The Sunday Herald Tribune Funny Papers

The Sunday Herald Tribune had a six-page funny papers section. It carried none of the widely syndicated, well-known strips of its day. The paper syndicated its strips to a small number of newspapers. As a result most of the titles did not give rise to comic books, radio shows or movies and are now all but forgotten. The strips were humorous rather than melodramatic and the humor was less raucous than the top strips of the day. There were no action adventure strips.

The section was topped by "Mr and Mrs." a long-running domestic comedy which had been created by Clare Briggs but had been drawn since 1930 by Ellison Hoover.

The other strips were:

• "The Timid Soul" by H. T. Webster. This strip was introduced in The World in the mid-twenties. The name of its title character, Casper Milquetoast, entered the dictionary to mean a man afraid of his own shadow.

• "Our Bill" by Haenigsen- The adventures of a teenage boy. The strip was created in 1939. Teen culture had become a big thing as the offspring of the baby boom of the Twenties reached adolescence.

• "Peter Piltdown" by Mark Eaton. Piltdown was a teenage cave man in the age of the dinosaurs. He was named for a famous archaeological discovery that proved to be a hoax in 1953.

• "Shaggy" by Gould. A filler strip about a dog that appeared intermittently.

• "Clarence" by Weare Holbrook and Frank Fogarty. The misadventures of a rotund sad sack.

• "Penny" by Haenigsen- Teenage girl introduced in the mid-Forties as a companion piece to “Our Bill.” It proved to be one of the most successful strips syndicated by the newspaper. It featured a lot of teenage slang, much of which was invented by the cartoonist.

• "Peter Rabbit" by Harrison Cady. The fuzzy bunny first appeared in the Herald Tribune when the paper began its funny papers in 1920.

• "Skeets" by Dow Walling- A gentle strip about a little kid.