Sometimes researching a creator is difficult, not because of the lack of information, but because of the overwhelming wealth of it. Over his lifetime, Jack Kirby produced an incredibly large body of work, which includes co-creating most of the well-known Marvel Comics characters, such as Captain America, the Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, and the X-Men, as well as quite a few not nearly as well known DC Comics characters, including The Guardian, the Newsboy Legion, The Demon, and all the New Gods characters of the Fourth World. Because of this, there has been quite a bit written over the years about the man and his work, and it takes quite a long time to sort through. It's especially difficult when what you're looking for is information about his lesser-known work in newspaper comic strips, and when much of that was work for an obscure syndicate called Lincoln Newspaper Features that we'd probably know absolutely nothing about had Kirby not worked for them. This information is important, however, because his work in newspapers directly led to him meeting people he would co-create the aforementioned famous characters with, as well as dictating who he would create those characters for.

For many years, I've relied on a blog called The Stripper's Guide, written by Allan Holtz, for much of my information on very obscure and unknown comic strips. Most times, when I'm researching various comic strips or creators, things that I find there can generally also be found in at least one or two other places online. Unfortunately, in the case of Bob Kane, I must rely solely on the information from The Stripper's Guide, because it seems to be the only place on the open Internet that any solid information can be found on the newspaper comic strips he created.

Bob Kane was the artist and co-creator, along with Bill Finger, of the comic book character Batman. Kane drew the Batman newspaper strip for three years, starting in 1943, and that's fairly well known. While writers and artists behind comic books didn't always work on the newspaper strips with their characters in them, it wasn't unheard of. Certainly nothing about that is obscure or unexpected. Going a bit deeper, Kane also worked on some projects for other comic magazines, and also worked at the Eisner-Iger studio drawing various humor comics. While there, he created the Mickey Mouse rip-off Peter Pupp, among many other things. Still, there is plenty of fairly easy to find information to be had on those topics.

The obscurity comes with the non-Batman newspaper comic strips that Kane produced, or possibly produced.

Editor and Publisher, the newspaper industry magazine, used to publish a syndicate directory at the end of each year, listing features offered by syndicates to newspapers, though not necessarily that actually ran in newspapers. Kane is listed as a creator of a few features, namely "The Losers" and "The Aristocrats" for the Ledger Syndicate and a newspaper version of "Peter Pupp" which was apparently distrubuted by Eisner-Iger Associates. I couldn't find any evidence of their existence outside of these listings, and Allan at The Stripper's Guide hasn't found anything on them either. However, there is one other that he's listed as creating, called "The Little Major", that there is a small bit of information on.

Small, in this case, means next to nothing. The strip was distributed by the short-lived General Features Syndicate, which is an obscurity in itself. Editor and Publisher has little information on the syndicate besides its address, there's no evidence of it being well advertised in any way, and Kane himself never mentioned it or "The Little Major," even in his autobiography.

The reason for its obscurity, and for Kane never mentioning it, is probably due to the amount of material that Kane was producing at the same time. "The Little Major" ran for a year, from 1937 to 1938, at which point he was already quite busy working at the Eisner-Iger studio. Given that it seems the General Features Syndicate was obscure even in its time, it makes sense that "The Little Major" wouldn't get much notice. Then, just a year later, he and Finger created Batman, and that was obviously where most of his focus shifted.

"The Little Major" isn't really too bad of a comic strip, either. The gags are fairly forgettable, but the artwork is quite good. Kane's drawing style definitely lends itself to that kind of humor strip, and I think I actually like it better than his work on Batman.

For more information:

Bob Kane at Comiclopedia

General Features Syndicate at The Stripper's Guide

General Features Syndicate comic strip series at The Stripper's Guide

Fans of mainstream comic books will no doubt be familiar with the name Kubert from one place or another. Younger readers may be familiar with either Andy or Adam Kubert and their comic book work, and older readers will most likely know of Joe Kubert, their father, and his extensive contributions to the medium. It's possible, however, that they may not be aware of Kubert's history with newspaper comics, and especially how extensive it is.

Joe Kubert is probably best known for his work on war comics with characters such as Sgt. Rock and The Haunted Tank, his Silver Age revival of Hawkman, or his work on various DC Comics titles over his 70 year career. He's also fairly well known for founding the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, located in Dover, New Jersey. The school boasts some fairly famous and successful alumni, and is still in operation.

