The Press: Deathless Deer

One thing that New York Daily News Publisher Joseph Patterson knows for sure is comics. He used them shrewdly to build his tabloid’s record daily circulation (1,975,000). He cooked up several comics (the Gumps, Moon Mullins, Dick Tracy), launched the technique of continuing the episode instead of ending it each day. But until last week he had not bought a new strip for nine years.

The promoter who broke down his resistance was his shrewd, pretty daughter, Alicia (Mrs. Harry Guggenheim), editor and publisher of the Hempstead, L.I. Newsday (circ.: 35,000). She had tried to buy some of her father’s better comic strips for her suburban sheet, but the Chicago Tribune-New York News syndicate, like most others, has a 50-mile territorial limitation on comics. So Alicia invented her own. It is scheduled to begin about Nov. 1 in eleven papers, including Father’s News, Cousin Bertie McCormick’s Tribune, Aunt Cissy Patterson’s Washington Times-Herald and Alicia’s Newsday.

Name of the strip given it by Father Patterson, is Deathless Deer. The deer is no Bambi but a beauteous, dark, ruthless Egyptian princess who suffers death in the fourth installment. Awakened 3,000 years later (today) in a U.S. museum, she is ready for 20th-century adventures.

Artist is Neysa McMein (magazine covers), who has never worked with pen and ink before. Her first attempt is nothing extra, as comics go, but it will probably satisfy the customers. Says Artist McMein: “I despair of ever getting out the front door again. Why, they say these things sometimes go on for as long as 22 years.”