Thursday, February 22, 2007

 

Obscurity of the Day: Tar Pit






Here's one that might have succeeded if it had more of a chance. Steve Dickenson's Tar Pit features the gag-a-day adventures of a group of cavemen. The strip started out slow, with more misses than hits in the jokes, but Dickenson improved over time and after a few months the strip really began to click, delivering good gags on more days than not. I'm guessing that the King Features salespeople gave up on the strip after the cold reception that newspaper editors were bound to give the early material.

The strip began (at least in the Milwaukee Journal) on June 14 1993 and ended sometime in 1994. A Sunday was advertised, but I have no samples to prove that it did run. Does anyone have better information to share?

Steve Dickenson fared better with Lola, which began in 1999 and is still running.

EDIT: Have now found a Sunday.

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Comments:
Well, David Farley said in 1993 that he did some gags for the strip.

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.comics.strips/tree/browse_frm/month/1993-05?_done=%2Fgroup%2Frec.arts.comics.strips%2Fbrowse_frm%2Fmonth%2F1993-05%3F&

Scroll down until you see Farley's post.

I have no idea how reliable this website is, but it says Jerry Craft did some gags as well.

http://hometown.aol.com/comicsproj3/creditupdates2.html

You might know Jerry as the creator of "Mama's Boyz," which is syndicated by King Features as part of its "Weekly Service" package.
 
Wow -- those posts really have some age on'em. Didn't know newsgroups got archived that long!

Thanks for the info.

--Allan
 
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