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 Tรถpffer. 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:
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:
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)
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!)
May 6, 1973:
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:
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.
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:
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 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"
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
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.
Mike,
ReplyDeleteQuite a trip through comic strip history and the New York Sunday News Comic Section. Equally fascinating was your job at the candy story and the array of local characters you dealt with. Having worked in a retail store in my early years I can relate to your experiences.
Like you, the Sunday News was part of my childhood. After attending church with my mother and brother we would turn the corner and pick-up the paper from the candy store, then proceed to Giangrosso's bakery for a loaf of Italian Bread and often to the opposite corner to buy cold cuts, mozzarella, ricotta or other italian specialties. Our house was a short 2 1/2 block walk, and when we got home I often fought with my brother John over who would to the funnies first.
My favorites were Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie and Dondi, but I loved most of the strips, and, as you noted, have a soft spot for Louie.
I recall the Newspaper strike of 78, although the interim paper I recall buying was The Trib. Anyone else recall that newspaper?
Thanks for a nostalgic and fascinating trip back to a golden age of newspaper strips.
Nick, I have copies of The Trib also, but it wasn't a strike paper. It appeared a year or two later for a short time, before folding.
DeleteBatton Lash was trying to post a comment, without success. He sent this to me via e-mail:
ReplyDeleteDoc-
I just had to drop you a line– you really brought me back with your blog entry about those wonderful old Sunday News comics!
Growing up in Brooklyn around the same time as you did in Queens, I fondly remember The News’s comics as well (and totally envious that you saved so many of them!). I can remember a neighbor excitedly telling me “Dondi made the back page!” when The News “demoted” the long running “Gasoline Alley” to the inside. I remember being fascinated by “The Teenie Weenies”– what a concept! And who knew “Flubs and Fluff’s” cartoonist had a Batman pedigree? And when “L’il Abner” was picked up by The News– OMG! I never saw women drawn that way up to that point. A far cry from Lois and Lana, to be sure!
I remember that widespread 1963 New York newspaper strike very well– and it had inadvertently “created” a legacy for Chuck McCann! His kids show was on WPIX, which was owned by The News. During the strike, Chuck would read the Sunday comics, as Mayor LaGuardia did doing a newspaper strike of Chuck’s childhood. At first, Chuck read them “straight” as the camera panned over each panel: Dick Tracy, Dondi, Terry and the Pirates and Little Orphan Annie. But soon, Chuck began reading the strips in character– dressed as Dick Tracy, Dondi and his most remembered characters, The Dragon Lady’s Mama (!) and Orphan Annie herself (complete with whited-out eyes!). Maybe you had to be there, but to anyone who was, it was unforgettably hilarious!
I remember when Hagar was introduced– it immediately became my father's favorite. That and Beetle Bailey! I think he also got a kick out of Dick Tracy– that was one of the first comics I can remember and my dad telling me about all the wild characters in it.
I also recall the interim papers during the 1978 newspaper strike with some fondness. I think I saved a few of them– they were great in a pinch (I seem to remember the New York Times was the first to return after the strike. It occurs to me that the idea of that The Times ever running comics was inconceivable. How times– and Times– change!).
Sundays with the comics in 1960’s and 70’s, while growing up in New York’s outer boroughs (Queens for you, Brooklyn for me) . . . a special time, in a special place. We were very fortunate!
Thanks for sharing, Doc.
All the best,
Batton L.
Hi, a great read. As I may have mentioned, when I was in New York I tried to research the New York Sunday News comic section to document the appearances of Gill Fox's Bumper To Bumper. Like The Super, it was a filler strip that was only used when there was room for it. The artists delivered a stack of strips and let the editors decide when to use it. I did not know that other editions did sometimes use a certain strip on a day the other didn't, but it seems to me that they did not skip or publish a scheduled strip, but that they decided there was room for the next one on the stack. If that is right, you might find a strip published in the outside edition in the central edition at a later moment. If, as I have picked up, it was not a scheduled strip, not publishing it would not lead to skipping it.
ReplyDeleteBumper To Bumper appeared between 1954 and 1964, so that is where my main interest lies. That means I have quite lot of those Beyond Mars pages, bith the full page opne you show and the later half page ones. Still, I have just ordered the complete edition from the Preview catalogue, as done by IDW. I love their books and it really is a great strip.
So... maybe we could join forced and do a post about the filler strips? Apart from Bumper To Bumper and The Super I can mention Beany by Frank Johnson, Cecil by... eh... have to look it up, This Man's Army by Henry Arnold, Hapless Harry by Geo Gatless, something about a baby and Potsy by Jay Irving. Potsy was a continuation of Willie Doodle, which itself was a filler strip for the New York Herald Tribune in the forties (which had filler strips such as Coogy by Irv Spector, Gill Fox and Selma Diamond's Jeany and Harvey Kurtzman's Silver Linings).
