OT : Tales from the New York Daily News Sunday Comics (#2) : "We Are Back!" The 1962-63 Newspaper Strike & the Return of the Sunday Comics

The voice that triumphantly screamed out of the two-ray wrist radio said it all, "WE ARE BACK!" The feature title below the New York Daily News Sunday Comics section banner blared DICK TRACY, and all was right once again with the world. The comics were back because the newspapers were back! The strike was over!

New York City newspaper strikes were and are a predictable factor of the New York City labor situation. In the modern era, after several earlier strikes, there was the two week long 1899 Newsboy's Strike against Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, and William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Journal. The strike lasted from July 21 to August 2. This strike struck such a cultural chord that it inspired both Simon & Kirby's Newsboy Legion for National in Star Spangled Comics #7 (April, 1942) as well as the Disney film Newsies in 1992 (and the 2012-2014 Broadway production).

The famous 17 day Newspaper Strike of 1945 from June 30 to July 16 is notable in that 7 daily papers went down as 1700 delivery men walked out. All 7 papers were still actually published and sold out of their plant factories, causing massive lines all around the city as readers waited for as long as two hours in snaking, block-long lines, to get their favorite papers. Wonderful to us is the history that New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia read the newspaper comics over the radio, going so far as to do all the sound effects necessary in Chester Gould's Dick Tracy strip on Sundays.

Of course I already covered the 88 day 1978 New York City Newspaper Strike of August 10 to November 5, HERE.

The strike that precipitated the exclamation at the start of this article was the devastating  114 day Strike of 1962-63, from December 8, 1962 to March 31, 1963. I say devastating because the aftermath of the intense labor dispute between the publishers and typographers had the unprecedented consequence of ultimately dooming four of the eight New York daily newspapers. When the work-stoppage ended on March 31, 1963, the strike losses compounded the already existing financial hardships and took down the New York Daily Mirror on October 16, 1963. The New York Daily News bought the Mirror's name and good will, with several of the Mirror's successful comics strips jumping over to the News, including Al Capp's Li'l Abner, Harry Hanan's Louie, and Kerry Drake.

In addition to the Mirror in 1963, the lasting effects of the strike took down in April, 1966, the New York World Telegram, New York Sun, New York Journal-American and the New York Herald Tribune, several of which attempted mergers to stave off the end, but ultimately unsuccessful. The proposed mergers set off another strike that doomed all 4 papers.

This left only The New York Times, The New York Post and The New York Daily News. The Times carried no comics, the Post didn't have a Sunday edition and the sole remaining color Sunday comics section in New York City, by mid 1966, belonged to the New York Daily News.

Now let's get back to the end of the 1962-63 strike. By my calculations, the stoppage bookends 12/8/62 to 3/31/63, and took out 17 color Sunday sections that did not get published. (As I related in my last post HERE, Sunday comics sections were prepared and shipped to newsstands in advance and I was able to procure the Sunday August 13th section that post-dated the 1978 strike by 3 days. So it's not impossible that the first Sunday section of the strike exists)

Looking at the date involved, the strike ended on Sunday, March 31, 1963. Below I will present in its entirety, the very first Sunday section following that strike. But there are problems.

1. The Sunday Comics section is not dated anywhere.
2. The section is short by at least a third, only the top features were published
3. Nearly all of the features concern themselves with the newspaper strike!

So the big question .... Is this actually the Sunday section for the first Sunday back after the newspaper strike? If it is, it should be dated Sunday, April 7, 1963. It's not. It has no date at all. So what exactly is this? Is this a special supplement that ran on the last day of the strike, which was Sunday, March 31, 1963, in preparation to the start of publication on Monday, April 1? Is this sort of an April Fool's section? My answer is, I have no idea.

One thing to consider is that most of these cartoonists prepared full Sunday strips featuring the news that the strike was either over, or just mentioned newspapers in some capacity. These had to be prepared well in advance of the strike's end and probably on the recommendation of the syndicates that sold these strips to the News. 

And a last thought on the matter. If these strips were not part of the regular features' continuity, then they are extras that no one has ever seen since the appearance of this strike-end Sunday section. And if so, that's kind of cool!

Without further ado, here is the section in its entirety. My annotations will accompany each feature.

Cover: Dick Tracy by Chester Gould.(Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate)

Dick Tracy had the cover position on the Sunday News Comics from the mid 1930's right up to December 7, 1980, the day before former Beatle John Lennon was murdered. It replaced The Gumps on the front page and was ultimately ousted by Hagar The Horrible. This cover was not a Sunday page, just a specialty drawing of Tracy and his gang announcing the end of the strike and resumption of the comics in the Sunday News. If this was a real Sunday section, then Tracy's Sunday page was skipped this week, something I find doubtful.

Page 2: Winnie Winkle by Martin Branner (Chicago Tribune Syndicate)

Branner's signature is in under the title but I don't think he was still doing this strip in 1963, having suffered stroke the year before. This may be his long-time assistant Max Van Bibber. The long-running career-girl feature ran 76 years in total from 1920 to 1996. My oldest News Sunday section in 1929 has Winnie. I'm still in the midst of indexing my collection from 1961 to present and am presently only in 1988. Winnie was still running in the News as of that date, drawn by Frank Bolle. It's a good bet it ran there until the end.

At the bottom of the page is another Martin Branner feature, the humor strip Looie. Looie was soon gone and shortly the News received another, differently spelled Louie from The Mirror, the classic pantomime strip by Harry Hannan. Looie was possibly a revival of sorts of one of Branner's earliest features for the Bell Syndicate in 1919, Looie The Lawyer.

Neither of the above Branner features mention the Strike or newspapers in any way.

Page 3: Terry And The Pirates by George Wunder (Chicago Tribune Syndicate)
The first incarnation of this classic strip was launched in 1934 by the great Milton Caniff. The feature was one of the most celebrated of its time and Caniff's style the inspiration of scores of adventure strip and comic book artists for decades to come. Caniff would leave the feature at the end of 1946 due to creative and control differences with the syndicate and launch Steve Canyon in January of 1947. George Wunder replaced Canniff on Terry, continuing on until February 25, 1973. The Sunday News carried the feature until the month before its demise, January 1973.

