The Press: First Strips

Few top-flight comic strips are today consciously comic, few still appeal primarily to children. Like movies and pulp fiction, they are mostly simple narratives for the unsophisticated of all ages. First comic-strip character to find high adventure in Europe’s war was the Register and Tribune Syndicate’s Jane Arden girl reporter for a mythical newspaper.

When the war broke, Artist Russell Ross and Author Monte Barrett scrapped cuts and continuity prepared six weeks in advance, hastily gave Jane Arden a war assignment. On her way by plane this week to the neutral kingdom of Anderia, while real correspondents were chafing because they could not get to the front, Jane Arden was caught between the lines.

First in another field was NEA Service, when in Texas-born Roy Crane’s Wash Tubbs native girls were pictured dancing naked though mud-daubed (see cut), on a South Sea island.