Interestingly, the school's mascot, Tor, is actually a comic book character that Kubert originally created for the St. John Publishing Company, and who appeared in a comic entitled One Million B.C.. Tor was a Tarzan-esque caveman warrior, and first appeared in 1953. After St. John folded, Kubert was able to retain the copyright for the character, and in 1959 attempted to pitch it as a newspaper adventure comic strip. He was never able to convince a syndicate to take it on, but the material he created for the pitch was reworked and published at DC Comics in the 70s.

In the 1960s, however, Joe Kubert did draw a syndicated comic strip, though not one with characters that he'd created. Jerry Capp, brother of newspaper cartoonists Al Capp and Elliot Caplin, was to be the ghostwriter of a strip based on Robin Moore's bestselling book "The Green Berets". The strip was to be creditted to Moore, obviously for marketting reasons, though Moore never did any writing on it. Capp first approached comic book artist Neal Adams, but Adams was currently working on another newspaper strip developed by Capp, Ben Casey, and felt he wouldn't be able to take on the extra work. Adams was familiar with Kubert's work, though the two had never met, and suggested Capp contact him. Kubert took the job, and Tales of the Green Beret debuted in September of 1965. Kubert and Capp worked together on it for about a year and a half, but the two butted heads creatively the entire time, and Kubert ultimately left the strip. It only continued for a few more months afterwards, under a succession of various other artists. Also, by that time opposition to the Vietnam War was at its height, and even without the creative struggles, there wasn't much demand among readers for that kind of strip.

Most unexpected were the newspaper strips Kubert worked on in the late 1970s. By that time, he had founded and was teaching at the Kubert School. King Features Syndicate approached him and asked him to assist on the artwork for Big Ben Bolt, the boxing comic originally created by Elliot Caplin. Interest in the strip was waning, and there were very few papers that still carried it, so the syndicate would not be able to pay very much for whoever did draw it. Kubert decided that this would be a great opportunity for his students to gain some hands-on experience, so he enlisted some of them in the project. Unfortunately, the workload was too much for them when coupled with their school work, so Kubert ended up drawing it entirely on his own. This didn't last long, though the strip didn't last much longer either, and ended in 1978.

A similar situation occured when the New York News syndicate contacted Kubert about assisting on artwork for, of all things, Winnie Winkle, the gag strip originally created in the 1920s. At first, the students were involved in its production, and in fact it was signed "JKS," for Joe Kubert School, but in the end Kubert himself ended up doing all of the work. After a year, Kubert decided it was enough. He did feel it was a good exercise for himself and his students, however, as he was a firm believer that an artist should be versatile and be comfortable working in any style.

For more information:

Joe Kubert at Comiclopedia

An extensive interview with Kubert on his career as a whole, at The Comics Journal

An interview with Kubert on Tales of the Green Beret, at Matt Tauber's blog

One of the most interesting periods comic strip history, to me, is the the late 19th and early 20th century, because of the fierce batttles for supremacy between the various newspapers, especially in New York. One of the biggest feuds by far was between the newspapers owned by Joseph Pulitzer and those owned by William Randolph Hearst, and involves one of the earliest newspaper comic strips, "Hogan's Alley," and its most famous character, The Yellow Kid. The strip was created by Richard F. Outcault, but was also drawn for a period by a different artist, the American realist painter George Luks.

Luks is best known for his paintings, which have been featured in many high profile museums in the United States. He is most commonly associated with the "Ashcan" school of realism, which also included artists such as Edward Hopper and George Bellows. Like those other American realists, Luks mainly created art that depicted the common, working class residents of New York City, and the real lives that they lived. The people are dirty, messy, and poor, though somehow often still happy despite their lot.

It's very interesting, then, to look at Luks' work previous to breaking into the fine art world, as it dealt with many of the same themes. Prior to this, he had quite a long career as a magazine and newspaper illustrator, for publications such as Truth, Puck, Drama, Music, the Philadelphia Free Press, and the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. His illustrations often involved normal people doing normal things, though often in humorous ways. He was fond of drawing filthy street urchins and old, wrinkly men and women, and buildings and streets did not look much better than the people did.