This installment does mention newspapers, including  the 8th panel with an image of the New York Daily News, and a mention of "it's like being without the papers" in panel 6, a deliberate strike reference.

Page 4: Brenda Starr Reporter by Dale Messick (Chicago Tribune Syndicate)
Launched in 1940, this very popular feature ran until January of 2011, with Messick retiring from the art chores in 1980, and full relinquishing in 1982. Ramona Fradon was the second artist on the feature until being replaced by June Brigman in 1995.

This one is easy! A full page montage of the newspaper strike being over!

Page 5: Beany by Frank Johnson (Chicago Tribune Syndicate)
Frank Johnson was an assistant to Mort Walker who ghosted on Beetle Bailey, Hi and Lois, and a long run Boner's Ark, both credited and uncredited. According to online sources, Beany incorrectly is credited to have run from 1968 to 1974. As this is 1963, we know the 1968 reference is incorrect. Beany ran sporadically in the Sunday news, usually running vertically against a 3/4 page ad (as seen here), only when ad pages ran (which was not every week). It would alternate with Tweety-Pie by Roy Fox (not the bird!). Beany ran as late as 1979, last seen in the Sunday News Comics on August 19, 1979. Given the incorrect start date in the references, the end date of 1974 is likely incorrect also. Either that or the News ran reprints.

This Beany installment does not mention the strike nor anything about newspapers.

Page 6: 
Smitty by Walter Berndt (Chicago Tribune Syndicate)
Pottsy by Jay Irving (Irving Joel Rafsky) (Chicago Tribune-News Syndicate)

Walter Berndt's Smitty ran 51 years between 1922 and 1973, ending its New York Daily News Sunday run on March 7, 1971.

Jay Irving's Pottsy ran from 1955 to 1970, ending upon Irving's sudden death. Pottsy continued to appear in the Sunday News for about 2 months before Irving's inventory ran out.

Both Smitty and Pottsy installments below dealt with the end of the newspaper strike.

Page 7: Moon Mullins by Ferd Johnson (Chicago Tribune Syndicate)

The long-running popular strip Moon Mullins ran from 1923 to 1991, ending its Daily News Sunday run on August 28, 1977. My earliest Sunday has the feature in 1929 so there is a straight, nearly 50 year run in the New York Daily News. The feature was created by Frank Willard and Ferd Johnson was an assistant almost from the beginning, eventually taking over the feature in 1958 upon the death of Willard. Johnson had been producing most of the strip for years uncredited.

The strip below as well as the "topper" Kitty Higgins by Johnson, do not deal with the strike or newspapers.

Page 8:
Smilin' Jack by Jack Mosley (Chicago Tribune Syndicate)
Smokey Stover by Bill Hollman (Chicago Tribune Syndicate)

The longest running aviation comic strip, Jack Mosley's Smilin' Jack zoomed the newspaper skyways from 1933 to 1973, although it was not carried by the New York Daily News Sunday section past 1966. This installment's one large panel completely references that the newspaper strike is now over.

Smokey Stover by Bill Hollman ran from 1935 to his retirement in 1973, last seen the New York Daily News Sunday section in September, 1972 (as did his topper Spooky). This entry did not reference the newspaper strike in any way. I have a brief connection to Hollman in that his wife was one of my first patients back in the day.

Page 9: Mary Perkins On Stage by Leonard Starr (Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate)

One of the most beautiful strips of all, Leonard Starr's showpiece ran from 1957 to 1979, ending in the Daily News Sunday Section of August 29, 1976. Starr then launched a revamped Annie feature on December 9, 1979, based on the success of the Broadway musical.

The strip below does reference the newspaper strike.

Page 10: 
Little Orphan Annie by Harold Gray (Chicago Tribune Syndicate)

Before there was Annie, there was Little Orphan Annie! One of the most successful and popular strips of all time Harold Gray's masterpiece ran from 1924 until his death in 1968. It limped on with other artists and reprints before being supplanted by the relaunched Annie, which ended in 2010.

The strip below makes a reference to Annie's paper route, which may or not be a strike influenced comment.

Aggie Mack by Roy Fox (Chicago Tribune Syndicate)
Launched in 1946 by Hal Rassmusson, Roy Fox took over the feature in 1962 upon Rasmusson's death. It appeared sporadically as an emergency filler until it's last New York Daily News Sunday appearance on June 18, 1972, with a title shortened to just Aggie. (It's previous appearance was on December 26, 1971!) Fox had another infrequently appearing strip called Tweety-Pie that similarly ran as a filler, last appearing In the daily News Sunday section dated February 25, 1979.

The Aggie Mack below does reference the newspaper strike.

Page 11: Dondi by Gus Edson and Irwin Hasen (Chicago Tribune Syndicate)
One of my all-time favorite continued adventure strips! The late Irwin Hasen was a friend of mine and we discussed the feature innumerable times. Unfortunately, one thing I never asked him was about "this" entry, whether it was a one-off or part of the Dondi continuity.

Dondi ran from 1955 to 1986, starting inside, and then was a mainstay of the Daily News Sunday Comics back page from about 1965 to May 1, 1977, when it was supplanted by Charles Schulz's Peanuts. When Edson died in 1966, Bob Oksner assisted Hasen until the strip's end. Ben Oda was the predominant letter of the feature.

In this installment, Dondi and his pal Baldy are looking in the newspaper for a movie review. No strike is mentioned but a "newspaper" is. Dondi Sunday strips always were part of a continuing saga. This episode appears to be self-contained and created solely for the comics' "return".

Back Page: Gasoline Alley by Bill Perry (Chicago Tribune Syndicate)

Finally, the back page and the venerable Gasoline Alley. Walt and his crew would be kicked off the back page in a year or so and replaced by Dondi.