I do not have the collection you have, but I do have a large collection of sections from 1968 to 1976, which I am currently scanning for my favorites. So you can expect runs on my blog of Flubs and Flufs, Laugh-In, Friday Foster and antother filler (almost forgot it) - a full gag page by Reamer Keller. Maybe if I am done, you can send me a list to see if I have some of the ones you are missing from those earliest years and do a swap for something.
I'm interested in seeing the Friday Foster Sunday strips. Have you posted them yet?
DeleteNice article.
ReplyDeleteToo bad since 1999 the New York Daily News stopped carrying Dick Tracy.
And in May 2014 the New York Post quit running its daily comics page that included Garfield, Dennis the Menace, and Wizard of Id - And the Daily News refuses to pick up Garfield for its comics after the New York Post dropped it (The comics that currently run in the New York Daily News are: Hagar the Horrible, Dilbert, Zits, Jump Start, Mother Goose and Grimm, Soup to Nutz, Gasoline Alley, WuMo, Pooch Cafe, Red and Rover, Argyle Sweater, Between the Lines, Jumble, Blondie, One Big Happy, Pearls Before Swine, Mutts, Doonesbury, Biographic, and Prince Valiant)
Have you ever gotten the Newsday newspaper published in Queens/Long Island, they carry some of the New York Daily News comics, plus most of the dropped New York Post comics (Garfield included!), and even reruns of 2 strips that no longer run in the New York Daily News (Peanuts and For Better or For Worse).
Thanks for the kind comments. For most of the 1990's and into about 2005 I clipped the daily sections of all 3 NY papers. Following the end of Calvin and Hobbes and then Peanuts, I later sold all years after 2005 on ebay by the year. I have about 5 years of Newsday Sunday sections from the late 1980's through early 1990's. Great comics section. The Sunday Newsday is impossible to get in Northern Westchester. The daily paper, comics excepted, has shrunk to a daily that doesn't interest me any longer as it's slanted to Long Island coverage. I did love the NYC edition of Newsday when it ran. I bought it every day, along with all the other papers. The NY Daily News daily comics are still enjoyable and the features plentiful, although why they refuse to bring back old standbys is unknown to me.No one buys the paper just for the comics any longer, as may have been the situation decades ago.The Sunday comics section is an abomination, though. About 6 thin pages of mostly features that do not interest me. What a come-down from their glory days. I realize whoever is in charge of the comics features couldn't care less, but it's still a shame.
DeleteIt was in early January 2007 the New York Daily News stopped carrying the then in reruns Peanuts comic strips.
DeleteAs of May 2018 the now ended Soup to Nutz was replaced in the 2 page New York Daily News comics by Baldo.
Delete=v= The first part of this brings back memories.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a kid, my next door neighbors were constantly getting things shipped to them from friends in NYC, wrapped in newspaper. They gave me the _Daily_News_ Sunday comics sections, and they even encouraged their friends to use as many of those as they could.
It was a different and more extensive (if crumpled) comic strip world than I got from the hometown newspapers. Also, wedidn't have a tabloid in our city, so that was pretty novel, as well.
What part of the country was this, Jym?
Delete@Doc - I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pa.
DeleteThanks for posting this entire section, Doc. It really brought back memories for me, having grown up on Levittown, Long Island in the '50s and early '60s. On Sunday my dad would drive me and my sister to the bagel shop nearby. We'd get a dozen of those tasty treats and he'd also buy the incredibly thick Sunday NY Daily News, with Dick Tracy front and center. Needless to say, I loved reading the comics.
ReplyDeleteThe strips you posted were almost two decades before this little kid started reading them, but the main ones looked pretty much the same (Dick Tracy, Annie, Little Orphan Annie, Gasoline and Smilin' Jack). Some were way past their prime by the late '50s (Annie in particular, which seemed to start with some literary quote that never seemed to tie in to whatever went on on that particular page) and Gasoline Alley, which was far tamer than in the 30s and such. But I loved Dick Tracy (I particularly recall a long sequence where Tracy was trapped on a dessert island and got thinner week by week, as he was starving to death!). Whew! The strips you posted here are equally fun. It's interesting to see how many comic strip ads were included, and which strips were long gone by the time I started reading!