Due to his penchant for drawing these kinds of people and these kinds of scenes, it was no wonder why Joseph Pulitzer chose him for a replacement artist on the very popular comic strip "Hogan's Alley." Near the turn of the 20th century, Pulitzer's New York World had become well-known for its inclusion of a comic supplement, mainly due to "Hogan's Alley". When William Randolph Hearst came to New York and purchased the New York Journal, he decided to borrow the idea, and created comic supplements of his own, though he didn't have artists with the amount of name recognition that Pulitzer did. In 1896, however, he hired Richard Outcault, who created "Hogan's Alley" and had been drawing it for the World, to draw it for the Journal, making Pulitzer understandably quite upset. Oucault had been working at the World since 1894, and was obviously quite a valuable asset. Thankfully, a few months before Outcault left, Pulitzer had hired Luks as an illustrator at the World. He tasked Luks with continuing "Hogan's Alley," even though The Yellow Kid would also be appearing in Hearst's Journal. This sparked quite an argument over which was the "genuine" Yellow Kid. Was it the one that appeared in the paper it had originally been published in, or was it the one drawn by its original creator?

It was a contentious time, though Luks' strips only lasted until the next year, and Outcault's Yellow Kid strips ended in 1898. Still, among his cartooning colleagues, Luks was seen as an upstart "imitator," and many stopped speaking to him. It was clear they saw the genuine Yellow Kid as being drawn only by Outcault, and blamed Luks for the whole ordeal just as much as they blamed Pulitzer. It wasn't long after this that, though, that Luks began doing fine art and put his cartooning carreer behind him.

For more information:

George Luks at Comiclopedia

George Luks: The "Other" Yellow Kid Artist at Hogan's Alley magazine

An interesting George Luks anecdote at The Stripper's Guide

A very thorough look at George Luks' Yellow Kid at Academia.edu

I have always maintained, and will always maintain, that comic strips of any era can be considered fine art. There's nothing that separates the art that you see in the newspaper and the art that you see in a museum apart from one being in a frame and one being in print. I feel this opinion of mine is bolstered by the fact there are those who are considered fine artists who also created newspaper comic strips.

Lyonel Feininger certainly deserves the label of fine artist. Born in New York, he was sent to Germany at 16 to study music, but ended up studying art instead. He studied at various art schools in Berlin and Paris. He was affiliated with several German Expressionist groups, including the famous Blue Four, which included himself, Paul Klee, Wassilly Kandinsky, and Alexej von Jawlensky. He helped found the Bauhaus school and was the only person to teach there from its inception all the way until it was forced to close. He worked in several different media, including oil, woodcut, charcoal, and ink, in an art career spanning several decades. One of his paintings, The Green Bridge, even sold at auction in 2001 for an amazing £2.42 million.

Knowing all this, his is obviously not a name anyone would expect to see on a newspaper comic strip. It's a bit of a shock, then, when one realizes that Feininger created two of them.

At the turn of the 20th century, American newspapers would often reprint cartoons and caricatures from European publications, mainly because it was cheap to do so. Erroneously believing that this was done because it was in high demand among the readership, The Chicago Tribune decided that, instead of reprinting, it ought to enlist some European artists and writers to create material for them. Several German magazine cartoonists and illustrators were hired to create both one-off gags as well as some continuing series. Feininger, in order to pay his bills, had been working as a caricaturist in Germany for many years, and was hired by the Tribune along with the other artists.

The two comic strips that he created were "The Kin-Der-Kids," which ran from April to November of 1906, and "Wee Willie Winkie's World," which ran from August of 1906 to January of 1907. "The Kin-Der-Kids" was an adventure story involving some kids, a mechanical boy, and their talking blue dog travelling the world in their bathtub. It's definitely as strange as it sounds, but not nearly as strange as "Wee Willie Winkie's World," which revolved around the titular Willie and the incredibly surreal world that he lived in. In it, everything was alive, and anything that could be given a face and a voice was. This meant that Willie often ended up being the least interesting thing in the strip. The art on both strips is as good as you'd expect, and certainly rivals the other great cartoonists of that time such as Winsor McCay and Richard Outcault.

Unfortunately, due to troubles with the syndicate, both features were cancelled after very short runs. The cancellation wasn't entirely bad for Feininger, however, who shortly afterward began his art career outside of comics. It is interesting to notice, however, how his work in comics influenced his later work, as well as how his previous art training influenced his comics.

For more information:

Lyonel Feininger at Toonopedia

Lyonel Feininger at Comiclopedia

Wee Willie Winkie's World at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum

Lyonel Feininger works at Wikiart

Lyonel Feininger at the Museum of Modern Art

Lyonel Feininger works at the Museum of Modern Art German Expressionism collection

This one might more appropriately be filed under "Unexpected comic strips," as it's a bit of a strange one. While nothing that David Lynch does is necessarily expected, a newspaper comic strip is not the first thing one would imagine a surrealist film and television director might do. Even then, if one tried to imagine of what kind of comic strip said surrealist film and television director might create, I don't think it's likely anything like The Angriest Dog in the World would come to mind.