Gasoline Alley is one of the granddaddies of newspaper strips, created by Frank King as a single panel feature debuting on November 24, 1918 and still running today. The original premise of the strip was lifelong bachelor Walt Wallet and his gang of friends (Avery and Doc) hanging around their garage. Most of the gags were of the automotive variety. But on February 14, 1921, Walt found an abandoned baby on his doorstep in the middle of the night, named him Skeezix, and the strip took off into the stratosphere. King had his characters age in real time, with his resulting genius depiction slice of Americana during the early and mid part of the 20th century, never surpassed by anyone.

Frank King handled the feature from 1918 to 1959. His assistant Bill Perry did the Sunday strips only from 1951 to 1975. Dick Moores did the daily continuity from 1959 to 1986 and Jim Scancarelli has produced the feature from 1986 to present.

The strongest recommendation I can make to readers is to look for the 5 volume reprinting of the earliest years of the strip by Drawn and Quarterly entitled Walt and Skeezix. A 6th precursor volume is called Walt before Skeezix, and reprints all the non-continuity automobile gag-a-day strips from 1918 to 1920. The most recent volume from 2011 carries the series up to 1930. (with a new one due in November).Walt and Skeezix, edited by Chris Ware, with annotations and introductions by historian Jeet Heer, and family archive articles and artifacts from the King family, is the finest collection of perhaps the grandest newspaper strip ever presented. Two over-sized volumes of King's fantastic Sunday pages have also been published by Dark Horse, covering the years 1920-1925. Everything can be bought here:  Walt and Skeezix

The strip below does not reference the strike nor any newspaper.

So what to make of all this? Some of the features above appear to be regular installments. Some vaguely mention a newspaper in the strip. Others are absolute "strike's over" installments. Dick Tracy doesn't even publish a Sunday page! Is this "the" first Sunday section after the strike ended, making it April 7, 1963? if so, why is there no date? And no Dick Tracy? Or is it a Sunday "special" presented on March 31, 1963, the day the strike ended. I'm betting on the latter, as a special late edition wrap on the Sunday night the strike ended, with "strike strips" prepared well in advance. If so, it's cool to see "special" strike Sunday pages not seen anywhere else.  It would really have helped if there was a date "anywhere" on this thing!

One thing I have found, is a similar Chester Gould Dick Tracy specialty drawing announcing the end of a New York City newspaper strike, this one in 1966. (From "Dick Tracy, America's Favorite Detective", Citadel Press). So he did it once in 1963 and apparently did it again in 1966.

I welcome all comments and suggestions.

OT : Tales from the New York Daily News Sunday Comics (#1)

This is the first of the occasional off-topic post concerning my obsession with the Sunday comics sections of my youth. For folks who grew up in New York City, I hope it brings back memories. Future entries in this series will elaborate on  specific features of interest within these comics sections.

Before there were comic books, there were comic strips. Historians and researchers have moved the timeline ever backward on the evolutionary origins of the format, both single and sequential panel, doubling and trebling the Victorian era of comics in the Overstreet guide over the years. My pal Bob Beerbohm has taken the printed format of "comic book" in this country as far back as 1842, revealing The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck by Swiss cartoonist Rodolphe Töpffer. Printed first in Europe, it was reprinted in the U.S. as a newspaper supplement. The Platinum era likewise promulgated compilations of sequential art, frequently popular newspaper features. But the earliest newsstand comic books, as we generally know them, started in 1933 with Eastern Color's Famous Funnies, and the contents were newspaper comic strip reprints.

On a personal level, before I read comic books, I read comic strips. The newspaper of choice in my home of the late 1960's was the New York Daily News. Most of the plethora of New York newspapers folded in the 1960's following the devastating  newspaper strikes of 1962-63 and 1965. This left only the Daily News, the New York Times and the New York Post. The Post, unfortunately, didn't have a Sunday edition. My father would occasionally bring home the broadsheet New York Times, especially the Sunday edition, but the awkward "folded" format and lack of comics turned me off. On Sundays, my grandparents would come over for Sunday dinner and bring the tabloid format Sunday News with the color comic section. I had two immediate intentions, first to see what they wrote about my New York Mets from Saturday's game (even though I usually watched the entire game), and reading the comics. My grandfather would arrive, walk up the stairs and say to me every week, "Hey Mike, go see what Louie did today!" Louie, my grandfather's favorite strip, was the late Harry Hanan's 3-tier pantomime strip, a feature which would also become the favorite strip of my childhood. Louie had no text, no continuity, and within the confines of the strip, received no respect. He even looked like my grandfather! Short, mustachioed, and fedora-wearing.

November 19, 1967:

Here Louie's wife catches their son rotting his brain with a horror comic book. Dr. Frederic Wertham would be proud!

March 19, 1972:

The Sunday News comic section was thick (often had up to 30 features), and stuck more-or-less to the same format for years. The total amount of features would vary subtly depending on how many advertisements were run. There must have been a maximum number of pages allowed so if more ads ran, strips had to be cut. But the cut strips would never be any of the major features. Chester Gould's Dick Tracy was always on the front cover, Irwin Hasen's Dondi was always on the back cover. Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie (and Maw Greene) was on page 2, Chic Young's Blondie was always on page 3 in the 1970's. Others included Mort Walker's Beetle Bailey, Leonard Starr's gorgeous On Stage (later called Mary Perkins, On Stage), Dale Messick's Brenda Starr, and Jerry Robinson's Flubs & Fluffs, which was usually opposite Dondi on the inside back cover, although earlier in the decade it was a full page of Gasoline Alley. Winnie Winkle ran forever.

Stan Lynde's Rick O'Shay ran sporadically for 3 decades:

February 3, 1974:

On Easter Sunday of 1972, two new features debuted simultaneously. Both had been running for nearly a decade elsewhere. Jim Berry's Berry's World had been running since 1963 and Bil Kean's The Family Circus since 1960. Both would have Easter themes:

April 2, 1972:

April 2, 1972:

Bill Keane's  Family Circus was wonderful, but for some reason I never thought as funny as his Channel Chuckles, which didn't run in this paper (but I had enjoyed via paperback reprints).

