Reminiscing Gone Awry
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Art Smith reminisces about the comics pages of The Marietta Times and obviously delved into the newspaper’s archive to get the history right and refresh his memory. But did he get it right?
Art could have used a fact-checker – if newspapers employed fact-checkers any more.
The early comics page history of The Marietta Times begins in 1920:
Comics first started appearing in American newspapers in the late 1800s with a strip called the Yellow Kid appearing in a New York newspaper in 1895.
The Sept. 23, 1920, edition of The Times featured a single strip named Bringing up Father. The strip, later renamed [emphasis added]
Jiggs and Maggie, ran for 87 years, ending in May 2000.
Okay, we pass on that Yellow Kid reference, it was not the first newspaper comic strip by any means.
But Bringing Up Father was never renamed Jiggs and Maggie, at least not officially. The strip was referred to as “Jiggs and Maggie” (or “Maggie and Jiggs”) and apparently some newspapers used that title, but the name of the strip was always “Bringing Up Father.”
And then…
The Times of 1940 carried eight strips including Blondie. Blondie was introduced to the world in 1930 and drawn by Chris Young [emphasis added].
Chris Young? Blondie was created by Murat ‘Chic’ Young. Even if The Times didn’t credit the cartoonists Chic Young signed every strip.
As someone who makes my fair share of typos I’ll write it off as that (like his “Buzz” Sawyer reference).
But…
By 1950 Blondie was joined by 14 other panels, including Lil Abner, the Red Ryder and Donald Duck, drawn by Walt Disney himself [emphasis added].
Yes Walt Disney was credited for every Donald Duck comic strip and he signature was affixed to every one, but people knew that the Walt Disney comic strips were ghost by his studio and, other than the first few weeks of Mickey Mouse in 1930, Walt himself had nothing to do with them.
I do give Art Smith credit for making me look up Jim Baker’s The Ohio Adventure.
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