Birmingham Historical Comic Strips -- Clarion-Ledger, The Twenties

In selecting the next paper I wanted to start on, I let sentiment guide the way. I started with the Birmingham papers, partly because Birmingham has been my home for almost half my life now and partly because, way back when I started this project, they were the ones that I most easily had access to the archives for them. Now, though, through the magic of online newspaper archives, I have access to the paper of my youth, so I'm going to look back in that direction. While there were local newspapers in most small towns, the Clarion-Ledger from Jackson served as a very close to state-wide paper - the Commercial Appeal from Memphis was more popular in the extreme north, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune was about even on the Gulf Coast, but in between "almost everyone" subscribed to the C-L and to their local paper, sometimes not bothering with the local paper. Unusually, the C-L still publishes a daily print edition now, so we'll see where that leads in terms of the comics page.

1923: It's a little hard to pick a starting date for when the C-L began to have a "comics page"; it was more a case of oozing into it than having a clear start. I've arbitrarily chosen a start date of January 6, 1925, because that was the first date when they ran the two strips they were carrying at the time on the same page and continued to do so going forward. Those strips were Bringing Up Father and a well-done (in the context of the day - the strip that day was about "Indian Tribal Life" and was a bit cliched but seems non-offensive even at this distance a century later) history strip called High Lights of History by J. Carroll Mansfield.

The paper overall that day was an interesting read for me. This being the Deep South in 1925, there were multiple pages of coverage of a Billy Sunday rally that had taken place the previous weekend. However, there was also detailed coverage of the county commission meeting that culminated in the paving of the road from Jackson through Raymond to Utica that eventually became the highway that I lived along from 1976 to 1979. Interestingly, there was also a sizable editorial cartoon mocking Jack Dempsey for not fighting Harry Wills. I would never deny Mississippi's brutal racist history, but it's always been a complicated thing.

By the end of the year, they had added three more strips and solidified into a more typical page - by the next week in January, they had added Tillie the Toiler in full flapper mode and Little Jimmy as a "typical" little-kid-who-couldn't-stay-out-of-trouble (the quotes are because it, along with Buster Brown, pretty much invented the genre) strip. In August, the first day of the strip overall, they added Ella Cinders, which was a modern-for-the-time letting of the tale referenced by its title.

Bringing Up Father, George McManus, International Feature Service
High Lights of History, J. Carroll Mansfield, McClure Newspaper Syndicate
Ella Cinders, Bill Conselman and Charlie Plumb, Metropolitan Newspaper Service
Tillie the Toiler, Russ Westover, King Features Syndicate
Little Jimmy, Swinnerton, International Feature Service

1926, 1927: No changes, Bringing Up Father drifted to a different page.

1928: In September, they added Just Kids, a not-particularly inspired strip about a gang of neighborhood kids. The only thing that made the strip stand out from a handful of similar strips at the time was the presence of one kid of East Asian descent.

Just Kids, Carter, King Features Syndicate

1929: Little Jimmy left in February, replaced by the family ensemble Polly and Her Pals. March saw the addition of Cuddles, which at least had an interesting premise; it was subtitled "A Flapper at King Arthur's Court." In August they added Ripley's Believe It or Not on a news page.

Polly and Her Pals, Cliff Sterrett, Newspaper Feature Service
Cuddles, Forbell, Key Features
Believe It or Not, Ripley, King Features Syndicate

Last Updated: June 6, 2007