Here Keane does a generational homage to characters long gone and revered by comic strip fans and historians...

June 1, 1980:

Scores and scores of wonderful features persisted, appeared and vanished through the decades....

Leonard Starr's gorgeous Mary Perkins On Stage.

December 31, 1967:

This entry uses artist/writer Tom Sawyer (Tom Scheuer) as a model for one of the characters. Sawyer did backgrounds for Starr when he broke into the business.

May 16, 1971:

Starr would ultimately re-launch Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie in late 1979 as ANNIE. (The original Sunday run ended in the News on March 14, 1976.) Here is the debut Starr Annie Sunday.

December 9, 1979:

In 1973 I found the debut of Hagar the Horrible by Dik Browne.

February 4, 1973:

Jerry Robinson's Flubs & Fluffs
December 18, 1983:
(Running since the mid 1960's, here is a huge double splash Holiday centerfold!! It's 14 by 16 inches!)

1971 saw the debut of two new features. The first was Dark Shadows, based on the enormously popular daytime Gothic soap opera, and drawn by ex-Timely artist Ken Bald. (Bald had drawn the definitive versions of Timely's Millie The Model and Cindy Smith in the 1940's).

***(Dark Shadows replaced the long-running Daily News comic strip icon Smitty by Walter Berndt, a feature that had appeared without fail since the early 1920's!)***

Dark Shadows debuted with the March 14, 1971 Sunday page. It ran daily and Sunday until November 7, 1971 in the Sunday News, continuing elsewhere until March 11, 1972. I can tell you why the News dropped it half-way through its run... As gorgeous as it was drawn, it was as boring as can be, story-lines meandering and dragging on with minimal suspense. Here is the second Sunday page....

March 21, 1971:

Then on November 14, 1971, appeared a promo for another new comic strip, Cliff Roberts' Sesame Street, which would debut the very next Monday on November 15. Based on the very popular Public Television children's show that began in 1969, the feature replaced Dark Shadows, which, as mentioned, had been running since March 14. Sesame Street would only run here until July of 1972 (continuing elsewhere until 1975). The early period of the strip did not feature any of Jim Henson's Muppets, but rather highlighted the art of Sesame Street animator Cliff Roberts. The Muppets themselves would have a later strip in the Sunday News called Jim Henson's Muppets, from September 1981 to April 1983.


November 14, 1971:

January 9, 1972:

Week after week, month after month, the format and features could be counted on to be there and in their respective positions, with the occasional minor aberration. "Country Editions" of the Sunday News, meaning editions that were sold out of state, had red prices as opposed to the blue NYC editions (labeled "Comics Section" under the left blue price), as well as extra features due to the lack of local ads. So. for example, when "Super" Duper was missing any given week, it was likely often instead published in the National edition. And unfortunately, vice versa.

April 21, 1968:
(NYC edition - blue price)

April 1, 1973:
(Country Edition - red price)

Here is a direct comparison of the same section from both the Country Edition and the Local Edition of the April 15, 1973 Sunday section. Both copies have the same features, with some slight different positioning on different pages. The "blue" NYC edition on the right has 28 total features. The "red" Country Edition on the left has 27 features. The differences are that the NYC edition does not carry Animal Crackers nor Bill Kresse's Super Duper. The Country Edition does. Additionally, the NYC Edition has substituted Tweety-Pie (not the bird) in place of Super Duper. Tweety-Pie was a short strip by Roy Fox that always ran length-wise down a page against a 3/4 full page ad.

In the late 1960's, there were even features I didn't remember, showcasing gorgeous artwork by comic book legends including the great Joe Kubert, who had a spell on Tales of the Green Beret in 1967:

April 16, 1967:

April 23, 1967:

December 31, 1967:

January 7, 1968:

As a little kid, I would crudely decimate these sections every Sunday...... Coloring in Coloring College with crayons, filling in Junior Jumbles in pen (rather than pencil, and crossing out a lot!), clipping out master caricaturist Bruce Stark's sports posters in the centerfold, and in the early 1970's, cutting out those cheap rock group iron-ons for my white tea-shirts (that never actually went on the shirts, so the comics were destroyed unnecessarily).

Mets manager Yogi Berra in the June 17, 1973 Sunday comics section.
Artist: Bruce Stark

I would occasionally even clip strips themselves, specifically my second favorite strip,"Super" Duper, a frantically stylized parody of a building superintendent who was more interested in girl-watching. Those girls in question were voluptuously rendered by former Humorama (and sometime 1960's Archie Comics) cartoonist, Bill Kresse. (Kresse drew a dynamite Sabrina the Teen-Aged Witch that was so jarring, the editors eventually pulled him off the feature!)

• (Irony of ironies, unbeknownst to me, Bill Kresse actually lived within walking distance of my Jackson Heights home all the years I lived there. I found this out years later when my youngest brother Stephen was working in a drug store on Northern Blvd and 80th street. He came home one day and told me one of his frequent customers was a cartoonist he'd never heard of. My curiosity piqued, I asked him to get the man's name the next time he came into the store. The following week Steve comes home and tells me the guy's name was Bill Kresse. "Bill Kresse??", I exclaimed, "Don't you know who that is? That's the guy who drew Super Duper in the Sunday News!" Well, two days later my brother comes home with a color autographed drawing of Super Duper. The inscription read ... "For Steve, thanks for remembering me! From Bill Kresse and Super Duper!".  Thanks for remembering me, indeed! $%&#!!! )

May 6, 1973:

In 1973 I made a decision. I would stop ruining these Sunday Comics sections and start saving them. Every single week without fail, after reading, I dutifully placed the section in a large manila envelope. At some point we started getting the paper delivered in the morning, so I didn't have to rely on my grandparents. If I missed a section completely, I'd frantically search neighbors' garbage cans where old newspapers were piled up. When my family went on vacation, I made sure the Sunday comics were covered by a neighbor, grandparent, friend, anyone I could find. Yes, I'd occasionally miss one completely, but never more than 2 or 3 a year. And most years were 100% complete. No matter how many times I changed my address from college, post-graduate and buying a home, I made sure I continued to put those weekly sections away. Yet, I never looked back at them in all the years that had gone by. They just continued to accumulate and pile up, first in a staggeringly high pile of manila envelopes, then in storage boxes. 