How could newspaper editors and publishers get away with the crime of shrinking the great American comic strip? Comics that had a full 12 paneled page cut to smaller sized six panels half the size without background reduced to talking heads. There should have been a loud outcry. Whatever happened to freedom of the press? The freedom of comic strip creators to express themselves fully instead of being stifled by stingy, greedy editors and publishers.
ReplyDeleteHi,
ReplyDeleteI note your comments about the newspaper strike of 1978. I have been collecting the Sunday funnies from the Daily News since the mid 1970's and the only ones I have missing are from that strike. What I remember though is that the News started printing again at some point while the strike was still going on and being a union man I didn't buy the paper until the strike was over. So I'm missing those copies. They're all boxed up in my attic and I think when I retire, which will be in the next year, I will go up and see what's missing and see about picking them up on EBAY.
Andy Ginsberg
Andy,
DeleteAs I wrote in the piece, I was working in the candy store newsstand during that strike and have no recollection of the News starting up again. Was it the actual "Daily News" or was it one of the strike papers? The strike papers were put together by newsman who worked on the regular dailies. I believe the new York Daily Press was the Daily News strike version. None of the strike papers had color comics sections on Sunday. Now the earlier 17 day newspaper strike of 1945 "did" continue to publish during the strike. The papers were sold out of the printing plants. I wrote about them here...http://timely-atlas-comics.blogspot.com/2015/09/ot-tales-from-new-york-daily-news.html
Hi Doc,
ReplyDeleteNo, it was definitely the actual Daily News. I remember being surprised that Bob Raissman who writes a media sports column for the newspaper, crossed the picket line and went back to work as he had espoused strong union views. On a separate note, you mention that the NY Post didn't have a Sunday comics section which is true as they didn't publish on Sundays but for many years their Saturday edition was a weekend edition and it had a comics section which I remember quite well. Mark Trail was usually on page three and i think Mary Worth was on the cover. I regret to say I never saved any of them but I did save all the Sunday funnies from the period when the Post did try publishing a Sunday newspaper.
Andy
Andy, where was the News sold? It seemed local newsstands, at least in Queens, didn't carry it.I've never heard of this before. Recently I went through every one of my strike papers and scanned all the strike articles for a future blog post. I even read in the last issue of The NY Daily Press that the strike was over the News going back to print.How could they have been publishing through the strike "and" as a strike paper? If you saw it, I believe you, but I've never heard of it or can fathom how it happened. As for the Post, yes, it didn't have a Sunday edition but it ran some Sunday comics in black and white on Saturday. Additionally, it experimented with a Sunday edition, I believe, in the late 1970's and published 5 or 6 color Sunday comics sections. I have them all here but for the life of me cannot find them! I turned them up about 6 months ago in a large manila envelope, put them away, and now cannot re-locate them!&*&^%#^*!!
DeleteHi Doc,
ReplyDeleteI've lived in New Jersey for the last 50 years and worked in Manhattan for the last 40 years so I would have bought the papers in the Port Authority Bus Terminal. I'll have to look in the attic for the News and the Post comics. Memory is always a tricky thing and I'm pretty sure about this but I'll have to see if I can verify it. I remember the Post printing on Sundays and I thought it was for more than a few weeks but, again, I'll have to see what I find. Can't say when I'll have a chance since I'm still working.
Andy
Hi Doc,
ReplyDeleteI've done a little Googling and I see that my memory is more than tricky, it's incorrect. I was right about the News publishing during a strike but it looks like it was the strike in 1990 when it was only directed at the News. That went on for five months and the paper was hard to find because of the strike but I do remember not buying it for a while. It also ended with the sale of the paper to Robert Maxwell which was a very dark period for the News. I've loved newspapers since I was a kid and have boxes of them as well as bound volumes I've purchased on EBAY. The first thing I saved was from the 1962 strike when the papers came back. In talking about the funnies, my family bought the Post, the News and the Times. So I never got to see the Mirror comics and worst of all the Journal American as they had a color section on Saturday and Sunday. Now we're down to just the News, the Post and Times and the News is very close to disappearing. If I had my choice I would have hoped it was the Post that went under as I dislike it and Rupert Murdoch.
Sorry for the confusion.
Andy
Ok Andy, thanks for the clarification. hey! Go to my last blog entry and tell me if this is the one you're talking about! This Sunday section appeared at the end of the 1963 strike and it's undated. I don't know if it's the first one back or a "special" section. http://timely-atlas-comics.blogspot.com/2015/09/ot-tales-from-new-york-daily-news.html
DeleteHi Doc,
ReplyDeleteI was referring to the front page of the Daily News, not the funnies. The first edition back from the strike was a daily and I think it said, We Have News for You. I wish I had saved the whole paper. I also saved the first section of the NY Times and was able to acquire the full paper, with a special what happened during the strike section, on EBAY. Reading that was fascinating especially all of the celebrities who passed away that would have gotten a big write up in the newspaper and only got, at most, a paragraph in the recap. Also, when I was talking about the NY Post Saturday color comics, that would be in the 50's and early 60's. Don't remember when the funnies section was discontinued but it never made it out the 60's.