David Lynch is best known for his movies such as "Eraserhead," "The Elephant Man," "Dune," "Blue Velvet," "Mulholland Drive," and others, as well as his television series "Twin Peaks." Before venturing into film, he originally wanted to be a painter. As such, his films were supposed to be paintings come to life, if such a thing is possible.

In 1983, he decided, for reasons known only to Lynch, to create a comic strip that featured a dog who, according to the caption which accompanied every strip, "...is so angry he cannot move. He cannot eat. He cannot sleep. He can just barely growl. Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis." Each strip then featured four panels, three of which were identical and showed the dog outside being silently angry during the daytime, and the last which was a similar scene showing the dog outside at night. The images were exactly the same in each strip, the only difference being the speech balloons which emanated from inside the house. The dialogue ranged from philosophical observations to bad puns to generally meaningless statements, though I think Lynch believed the idea of the strip was far more interesting than anything that was said in it. The dialogue of those in the house didn't matter as much as the fact that a terminally angry dog was sitting out in their yard being entirely ignored by them.

According to Lynch, the idea came from a time in his life years earlier when he was attempting to work through a large amount of anger. He says that he had originally decided to see a therapist, but that the therapist informed him that therapy would seriously impede his creative process, so he decided against it. He instead discovered and began to rely on transcendental meditation, which he says helped him overcome that anger and allowed him to create his body of work. The strip, then, is a look back at that angry period of his life and the outlook on the world that he had during that time. In a way, it seems that it's supposed to be comedic, but as Lynch put it, "...the humor in the strip is based on the sickness of people's pitiful state of unhappiness and misery." Whether one finds that funny or not is up to personal taste.

The strip only ran in alternative weekly newspapers, most notably the L.A. Reader, for nearly 10 years. This is remarkable, especially given the negative response that most readers had to it. When it began to be published in the Dark Horse anthology Cheval Noir, a letter from an angry reader called it a "useless, idiotic, CON GAME of a strip." Far better strips have run for far less time, though it's possible that someone as popular as David Lynch can get anything published for however long he wants.

For more information:

The Angriest Dog in the World at Toonopedia

David Lynch at Comiclopedia

A selection of strips at The Universe of David Lynch

A further selection at LynchNet

David Lynch at Artsy, which showcases his artwork outside of film

To be fair, this one isn't quite as unexpected as the last three, but the newspaper comic strip he created is obscure enough that I thought it was important to cover.

Dr. Seuss is, of course, mainly known for his work in children's literature, but much like Johnny Gruelle he got his start in cartooning and illustration. He began as a magazine cartoonist, and his cartoons first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and in the humor publication Judge. He also did quite a few advertising illustrations for Standard Oil, NBC, General Electric, and others. His first book, "And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street," was published in 1937. He did quite a lot of political cartooning during World War II, and after the war he would begin his children's book career in earnest. However, in between all of this, for a period of less than a year, he wrote and illustrated a mostly forgotten newspaper comic strip called "Hejji."

Unfortunately, there isn't a lot written about Hejji anywhere, either on the internet or in books. Biographies I've read of Dr. Seuss don't even spend very much time discussing it. It's tragic, because Hejji is beautiful to look at and very fun to read.

The strip began in April 1935 as a Sunday feature, and only ran until June of that year. Hejji, the title character, seems to be some kind of Middle Eastern traveller who arrives in the mysterious land of Baako. While there, he meets the ruler of the land, The Mighty One, and goes on a few adventures with him. While more of an adventure strip than a comedy or gag strip, it does blur the line with its absurd situations, characters, and locations. It would also prove fertile ground for ideas and images that Seuss would use in his later work. It includes some very familiar looking elephants, some turtles stacked on top of each other, and eggs being hatched by those who do not normally do so. The art is in the wonderful style one would expect from Seuss, and his dialogue balloons and lettering add a bubbly flair to it all. It really is a joy to behold.