In 1973 I also discovered comic books. (And that's another story in itself!)

Let's flash-forward now nearly 45 years. About a month ago I was staring at a 7 foot high pile of yellowed manila envelopes and two large storage boxes. That same weekend my pals Nick Caputo and Barry Pearl were up here visiting on a Saturday, Nick bringing with him two Daily News Sunday Comics sections from 1968 to show me some old Louie and "Super" Duper strips, features we both loved and frequently discussed.  I looked at them knowing a goldmine that I had not seen in decades existed 7 feet behind a wall in my garage. When they left, a decision was made. It was finally time to dig these out (as if I had nothing else better to do) and organize this half century of Sunday comics. The chore was not really difficult as it sounds as all the dates were sequential, but I wanted to know exactly what I had and what was missing. The results were fascinating. I had a near-complete run of weekly New York Daily News Sunday Comics sections from 1973 to present day, meaning as of last Sunday. In addition I had tons earlier, having found and bought the occasional section over the decades at old Phil Seuling cons in the 1970's. I now had about half of 1967, half of 1968, one in black and white (due to a printing error) from 1965, several from the year of my birth in 1961, a bunch from the 1950's, 1940's, 1939, 1930 and even one from 1929! I also realized that many of the features of the 1960's had migrated over to the New York Daily News from The New York Daily Mirror, which folded in October 1963, following the disastrous 1962-63 newspaper strike. Louie, Kerry Drake and Li'l Abner in particular, had come to the News from the Mirror.

The Mirror's Sunday comics section was also fabulous. I don't have enough samples to come to a definite conclusion, but it appears that two main features jostled over the course of decades to appear on either the front cover or the back cover. Here are two examples. One from 1950 and one from 1961. In 1950 Ham Fisher's Joe Palooka took the cover spot, while Al Capp's Li'l Abner the back cover. By 1961 it was reversed... Li'l Abner on the cover and Joe Palooka on the back cover.

January 15, 1950:

August 13, 1961:

Even earlier in the 1940's, Superman commanded the back cover of the Mirror, with Batman & Robin patrolling the page before!

Here's a strange anomaly....from the June 15, 1952 New York Daily News comic section, an Al Capp rendered full-page Li'l Abner contest ad sponsored by Surf soap. What makes this strange is the fact that Abner was then not running in the Daily News, but in the rival New York Mirror!

Back in the Sunday News, a late 1967 section even turns up an ad by pioneering comic book back-issue dealer Howard Rogofsky, right below Bill Hollman's Smokey Stover:

November 19, 1967:

I found another comic book ad in 1971. A fellow named Gene George placed at least 2 ads along the bottom of the Smokey Stover/"Super" Duper page offering to buy comic books from the 1930's to 1955. He obviously felt anything after that were worthless! The two Sunday dates were June 13 and June 27, 1971.

June 13, 1971:

Cropped:

In 1970 I found a great Hot Wheels ad illustrated by Alex Toth, who had a run on the comic book version of the classic toy car line. The ad was huge, lengthwise as a full page, 11x15 inches!

July 19, 1970:

1970 also saw a similar lengthwise full page 11x15 inch ad for the upcoming ABC Saturday morning children's lineup:

September 6, 1970:

In the early 1980's appeared the rare occasional ad by infamous discount electronics retailer Crazy Eddie. His iconic television spots were some of the most obnoxious commercials in NYC retail history! Crazy Eddie was actually Eddie Antar whose company at its peak reached sales of $300 million dollars a year and 43 stores. But after going public, it all eventually collapsed in fraud. When the massive skimming scheme was uncovered Eddie fled the country, later being convicted and imprisoned on the testimony of his cousin Sam, the company CFO. The man in the TV ads was not Eddie, but radio DJ Jerry Carroll. It was these "crazy" TV ads that drove a great deal of Eddie's retail success.

June 13, 1982                                                                        August 1, 1982

And if you don't believe me, try this....

The collection I had accumulated was downright gorgeous!

52 near mint Sunday News sections from 1973 and 1974:

October 10, 1965:
(Rare Black & White)

Page 6 of the newspaper explains why the comics lacked color. Unfortunately, I don't have the paper's main section.

From September 1, 1957, a ghostly ad for Winston cigarettes. I suppose the irony of this comic strip ad never dawned on the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company this far back in the land and time of presumed innocence. R.J. Reynolds helped millions of would-be intelligent smokers join our discriminating friend Luke prematurely in his den of "good taste".

According to my pal Ger Apeldoorn, ... "the artist above is Bob Bugg, who did Pictorial Review covers and illustrations in the 1950's, including the Sgt. Bilko ad for Camels in 1957-1958." 

Look for more samples at his fantastic 1950's illustration blog here: The Fabulous Fifties

September 1, 1957:

January 29, 1956

A gorgeous early Dondi Sunday by Irwin Hasen.

Jack Williamson and Lee Elias' Beyond Mars on the back cover in 1953:

This Sunday also sported a very early proto Tony the Tiger ad for Kellogg's Sugar Frosted Flakes. The cereal debuted in 1951.

