Wayback Whensday: The Case of the Curious Cartoonist
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Last month there was reason to believe that Ripley’s Believe It or Not had ended its historic run as the panel slipped into reprinting cartoons from the feature’s centennial year of 2018. That turned out to be a temporary turn of events and they are now once more offering new material. Rather than brush the research done for what I thought would be a death notice for the comic into the dustbin…
Robert L. Ripley was born Leroy Robert Ripley in 1980
By the time he was entering his 20s and the 20th Century was entering its teens the San Francisco sports cartoonist left the Bay Area for the newspaper Mecca of New York where he found employment with The New York Globe as sports cartoonist and writer. In short order he was being syndicated across the nation.
In late 1918 Ripley was at a loss for a cartoon so he collected a few sports oddities and changed his life.
Titled “Champs and Chumps” the first Believe It or Not was published on December 19, 1918 in Ripley’s home paper The New York Globe though it had seen print earlier in Washington D.C. and Buffalo N.Y.
And then… nothing. It took ten months for Ripley to repeat the idea.
When the second Champs and Chumps panel showed up his Globe editor renamed it “Believe It or Not” for publication in October 1919. Less than four months later a third Believe It or Not panel showed up.
The response from readers and editors (who could slide the noncontemporary strange sports stories into their sports pages on slow news day) was encouraging and a second February 1920 Believe It or Not showed up. The frequency increased, three in March 1920, and soon it became a weekly feature.
At that rate it didn’t take long to start running out of sports oddities. Other strangeness started appearing in the feature and eventually the panel was being filled with worldwide peculiarities outside the sports realm.
By the mid 1920s Believe It or Not was appearing in newspapers daily and on October 20, 1929 Ripley added a Sunday page.
Ripley died in 1949 and later that year, July 31, 1949 for the Sundays and August 1, 1949 for dailies, the comic was retitled from “Believe It or Not by Ripley” to “Ripley’s Believe It or Not.”
It continues daily and Sunday to this very day.
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