Beholding it, however, has become a bit difficult. It's never been collected and reprinted by itself, though it does exist in a collection called "The Golden Treasury of Klassic Krazy Kool Kids Komics," though that book is currently out of print. The editor, Craig Yoe, had posted some scans on his website, the blog of the International Team of Comics Historians (ITCH), but that website doesn't seem to exist any longer. Thankfully, you can still take a look using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, which is how I was finally able to do so. The title of the blog post says "Part One," though from what I gather the strips posted there are the entirety of the run. You'll notice that the strip appears to end right in the middle of the story, but it seems that's because King Features Syndicate cancelled the strip quite abruptly. I guess we'll never know what happened.

For more information:

Hejji at Toonopedia

Dr. Seuss at Comiclopedia

Chris Sims writes about Hejji at Comics Alliance

Read Hejji at the ITCH blog, courtesy of the Internet Archive

This one is a bit different from the previous two unexpected creators, because whereas those two were already famous for other things before becoming involved in comic strips, Johnny Gruelle became famous for something else after he had already been working in comic strips for quite a while.

Gruelle is most famous for creating the children's toys Raggedy Ann and Andy, as well as writing and illustrating storybooks to go along with them. He also wrote and illustrated quite a few other children's books that were not related to Raggedy Ann, including a couple collections of fairy tales. Raggedy Ann was created and patented as a doll in 1915, and she first appeared in Gruelle's books and illustrations in 1918. Andy didn't come along until 1920. Previous to this, however, Gruelle had quite the career as a newspaper cartoonist.

Starting in 1903, he worked at the Indianapolis Star doing political cartoons and caricatures. Around this time he also began work at a couple of newspaper syndicates, the World Color Printing Company and the Newspaper Enterprise Association, doing various comic strips. In 1908 and 1909 he worked on the George Herriman strip "Bud Smith" as well as on his own strip "Handy Andy," but those didn't last long. He didn't get his first big break until 1911, when he began working for the New York Herald.

The story goes that the Herald was looking for new talent, and sponsored a contest in order to find it. Reportedly, around 1,500 people entered, and Gruelle won the chance to be the paper's newest cartoonist, as well as a $2,000 cash prize. It's not clear whether this story is entirely true, or was concocted by the newspaper to cover the fact that Gruelle was hired to replace the paper's star cartoonist, Winsor McCay, creator of "Little Nemo in Slumberland." McCay had been hired on by William Randolph Hearst, and was set to leave in April of 1911. It was probably a bit of an embarrassment on the part of the Herald to lose such a great talent, so they needed a suitable replacement. Gruelle began at the paper in late January of that year. There isn't a lot of documented evidence to back up the contest story, but there isn't much at all about how Gruelle originally came to be hired by the Herald, so we can't be sure. The New York Herald was certainly quite a step up from the Indianapolis Star, so those kind of unique circumstances could have helped him get the job by making him more visible to the editors at the Herald. On the other hand, Gruelle had worked enough that he wouldn't necessarily have needed to enter a contest in order to get a job there.

However it happened, the feature that he created for them was called "Mr. Twee Deedle," about a fanciful, sprite-like creature who was friends with two children, Dolly and Dickie. The stories are what you'd expect from a children's tale, and the kind of thing Gruelle would go on to be famous for a few years later. They generally involved fun romps in forested locations, with Twee Deedle always using their adventures to teach the kids something about virtue and good manners. On the whole, there wasn't a whole lot that was interesting about what was going on, but that didn't matter, because the artwork was good enough to hide that fact. It was certainly something meant for children, and most likely ones that couldn't read. If they didn't know what the words meant, they could certainly appreciate the wonderful pictures. Unfortunately, "Mr. Twee Deedle" only lasted from 1911 to about 1914. In 1913, under the pseudonym John Barton, he also did a strip for William Randolph Hearst called The Troubles of the Titmouse Twins, which, strangely, was not about titmouses, but about mice. It only ran for about 5 months in 1913.

It was after this that Gruelle created Raggedy Ann and began mainly writing and drawing children's books. He did later return to newspaper comics in 1929 with a strip simply called "Brutus," which was quite the departure from his previous work. It featured a normal suburban family, who, like most other Americans that year, fell on hard times and dealt with their poverty in hilarious ways. It was very adult, and wasn't what most had come to expect from Gruelle, though it was the kind of thing he had started out doing years ago in Indianapolis. It did end up being his longest running strip, going all the way to 1938 when he died.

For more information:

Johnny Gruelle at Comiclopedia

Mr. Twee Deedle at Toonopedia

Brutus at Toonopedia

A selection of his newspaper strips at Yesterday's Papers

Indianapolitans "as we see 'em" at The Internet Archive, which includes caricatures by Gruelle and others