In 1929 Sidney Smith's The Gumps held the front page while the great Frank King's Gasoline Alley was featured on the back:

April 28, 1929:

Immersed in all these thousands of Sunday sections  wasn't good enough. Having all this before me, I realized that there was data here that had to be mined and recorded for posterity, and this would probably be my only chance to do it.  I created two spreadsheets. In one I began to systematically list all the features each week in the order they appeared. The second would list the features "sequentially", meaning the order they appeared as features. So all the features in my earliest sections would be at the start of the spreadsheet and as they disappeared over the years, blank spaces would be created, allowing me to easily track when features appeared, when they ended and exactly what replaced them. Dick Tracy would always be in the first column, obviously, no matter when it moved inside, and it moved off the front page for good on December 14, 1980, moving inside and being replaced on the cover with Hagar The Horrible. Based on my 1939 section, this gave Dick Tracy at the very least, a 40 year run on the front page of the New York Daily News. In 1929 and 1930, The Gumps were on the cover with Gasoline Alley on the back cover. In 1931 Gasoline Alley was on the cover, so sometime between 1931 and 1939, Dick Tracy rose to the coveted cover feature and did not relinquish it until the Sunday after John Lennon's death in 1980.

As I made my way through the mid 1970's, three Sunday News Comics debuts appeared in succession as some of the older guards were juggled onto partial hiatus. On January 2, 1977 the comics ran a full page promo ad for the upcoming Amazing Spider-Man strip by Stan Lee and John Romita, the first Sunday starting the following week on January 9. The feature would run in the News until July of 1981, leave the paper and return again to the Sunday page on April 23, 1983, continuing on for over 2 decades.

Then on May 1, 1977, the comics ran an interior full page promotional ad for Charles Schulz's Peanuts, which would finally make it's Daily News Sunday debut 27 years late on May 8, 1977. Debuting on the back cover, it kicked off Irwin Hasen's long-running Dondi, which had owned the back cover since about 1962. Peanuts would run continuously in this paper until the last Sunday on February 13, 2000. 49% of the strip's entire 50 year run would be carried by the New York Daily News. Peanuts had not been completely absent from the area, though. It ran in Long Island's Newsday and may have appeared in earlier defunct NYC papers.

Finally, on March 26, 1978, the comics ran a full page promo ad for DC's World's Greatest Superheros strip, which debuted 2 Sundays later on April 9, 1978. This was written by Martin Pasko, penciled by George Tuska and inked by Vince Colletta. The Sunday feature would run here until October 7, 1979, where it was replaced by the feature Koky (which debuted 3 weeks earlier).

When I reached the summer of 1978 a horrific discovery was made.  I was absolutely stunned to find that 3 entire months were missing from August through October! How could this be? At the very least, I could recall never missing more than 2 or 3... maybe at the very most 5 in any given year, and the vast majority of years were 100% complete! How could 3 months be missing??? Had my grandmother (who I lived with while in college), cleaned up my old bedroom (meaning, tossed stuff out)? Had my mother thrown them out? I frantically thought back through the years in my mind and realized that these were during high school. What happened in high school that would cause a loss of three entire months of sections? And then it hit me! There was another long multi-union New York City newspaper strike in 1978 taking down the New York Times, New York Post and New York Daily News!

Searching online sources, the dates completely matched the dates of the missing Sunday sections, from August 10 to November 5, 1978. But here was something further.... August 10th was a Thursday. I had the Sunday section for August 13th here in the collection. Then I recalled that I had gone down to my local candy store at the corner of Northern Blvd. and 73rd street in Jackson Heights, and knowing that Sunday sections were printed up and sent to newsdealers a week in advance (I had worked at the candy store years earlier, often putting together the Sunday news and NY Times sections on Saturday nights), got a copy of the Sunday section for the never-published Sunday newspaper before they were thrown out! Heck, this may be the only one in existence, for all I know!

August 13, 1978 NY Daily News Sunday comics section:
(Unpublished)

INTERLUDE:

(That candy store, long my source for newspapers and comic books when I was a kid, is now a Verizon store. When I returned to the area 5 years ago for the funeral of a childhood friend, my brothers and I stopped over at the Mark Twain Diner across the street and diagonal from The International House of Pancakes (sorry, I'll never call it IHOP). I couldn't believe my old candy store was gone! The original proprietors I knew were the parents of Gary Gold, a local kid I played baseball and hockey with. It was an old-fashioned corner store with a great soda fountain that made egg-creams that were out of this world. Gary Gold and I played baseball together one year for the local youth league on a team called Silksox Boy's Club. At that time I had very long hair in an almost 1965 Beatle-cut. Gary used to say I looked like Prince Valiant.

Buying my comic books in that store was always a bit of a chore. I could spend as much or as little time as I wanted looking through the racks but then when it came time to pay, it was impossible to get out fast. Gary's mother would slowly go through every book I had in my pile, reading the title out loud for everyone within earshot to hear... "One Spider-Man, one Uncanny Tales from the Grave, one Fantastic Four..." It drove me crazy! But his father was equally unnerving. Mr Gold would count out the price of each comic book out loud, ending with a round dollar he called by some inanimate (or animate) object... "25 cents, 50 cents, 75 cents, a bean, ... 25 cents, 50 cents, 75 cents, 2 fish!". So four 25 cent comics would cost me a bean and eight would cost me 2 fish!

The early 1970's long-shot photo above shows the Gold's candy store in the distance behind Jack-in-the-Box and the Mark Twain Diner. Both are gone now. Jack-in-the-Box became Arby's, then a parking lot, and now, an office building, I believe. The Mark Twain Diner is still structurally there, but may go under another name. Directly across Northern Blvd. from the candy store (just out of site at the left side of the photo) is the International House of Pancakes.What a block! Comics, newspapers, hamburgers, pancakes and egg creams!

One more story about that photo above. One day in January of 1975, my brother Nicholas and I were in the Gold candy store one afternoon buying comics. After spending either a bean or two fish, we were both tanked out and flat broke. On our way out I spied the cover of a book I'd never seen before, Weird War Tales. I'd never seen it before because it was DC and I never read DC comics. Superman, Batman, etc,... they were all silly to me compared to the Thing or the Hulk published by Marvel. It was a giant-sized book though, with a soldier, a caveman and a dinosaur on the cover! But the price! It was twice as much as a regular comic book at 50 cents and twice as thick. I absolutely had to have this book! But what to do? I had spent every cent I had, about two fish worth. My brother had nothing either. 

