Comic Strips
One of the first syndicated artists was Rube Goldberg. McNaught's line-up of comic strips included Mickey Finn and Dixie Dugan. Ham Fisher's Joe Palooka was at first rejected by McNitt, but Fisher was hired as a salesman for the syndicate, offering McNaught's features to newspapers. After having sold his comic to 20 newspapers, McNitt had to change his opinion and added Joe Palooka to the syndicate, becoming one of the big successes for it.
From 1937 until 1939, many of the syndicate's comic strips were reprinted in the comic book anthology Feature Funnies. In 1939, the syndicate hired Vin Sullivan, then editor of Action Comics, to start a new comics publishing company, Columbia Comics, which would carry both new comics and reprints of McNaught syndicated comics like Joe Palooka. The company existed until 1949 and is best remembered for their publication Big Shot Comics.
Other successes included columns by Dale Carnegie and Dear Abby by Abigail Van Duren. At the time of McNitt's death in 1964, the syndicate was still led by McAdam, providing contents to 1,000 newspapers.
The syndicate continued columns and strips which were already successful when acquired, but it also was active in creating and suggesting new content, from the Will Rogers columns to comic strips like Don Dean's Cranberry Boggs. In one case, McNitt supported a crossover between the comic strips Joe Palooka and Dixie Dugan, a feat which was commented upon by Editor & Publisher.
Their last success came with the comic strip Heathcliff, which they syndicated from the start in 1973 until the late 1980s. Heathcliff appeared in some 1,000 newspapers, and the McNaught Syndicate became the production company for a few Heathcliff movies, including Heathcliff: The Movie from 1986. By 1987, McNaught had only 24 features left, making it the tenth largest comic strip syndicate in the United States at that time. Probably in 1988, the syndicate eventually folded.
Read more about this topic: Mc Naught Syndicate
Famous quotes related to comic strips:
“Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–62)