A Bicentennial Obscurity: "200 Years Ago Today"

My journey to uncover the comic books and comic strips of the Bicentennial has taken me down some odd paths since the last time I posted here. Each bit of research unveils something new, something interesting, and something that required a lot more exploration.

Here's one such oddity. For a couple of years, ranging through most of 1975 and 1976, the Field Syndicate distributed a tiny comics panel called "200 Years Ago Today: A Bicentennial Calendar" to newspapers around the country. This single-panel cartoon contained a fairly simple drawing and a few words of text about what happened on that date two centuries earlier, often to comedic effect. Each panel was the width of a newspaper column, allowing editors to place it wherever they wanted, pretty much as filler, often on the editorial pages, but just as often scattered in random locations throughout the paper.

I've found a few dozen examples of this strip, dating as early as June1975 and running as late as October 1976. Oddly enough, I have yet to find the cartoon for July 4, 1976, even in any of the papers that ran it.

There are no credits on any of these strips, but Allan Holtz, who runs the excellent website Stripper's Guide, tells me "the art is almost certainly by Ben Templeton." Templeton not only created one of my all-time favorite comic strips. "Motley's Crew," he also co-created another Bicentennial comic strip called "Yankee Doodles." Holtz wrote about "Yankee Doodles" here, and I'll be digging into it in the coming months. "I guess Ben was getting some extra use out of all his period drawings by signing on to a second feature," Holtz told me.

I haven't been able to track down contact information for Templeton to verify any of this, but I did reach out to King Features Syndicate, which absorbed the Field syndicate a few decades ago. The reply, from director of publicity Claudia Smith, revealed little: "I checked with our Archivist and, unfortunately, we are not able to help very much. When we absorbed NAS in the 1980s, not all the old Field features were included, and no files were saved." They couldn't even verify who owned the copyright on "200 Years Ago Today."

It seems unlikely that this material will ever enjoy a decent reprint effort, so here are many of the examples of this Bicentennial obscurity that I have been able to find so far. Enjoy!