Dejectedly, we exited the store and walked in front of the Mark Twain Diner, seen in red above behind the stop sign. Then I had a brainstorm! Jack-in-the-Box had a drive through window at the right of that same stop sign above! People paid from their car! They must occasionally drop money during the transaction that no one ever retrieves! I pulled my brother to the window, looked around. Lo and behold, two one dollar bills were on the floor!. I knew it! I scooped them up, hurried back to Gold's candy store and bought my giant size Weird War Tales. And I still have it!

The 1980's photo below shows the corner store now called Sun's Stationary, after sale to Steve Sun in the mid 1970's. We all now called it "Uncle Sun's"

Late 1975 or early 1976, the Gold family sold the store to Steve Sun, a Chinese-American who hired me for several summers. I ran the store nearly myself one summer when his wife was pregnant with their second or third child, and Steve was out of the store most of the day. A great boss, my only negative feeling about Steve is that he pulled out the soda fountain and replaced it with a glass showcase for selling useless nick-nacks. So now the egg creams were gone! 

This was my first meeting with actual responsibility. Here I was, a kid of about 14 or 15, running a candy store all day, alone during the "Summer of Sam"! I'd meet him in the morning, put out all the newspapers, and get behind the counter, as he left for most of the day. At about 10:30 AM on the dot, Syd the Mailman would saunter in, leaving his mail push-cart outside. Syd seemed middle-aged to me, which could have been 35 when I was 14, but I suspect was at least 50. He came in every day for his "morning vitamins", which meant a large sized bottle of Yoo-Hoo chocolate drink. Syd would tell me that if it was good enough for Yogi Berra (who was the advertising spokesperson for Yoo-Hoo), it was good enough for him. (And 40 years later, I'll come clean ... I never charged Syd for that daily Yoo-Hoo. Uncle Sun never found out!). 

He'd then kick back and peruse the magazines and newspapers, often calling out their  names and cracking jokes about them. One in particular I recall, had to do with The Hobo News, a street paper from the 1930's and 1940's. He'd ask me if any copies were left. When I answered in the negative, that we'd never, ever even had any copies, he'd reply, "Then what are the bums going to read?" He'd do this on a daily basis. The same Hobo News joke. And I probably laughed at it each day, certainly never realizing that there was once an actual publication called The Hobo News!

After Syd left to continue his rounds, the procession of neighborhood customers and characters would come throughout the day, all familiar to me. Newspapers, cigarettes, comic books, magazines, stickball bats, Lotto tickets, adult magazines, rolling paper, batteries, baseball cards, candy and gum, I took money for all of it, day after day, until Steve came back around 4:00 PM.

And what characters! In addition to Syd, there was an old guy I called "Two Eve". He looked like a squat hairy hobbit and every morning I'd see him slowly making his way towards the store, walking in front of Bohack across the street, crossing to the International House of Pancakes, where he would wait for the light to cross Northern Blvd. and enter the store. He'd come in, his breath wheezing, to buy two packages of Eve cigarettes. Back then the #1 brand was Marlboro. But "Two Eve" would come in daily, and after a while not even tell me the brand, he'd just put his hands into his pockets, pull out a handful of weird junk including washers, slugs, small ballpoint pen springs (which would invariably fall to the floor), what looked like wrapped Werner's butterscotch candy, and pocket change, blurting out, "Give me two!" Eve was a woman's brand of cigarette, debuting in 1971 as competition to Phillip Morris' Virginia Slims, so maybe he was buying them for his wife. But every day like clockwork, two packs of Eve. The same routine. Somebody was obviously smoking them.

Then there was this enormous woman, grossly overweight, who lived around the corner on 73rd street towards 34th Avenue, across from Physician's Hospital. She'd come in daily during the summer wearing thong slippers and a tank top, buying the largest bag of Wise potato chips that we sold. She washed the large bag down with a 2-liter bottle of diet Pepsi. The first time, I asked her whether she wanted me to put the soda in a bag for her. Her reply was, "No, just give me a big straw!" I had the straw ready every day after that.

One time I got into an argument with a guy buying a stickball bat. He was looking for these light bats I'd occasionally see in sporting good stores (like Bill Allen's on Steinway Street, or Barco's off Roosevelt Avenue in Woodside). I hated the light bats, (they felt like balsa wood!). We played with a heavier, sturdier wood bat. one that could withstand the rigors of fast-pitch handball-court stickball, a game played in the handball courts of St. Michael's Park, with a strike zone spray-painted on the wall behind the batter. The lighter bats appeared to be made of pine and would crack easily if something more substantial than a Spaldeen was used, like a tennis ball. He swore the lighter bats were better because you could swing them faster (which shows how much he knew!). I told him the lighter bats were cheap pieces of garbage that broke easily, and (the smart ass that I was) told him he'd realize that if he knew anything about stickball at all (which I certainly did). He ended up buying one of our bats. I never saw him again because the bat probably never broke! In all honesty, I think the same company made both types of bats. This was probably Spalding trying to save money and changing the wood used to a cheaper, lighter, more easily splintering wood. The heavier wood bats were probably older inventory still in various stores, including candy stores, where they'd often languish for years. Within a few years all the bats you could find were this cheap, light wood, and all of them broke easily and readily. We'd go through about one a week.

Sadly, the Gold Candy store/Sun Stationary store is now gone. What stories that Verizon store could tell...

Steve and Mrs. Sun, circa 1986, the candy counter at "Uncle Sun's", a decade after I last worked there. The original wood cabinetry hailing from the 1940's or earlier, can be seen behind them. I sat behind that counter for two summers in the mid 1970's.

