Ed Dodd and Mark Trail

Mark Trail is probably the longest-surviving strip of its kind, and maybe the only one of its kind. Part adventure strip, part mystery, part Animal Planet and with plots so simple they make the Hardy Boys seem like James Ellroy. Here’s an easy way to solve any current Mark Trail mystery: The guys with the weird facial hair that travel by small plane are guilty, especially if they’re brothers or cousins.

Still, I’m fascinated that it’s survived long enough to be a legacy strip, carried on by another generation of cartoonists, Jack Elrod. One of my favorite websites, the Comics Curmudgeon regularly pokes Mark Trail and snuffs out his campfire of adventure.

Continuing my series on cartooning and cartoonists, Ed Dodd (or someone credited as such) wrote about himself and his work back in 1964. This is pulled from an oversized saddle-stitched magazine from Allied Publications with the creatively-challenged title These Top Cartoonists Tell How They Create America’s Favorite Comics. It featured an introduction by Beetle Bailey’s Mort Walker and was compiled by Allen Willette.

Here’s Dodd on Dodd:

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Q&A: James Childress & Conchy (1975)

A million years ago, when I was but a small boy, my favorite comic strip was - and still is - Conchy by James Childress. The strip was about a group of beachcombers and it had the wackiness of early B.C. by Johnny Hart mixed with the philosophical melancholy of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. And it was extremely well-drawn. I found out about Conchy in some obscure comic magazine, then realized it was not running in my local paper, The Roanoke Times & World News (because there had to be room for Dr. Smock, right?). But it did run in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Being too broke to spend the money every day to get a copy of an out of town paper, I pulled a pre-Google and read it for free: by going to the local library every Sunday afternoon and reading a week’s worth of strips in one sitting.

I loved it and I started to piece together a history of the strip and its creator. Childress himself was syndicating the strip on his own - no big syndicate to support and promote him. I remember being impressed by that gutsy DIY attitude; I had no idea such a thing was even possible. He worked his way up as an independent and subsequently got Conchy picked up by the same folks that syndicated Walt Kelly’s Pogo, Publishers-Hall.

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