The Daily Cartoonist

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Comics Kingdom Office Hours

D. D. Degg101 mins


Vintage Comics Kingdom has returned after taking the weekend off,
except for a week of Office Hours which they don’t have in their archives.

Mike Peterson usually does this, but I’ll do the honors today the best I can.


© King Features Syndicate

                Office Hours for 1/5/1974
            does not exist in our archives 

 

While digging up these panels by Cy Olson I stumbled onto this:

A notice that because of the death of creator Cy Olson the Office Hours panel will be discontinued
on Saturday, July 27, 1974 – King Features electing not to continue it with another cartoonist.
(edit: see Allan Holtz’s note in the comments regarding end date)

So Vintage Comics Kingdom has seven months of “new” Office Hours to run this year.

10 thoughts on “Comics Kingdom Office Hours”

  1. I’m always befuddled by the holes in their vintage archive, since it’s little trouble to find the missing comics, and it’s their company.

    I sometimes get the feeling that King Features has lost all interest in their own product.

  2. I’m guessing that King’s vintage comics comes from printer proofs in their archives. Note the difference in clarity comparing our samples to the comics on Comics Kingdom. The effort involved in cleaning up panels from newspapers to make them presentable there would probably cost them more than would be profitable.

  3. We used to get a week’s worth of strips on a single sheet of paper, which, by the time I was at papers, you would cut up and paste on the page, though later, they’d be scanned. After that, they began to be sent electronically and would be dragged into a comics page template.

    I’m assuming what they have are those semi-glossy sheets of strips, which is why they lose them a week at a time – misfile one piece of paper and you’ve lost six days’ strips.

    Now I’ll walk around the rest of the day trying to remember the name of that process that produced a very sharp, clear image on a sheet of high-quality paper. But there was a specific term.

  5. Does anyone have access to the week of “Judge Parker” archive strips ranging from 03/12/1979 to 03/19/1979? That’s another archive week that was recently skipped from CK, and (very annoyingly) it coincided with the end of a pretty interesting (to me) story line.

    Thanks to anyone who can help…

  7. Mark Jackson — no, there was a technical term for a type of output that was fine enough to be reproduced. What I remember is that, for those of us in the freelance world, there were places that could produce them — graphic design folks — and we had to do some “pretty please with sugar on it” so they’d run us off copies we could then send to major clients who expected such things.

  8. D.D. Degg,

    thanks a LOT! I guess I don’t read this place nearly as assiduously as I should, or I would have caught it when he posted it.

    Catching up now…

  9. Hi DD – According to the King Features Microfilm Catalogue, the material for Office Hours actually ended on 8/10/74, obviously running out the backlog of Mr. Olson’s panel. I can’t find anyone who ran that final week, but the Grand Rapids Press ran it until 8/3/74, one week longer than your Bridgeport Telegram. They replaced it with NEA’s Funny Business, which when they jump syndicates like that makes it at least ever so slightly probable that they learned of the impending cancellation and jumped ship to something else they had handy.

  10. Allan, I took The Telegram at their word with that Office Hours item. Further research reveals that the Telegram itself ran the panel until Friday, August 2, 1974.
    By the way, I did check the Office Hours entry in your book
    https://www.press.umich.edu/2133963/american_newspaper_comics
    and foolishly thought those last two weeks must have been
    reruns to allow the newspapers some extra time.
    Next time I’ll know better.

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