard Follies

Posted on: September 21, 2026 by Allan Holtz

Farmyard Follies is a feature that I stumbled upon by pure luck. It ran for eight episodes in the Crescent (OK) Times, and nowhere else that I can find. Although there are no syndicate stamps on the strips, two factors pretty much guarantee this is Lincoln material: one, the strip is by Lincoln bullpenner M.E. Brady, and two, the titles employ the distinctive Lincoln font.

These eight strips ran in the summer of 1937, which is an intriguing time for them to appear, and cements them as Lincoln material. The Crescent Times had just a bit prior to this been one of the few papers to run the sample strips from Lincoln’s aborted new page of features. Those samples all numbered eight episodes, and so does Farmyard Follies, so it stands to reason that this was probably among the proposed selections for the new page. I guess Farmyard Follies had so little appeal that the Times was the only one to actually print them, and even then they sat on them a bit before they were run. The only questionable aspect of this scenario is that all the other features were numbered while this one is not. But I think the coincidences are too great for this not to be one of the proposed new features that didn’t sell. And besides, one or two of the samples look like they could have had numbering scratched off of them, for reasons unknown.

M.E. Brady was one of the few Lincoln bullpenners who got to have his own name on a lot of his work. But that didn’t apply to Farmyard Follies — here he is bylined as “Rhyne.” But that’s okay, because Brady did get his name on these strips, just in their original runs — yes, these are merely reprints from an earlier strip Brady had done for the Brooklyn Eagle variously titled Dip And Duck, or Frogpond Ferry.

With Lincoln material I usually let the dates of their actual known appearances, however possibly wrong, be my guide for quasi-official start and end dates. And Farmyard Follies ran in the Crescent Times from June 10 to July 29 1937. But in my listing I will go on the assumption that these strips were made available with the rest of the scrapped page, and will use those dates — April 8 to May 27 1937.

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Wish You Were Here, from R.F. Outcault

Posted on: September 20, 2026 by Allan Holtz

Here’s a postcard that’s just brimming with esoteric trivia. First off, it’s an advertising postcard for Buster Brown Coffee, which was a product of the Steinwender-Stoffregen Coffee Company of St. Louis. The company was one of the biggest coffee roasting concerns in the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Their flagship brand was Yale Coffee, which I’ve never heard of, but I’m assured it was almost as much a household word as Folgers or Maxwell House in its day.

Outcault seems to have first licensed his character to the coffee company in December 1905; at least that’s when the first advertisements are seen. This date makes sense because this is when Outcault was leavintg the New York Herald and asserting his licensing rights to the character.

But I hear you saying, “Dude, the copyright on the card is plainly 1903. Your date seems to be a little off”. Maybe not, oh eagle-eyed one. See, the Steinwender-Stoffregen Company repurposed their advertising postcards from old Outcault cards that had been produced for Kaufmann & Strauss. The previous gag lines were replaced and sometimes the cards were partially redrawn to hawk the coffee. In this case I haven’t found the original card to compare to, but I’d bet dollars to donuts that there was a different character than Buster Brown featured. Buster and Tige seem to have been drawn by someone other than Outcault — apparently someone who’d never seen the strip but went off of a vague description of the famous pair.

Marketing a primarily adult-oriented beverage like coffee with Buster Brown doesn’t seem like that great a fit, but as with many Buster Brown-branded items, the coffee was a success. It was still available right up until Steinwender-Stoffregen went out of business in 1931.

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One-Shot Wonders: War Preparedness in Buffalo, 1898

Posted on: September 19, 2026 by Allan Holtz

The Buffalo Courier had a pretty neat homegrown colour comics page through part of 1898. The editor of the paper evidently quite liked cartooning in his Sunday edition; not only did they have their own artists contributing quite a lot of material in this period, but they were also an early adopter of the International Syndicate‘s page of cartoon gags.

But all that changed later in 1898. Reproducing photos was a real tough nut to crack for newspapers at this time, and the Courier seems to have come up with methods that worked really well. So enamored did they become of reproducing photos that the spotlight moved away from cartoons to page after page of photos in the Sunday papers.

Above we have a one-shot cartoon that ran in the Courier during that short-lived heyday of cartooning, on February 27 1898. I imagine if you were a resident of Buffalo during that time this is some funny stuff, but many of the inside jokes are too far inside for me. The cartoon was by a staff cartoonist named Parker. I’ve looked at a lot of his cartoons trying to suss out the initials that go along with the name, but all I can say is that “H.S.” is my best guess. But if it were a horse in a horse race, I wouldn’t bet big.

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