Andy
Before the New York Daily News picked up Peanuts in 1977, did the New York Post carry Peanuts circa early to mid 1970's?
ReplyDeleteI only read the Post from mid-to-late 1970's onward. I don't believe it ever had Peanuts in those years. Can't speak of pre-1975 Post. because I never saw an actual peanuts newspaper strip in the newspaper growing up, my only exposure and love of the strip was spun off the TV specials of the 1960's and the soft-cover Fawcett paperback reprints. I had about 50 of them! Still do. of course the entire strip has been reprinted in hardcover volumes by Fantagraphic Publishing. Softcover volumes by year are being released now.
ReplyDeleteI just was up in the attic and I have Sunday color comics for the Post from March 12, 1989 to May 28, 1989. I think that would be the only period since they ran on Saturday that the Post published a color comics section.
ReplyDeleteThis brings back many memories. Grew up in Richmond Hill. In my early teens delivered the paper as a way to make money. Sundays were always a bitch because of how thick they were.
ReplyDeleteI'm mainly writing because I was trying to find more info about the coloring section. My grandmother used to save that page of the Sunday comic section for me. I remember I had a huge collection of pictures that I colored in with crayons. They were cut out in an odd fashion to allow for the picture and its small write-up on the left hand lower side. I don't remember if they were color by number and the top left had the key. It would be awesome if you could post a picture of one of these. I don't know what became of my collection.
The coloring feature ran under two different names. It was first called "Coloring College" and ran from (I believe) sometime in December of 1961 to either March 21 or March 28, 1976. ( It then changed it's name to "Crayon Corner", running from either March 28 or April 4, 1976 to September 25, 1983.
DeleteThe coloring feature ran under two different names. It was first called "Coloring College" and ran from (I believe) sometime in December of 1961 to either March 21 or March 28, 1976. ( It then changed it's name to "Crayon Corner", running from either March 28 or April 4, 1976 to September 25, 1983.
DeleteHi Doc and all.
ReplyDeleteI am looking for information on a single large panel comic that appeared in the Sunday Daily News c. 1958. It featured Lilliputian Chinese characters who lived in discarded tin cans and the detrius of life. I believe it was a serialized story. The little men all wore mandarin jackets and had pigtails and Chinese caps. I assume it was probably pretty racist. Does anyone know the name of this cartoon, the creator, or a link to any images.
Nancy, it could have been "The Teenie Weenies", which ran in the Sunday News comics from 1941 to early 1968. I'll check into it tonight and get back to you.
DeleteWhat are the chances in the future the New York Daily News will ever get to pick up Garfield for its daily/Sunday comics since the New York Post dropped it as part of its comic withdrawal in May 2014? Doubtful, unless: 1) There's a net petition, or 2) If a current New York Daily News comic announces its retirement (Gasoline Alley has no sign of ending for now).
ReplyDeleteAnd is there a rumor that ever since Doonesbury was cut back to classic daily/first run Sunday mode beginning in March 2014 that the New York Daily News recently dropped Doonesbury for good after running it Sundays only for 2 years since it went first run Sunday/rerun daily mode (The daily Doonesbury strips in the New York Daily News were replaced by Pooch Cafe since March 2014)?
This is absolutely a informative blog, in internet world there are trillion of blogs being but all may not so useful. I bookmarked those blogs such as this. So thank you for share with us. Here I want to share some more Newspaper site which are not included here. Take a look below...
ReplyDeleteThe Financial Express
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Hey Doc,
ReplyDeleteDid the strike newspapers run comics? Daily Sunday or both? I see the image of the Graphic said it did, how about the others?
my best
-Ray Bottorff Jr
I read newspaper here redtea.com.
ReplyDeleteHello, Doc.V Have you another site that made by this type of information. I want to read. Let me know. thanks
This brought back so many memories! It’s fascinating to trace the origins of comic strips and how they evolved into comic books. I loved reading about your Sunday rituals with your grandparents and your connection to the "Louie" strip. for the past years, I was buying some hardcopies from https://largerthanlifetoys.com/ and at the same time reading yours. Best pair ever for comic enthusiasts like meeee!!!!
ReplyDelete