Heroes Arise
In 1929 heroic characters began to fill the comic strip newspaper pages. This was critical for comic books to become what they are today because for the first time you had heroic characters in the drawn in the sequential art form common to comic strips and comic books.
Buck Rogers, Tarzan, and Popeye all started that year. Tarzan was an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ famous novel character from 1912, discussed previously. Buck Rogers introduced science fiction to comic strips.
Buck Rogers is a science fiction adventure hero and feature comic strip created by Philip Francis Nowlan first appearing in daily U.S. newspapers on January 7, 1929, and subsequently appearing in Sunday newspapers, international newspapers, books and multiple media with adaptations including radio in 1932, a serial film, a television series, and other formats.
Buck Rogers
Nowlan had published several novellas including Armageddon 2419 A.D., published in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories. The newspaper syndicator John F. Dille saw the opportunity for a science fiction-based comic strip. After Nowlan and Dille enlisted editorial cartoonist Dick Calkins as the illustrator, Nowlan created the comic strip about life some 500 years hence titled Buck Rogers. Some have suggested that Dille coined that name based on the 1920s cowboy actor Buck Jones.
On January 7, 1929, the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D. comic strip debuted. (Coincidentally, this was also the date that the Tarzan comic strip began, distributed by United Feature Syndicate.) Buck Rogers was initially syndicated to 47 newspapers. On March 30, 1930, a Sunday strip joined the Buck Rogers daily strip.
Writer Nowlan told the inventor R. Buckminster Fuller in 1930 that “he frequently used [Fuller’s] concepts for his cartoons”. Dick Calkins, an advertising artist, drew the earliest daily strips, and Russell Keaton drew the earliest Sunday strips.
Like many popular comic strips of the day, Buck Rogers was reprinted in Big Little Books; illustrated text adaptations of the daily strip stories; and in a Buck Rogers pop-up book. At its peak in 1934, Buck Rogers appeared in 287 U.S. newspapers, was translated into 18 languages, and appeared in an additional 160 international papers.
Keaton wanted to switch to drawing another strip written by Calkins, Skyroads, so the syndicate advertised for an assistant and hired Rick Yager in 1932. Yager had formal art training at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and was a talented watercolor artist; all the strips were done in ink and watercolor. Yager also had connections with the Chicago newspaper industry, since his father, Charles Montross Yager, was the publisher of The Modern Miller; Rick Yager was at one time employed to write the “Auntie’s Advice” column for his father’s newspaper. Yager quickly moved from inker and writer of the Buck Rogers “sub-strip” (early Sunday strips had a small sub-strip running below) to writer and artist of the Sunday strip and eventually the daily strips.
Authorship of early strips is extremely difficult to ascertain. The signatures at the bottoms of the strips are not accurate indicators of authorship; Calkins’ signature appears long after his involvement ended, and few of the other artists signed the artwork, while many pages are unsigned. Yager probably had complete control of Buck Rogers Sunday strips from about 1940 on, with Len Dworkins joining later as assistant. Dick Locher was also an assistant in the 1950s. The strip’s artists also worked on a variety of tie-in promotions such as comic books, toys, and model rockets.
For all of its reference to modern technology, the strip was produced in an old-fashioned manner — all strips began as India ink drawings on Strathmore paper, and a smaller duplicate (sometimes redrawn by hand) was hand-colored with watercolors.
The relations between the artists of the strip (Yager et al.) and the Syndicate became acrimonious, and in mid-1958, the artists quit. Murphy Anderson was a temporary replacement, but he did not stay long. George Tuska began drawing the strip in 1959 and remained until the final installment of the original comic strip, which was published on July 8, 1967. At that point, Buck Rogers appeared in only 28 newspapers.
