From The Comics Journal 91, July 1984

Panel Discussion on comic editors, which included Gary Groth and Rick Marschall

GROTH: Let me ask Rick something. In the old newspaper strips, how much did the editor impose his vision? In other words, on some of the great cartoonists like McCay, Sterrett, Segar, and so forth.
MARSCHALL: Quite a bit, oftentimes. Hearst had a strong hand in the strips themselves, and his people did-Arthur Brisbane as editor, and Rudolph Block as comic editor. Block fashioned the comics page, came up with themes that he wanted to-it was almost like a quota system for a while in the '20s. He would search for certain kinds of artists to do certain kinds of strips. And my favorite story about how strong editors used to be, when they had good vision, is with the creation of the Blondie strip. Chic Young had been doing Dumb Dora, and he wanted to own that strip. He threatened to quit, they called his bluff, and he did quit. They got him back, and they got Paul Funk to do it in the meantime-and they said, Create a new strip and it was Blondie. And they gave it a big sendoff. They sent suitcases of lingerie to every major newspaper editor in the country, followed by a telegram signed by Blondie: "Has my stuff arrived yet?" All this expensive hype, and the strip still did not take off. There was a flurry of activity for a while, but it pretty much bombed. They didn't let it die. Joe Conway, who had been appointed editor and general manager of King, dreamed up some other things, a new boyfriend, but nothing really worked, and then the gimmick was, in 1933, get them married and have them go on a hunger strike. The Hearst press made a whole news story out of this. They arranged for famous people to send telegrams, "Don't let Dagwood starve" and all this business, phony people sent these, but they had photographs on the wire services of Chic Young deluged by 100,000 telegrams. Just direction all along the way, and it was not just pure promotion; they changed the theme of the strip and tried to work in different things and all that. It was a big splash when they got married, and it still didn't work. Then they had a baby- first time a baby was really born in a strip, and jokes about pregnancy, and recovering from pregnancy, and all of a sudden it was very real to people in the Depression era. And all of a sudden gags turned on things like meeting bills, and it was so real in a humor strip that that's when it caught on. But the reason it's so remarkable when you juxtapose the 1980s is that syndicates wouldn't do that today. If it didn't make in the first six months, the salesman would bring out a new strip, or they'd put it in the can or let it dribble on for a while but it would be ignored. This happens with syndicates today. It stays on list of 40 papers, but they just don't try, in an editorial or a sales way. So syndicates had more faith in features and artists, and they just worked with them, and it paid off. Popeye, for instance. Thimble Theatre was a very marginal feature for 10 years. It didn't make King Features any money; it was mostly just in the Hearst papers. But they saw something there, and they wanted to keep it. They worked with Segar on new themes and adventures and all this, and finally Popeye came, and Popeye is still King Features' biggest licensing property. So that type of editorial interest is an investment.

[This is all fine and good for Blondie and Popeye, but we should keep in mind the large number of strips that also only ran for a very short amount of time even in the 30s and 40s and all of the syndicate editors that passed on famous strips like L'il Abner before they got picked up. Further, it's not always the editors' fault. The business was just so much more crowded in the 80s that if a strip didn't take off after a short amount of time there was always someone else waiting in the wings to give it a go. They didn't have time to "give it a chance." Not so much anymore, but everything changed once the Web came around]