END OF INTERLUDE


Getting back to the comic sections, now I was sidetracked. What I remembered about that long newspaper strike was that after a week or two, when it was realized that the presses were not going to begin running again for quite a while, newspaper editors and writers banded together under "silent" publishers and strange, never-before-seen newspapers, interim newspapers, began appearing on the newsstands across the city. There were three different papers, the New York Daily Metro, City News, the New York Daily Press that were readily available in Queens newsstands, A fourth paper, the New York Graphic, appeared sporadically it seemed and I saw it only for a short while, and not until the 5th or 6th issue. And further, I knew I had saved near complete runs of most these papers, knowing they would eventually end and be lost to history (except perhaps in microfilm libraries). Where were they now? Had anyone thrown them out? I had not seen or thought about them since 1978! I knew I had left nothing home when I moved out after school and married. In fact, my mother made it quite known that she wanted all of my junk to move out with me (and blessed my wife for putting up with it). It just had to be somewhere here in my garage. We had built this house and moved to northern Westchester County in 1994, hauling all our stuff up from our apartment in Forest Hills (and before that, my childhood home in Jackson Heights). Just as the pile of manila envelopes had remained undisturbed for 20 years, there were still boxes never opened on shelves in the back.

It didn't take long. If there is one thing I am, it's organized. I may have a lot of stuff but it's in order and usually labeled. There on a top back shelf were additional manila envelopes undisturbed for two decades and labeled on the sides in black magic marker "strike newspapers". Inside were near complete runs of these interim strike newspapers. The envelopes hailed from the 1970's and they had begun to get brittle and rip at the corners. The papers themselves were in beautiful condition! Kept out of the light for 37 years, first in a basement, then in a garage, most of the papers were superlative. I organized the four runs and this is how they played out. The entire runs of these periodicals were as follows based on what I have:

City News Vol 1, #1 (August 17) to Vol 1, #67 (November 3)
New York Daily Metro Vol 1, #1 (August 21) to Vol 1, #38 (October 5)
New York Daily Press Vol 1, #1 (August 21) to Vol 1, #64 (November 4-5)
New York Graphic Vol 1, #1 (August, ?) to Vol 1, #19+ (September 17+)

The New York Graphic's entire run is unknown to me as it did not always appear. It certainly lasted longer than Sept 17th. City News and The New York Daily Metro were 80% or better, complete. The New York Daily Press was 100% complete. I had the entire 64 issue run!

The three month period covered some of the most newsworthy events of the decade:

• A new pope elected, John Paul I ... the pope's death, and John Paul II followed
• One of the country's most deadly air disasters in San Diego
• Yankee Ron Guidry's Cy Young season, Bucky Dent's playoff home run against the Boston Red Sox, and the Yankee 2nd straight World Series victory against the L.A.Dodgers
• Middle east negotiations, trials and tribulations 
• The House Select Committee on assassinations went to work 

Here are some select covers to the papers, three debut issues and an early one on the last. I plan to write a future article here covering these papers and the strike more in depth. I'll post scanned covers of all of them at that time.

The early 1980's brought a drought of innovation to the News' Sunday section. The long-running News Sunday standard, Dondi, the glorious back cover from at least 1963 until supplanted by Peanuts in 1977, breathed his last on December 22, 1985, dumped in the middle of a storyline.....

December 22, 1985, final Daily News Sunday:

The feature itself continued elsewhere in a mere 35 newspapers papers until June 8. I asked Irwin Hasen once why Dondi ended, and his answer was that he was unceremoniously told by the syndicate that it was through. Just like that, after a 31 year run.

Throughout the early 1980's, for every decent new feature like For Better Or For Worse, The Born Loser, Herman, Conrad, Goosemyer and Kudzu, there were clunkers such as Koky, Captain Vincible, Zap! The Video Chap and Enter The World Of Computers, the latter a children's teaching feature in conjunction with The Children's Television Workshop.

But there were better days ahead by mid-year. Berke Breathed's Bloom County joined the NY Daily News Sunday section on May 19, 1985, having debuted the day John Lennon died, on December 8, 1980.

May 19, 1985 (Daily News debut):

March 9, 1986 saw the debut of the short-lived U.S. Acres by Garfield honcho Jim Davis. This was heralded with a banner across the top of the page. The strip debuted earlier in the week on March 3.

March 9, 1986 (debut Sunday):

Finally, on May 11, 1986, what may be the greatest event in the history of the NY Daily News Sunday comics, the co-debut of Gary Larson's The Far Side, and in my humble opinion, the single greatest newspaper strip of all time, Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes! The co-debut came out under a wonderful full-page Blondie Mother's day cover:

May 11, 1986:

The Far Side had already been running since January 1, 1980 and Calvin and Hobbes likewise since November 18, 1985. Both were warmly and desperately welcomed into the Daily News fold! Unfortunately, the feature that got dumped to make room was Jerry Robinson's decades-long mainstay, Flubs & Fluffs. Flubs & Fluffs originally vanished from the Daily News Sunday comics on February 26, 1978, having appeared only sporadically since 1975, and run previously nearly every week since 1965. It returned with a vengeance on October 2, 1983 and never missed a week again until this May 11, 1986. It's possible this second run could have been reprints of the earlier syndicated run, but I do not know this as a fact.


On February 11, 1990, the New York Daily News began a celebration of Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, starting a reprint series in their color Sunday magazine of classic 1940's storylines. Dick Tracy had been running in the Daily and Sunday News since the early 1930's (it began on 10/12/31 and my earliest Sunday section with Tracy is the 1/6/35 section) and by this time had reached nearly 60 consecutive years. Accompanying a short article by the late Jay Maeder, the News reprinted a week worth of Tracy every week for 6 months in color, doing so until July 8, 1990. Sadly, the News dropped Dick Tracy within a decade.

For now, let me close with a real treat, something most alive today have never seen .... the entire 16 page Sunday section dated May 28, 1939, advertisements and all. It's a tour back into history and the long awaited beginning of a journey I've wanted to take to save these cultural gems of our four-color history. Future installments will look at select things that spark my interest in their history.

New York Sunday News Comics: May 28, 1939

SOURCES:

• All comic strip an newspaper images were scanned from the author's own collection
• Two photographs of Gary Gold's parent's candy store on 73rd Street from the 1970's and 1980's were from images posted to a Jackson Heights Facebook group.