RIPLEY'S BELIEVE IT OR NOT: DAILY CARTOONS 1929-1930

Ripley’s Believe It or Not: Daily Cartoons 1929-1930

By Robert L. Ripley
Introduction by Bruce Canwell

276 7.5x11-inch landscape pages
b/w except for reproduction of a few antique newspaper clippings that are sort of yellowed with age
IDW Library of American Comics
hardcover
$39.99

In a time when cartoonists were celebrities, Ripley was undoubtedly the most celebrated of the legions. He was “a shy, goofy, portly, bucktoothed stutterer who became a world traveler, a multimedia pioneer, and a rich and famous ladies’ man” (saith Neal Thompson in his A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe It Or Not” Ripley). A 1936 poll determined that he was the most popular man in America. But his beginnings were humble.

He started as a sports cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle in 1909, moved to New York and the creaky old Globe and Commercial Advertiser in 1912, and began to escape the sports pages on December 19, 1918, when he drew a cartoon that displayed odd facts about sporting events and athletes entitled “Champs and Chumps.” 

Then ten months later on October 16, he did another similar compilation and called it Believe It Or Not. By this time, Ripley was already a world traveler: he covered major sports events in Europe (including aspects of World War I). In 1929, on July 9, BION (as Ripley dubbed it) was picked up for syndication by King Features, and Ripley was soon an international figure.

For the next twenty years, he was in the news frequently as his travels in search of oddities were reported hither and yon. And he lived large. Although his “home” for many years was a tiny cramped room at the New York Athletic Club, he spent much of his time when in the city at night clubs, where he drank the nights away.

In addition to his cartoon (daily and Sunday), he had a radio show and several museums (“Odditoriums”) which were stocked with the strange artifacts he collected in globe-spanning trips, and then he did movies; when television arrived, he was soon on the small screen—albeit, only briefly, from March 1 until May 27, 1949, when he died.

Canwell’s short Introduction (enriched by the vintage visuals of newspaper clippings) suggests the dimensions of Ripley’s fame.

The book offers ample evidence of Ripley’s skill as an artist, reprinting all of his daily cartoons from his first for King Features through 1930. He began as a cartoonist, but by the time BION appeared, he was more of an out-and-out black-and-white illustrator whose high-caliber work went beyond the limitations of ordinary cartooning.