Comic History Comic Strips Gag cartooning Magazine cartoons

Rarities: W. P. Trent panels

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D. D. Degg Published: December 1, 2025 Updated: December 1, 2025 1 minute 1 comment

William Peterfield “W.P.” Trent, Jr. was the son of a respected Professor of English. W.P. jr. had an affinity for sketching rather than scholastics and made a career out of cartooning for a number of magazines.

Born on December 30, 1902 by the time he and the 20th Century both hit their 20s he was contributing cartoons to major magazines. Life, Judge, The Saturday Evening Post, Country Gentleman, The New Yorker, Collier’s, and other magazines were among those publishing his cartoons. Michael Maslin’s New Yorker cartoonist index has him contributing to that magazine from 1926 to 1941.

In 1928 he began a daily panel for The Brooklyn Daily Times titled Snob Stories.

“Snob Stories by Trent” began running in The Brooklyn Times weekdays on May 28, 1928 and before the first week was over it had found a permanent home on the back page.

Snob Stories ran until Monday April 22, 1929. On Tuesday April 23, 1929 Trent changed direction of his panel to a things-we-won’t-see type gag and retitled it to Never Happenings. The new panel still ran exclusively on the back page of The Brooklyn Daily Times.

After subnitting the new panel to syndicates and being rejected Trent and wife took off on a cross-country trip taking it upon themselves to self-syndicate the panel to newspapers.

While Trent told The Omaha World-Herald that “some papers” were running the panel I can find no evidence that any paper other than The Brooklyn Daily Times ever ran it and it ended there with the August 12, 1929 (a Monday) issue, apparently stopping it as he took off on his journey as a salesman.

Unsuccessful in selling the panel to a worthwhile number of newspapers W.P. returned to magazine cartooning.

In 1934 he showed up with a comic strip running in a pulp magazine. His The Bar Nothing one page comic strip ran in the monthly Cowboy Stories from January 1934 to April 1935. Unfortunately I can find no samples of Bar Nothing. Thanks to the Internet Archive I have samples of The Bar Nothing:

In the late 1930s Writer’s Digest became a regular customer.

During the 1950s he contributed The Fourth Estate panel to Editor and Publisher. Ger Apeldoorn at The Fabulous Fifties has pulled a selection of those comic panels about the newspaper industry from E&P.

W.P. Trent, Jr. passed away on February 25, 1972.