It’s always fun to see spot-art related to some of our favorite comic strips. That artwork usually appears in conjunction with some promotional effort or other — comic strips were “building their brand” before that concept started getting attached to everything and everyone in sight.
Looking at the early years of John Prentice’s long run on Rip Kirby, a variety of different promotions surfaced throughout 1958. King Features Syndicate provided subscribers with promotional art and copy for every upcoming storyline, which each individual newspaper could format as they chose. Here are a half-dozen such promo ads, culled from various papers and spotlighting stories that began in February, June, August, and November. (Click throughout for an isolated view.)
Early in ’58, editors who did business with King Features were encouraged to sponsor a “young readers draw comics characters” contest in their newspapers; Rip Kirby and his friends featured prominently in this promotion. Here is an announcement of the contest from the January 20th Raleigh Register, as well as a Kirby-based winning entry that got big play in the Duluth News-Tribune when it was published on February 23rd:
Subscribing newspapers came and went on a regular basis, of course, and King was more than willing to help ballyhoo the arrival of Rip in a new market, as these “coming soon” spot-ads from the Circleville, Ohio Herald indicate:
While the shift to gag-a-day features on the comics pages was well underway by 1958, the continuity-/adventure-strips had a clear advantage over their joke-focused counterparts for these types of promotions, and given that Rip Kirby ran until June of 1999, pieces like this may have helped give the strip additional “legs” by tempting new readers to give the feature a chance, and to give dedicated fans a hint at the next adventure.
