Lincoln Features introduced their initial line-up of weekly comic strips in March 1935. But it was only a few months later that they added to the roster with a new offering from a cartoonist who just barely missed being there at the beginning. The new kid, Larry Antonette1, working under the outlandish nom de plume Bob Dart, created Biff Baxter’s Adventures in May 1935. This was an adventure tale of a famous boxer who is shanghaied onto a modern pirate ship. Biff quickly finds himself with a beautiful girl and a kid to protect from the bad guys and we’re off to the races.
Daily-style adventure strips that run in weekly papers really ought to move the story along at a breakneck pace to have any hope of retaining reader interest, and the staff at Lincoln really understood that. But moving the story along quickly often means that logic and careful plotting goes out the window. When you sit down to read weekly strips without the curse of waiting seven days between episodes they generally suffer badly. Biff Baxter’s Adventures, however, does an admirable job of moving the story along quickly while avoiding plotting inconsistencies so big you could pilot a cruise ship through them, which is enough of a plus to make it one of Lincoln’s better story strip offerings. That doesn’t mean it’s any sort of undiscovered classic by any means — it’s dopey as all get out — but by comparison to some of Lincoln’s other story strips you have to give Antonette points for effort. What is less admirable is the art; Antonette could draw bigfoot cartoony stuff alright, but a realistically drawn adventure strip was stretching his artistic abilities to the limit. But the art does get the job done — I can tell who’s who and the action is clear enough — so I suppose I shouldn’t bellyache.
Speaking of Antonette’s art, I was quite happy to gather a run of this strip so that hopefully I could learn how to spot his work. As you probably know by now, Lincoln’s features were generally penned under pseudonyms, and the bullpen cartoonists would sometimes play musical chairs on their titles. I feel that I can pretty accurately identify most of the Lincoln crew — Elmo, Kirby, Brady, Newman, Tirman — but I have seen so little of Antonette’s work, and then primarily humor, that he could show up on some feature and I’d not be able to do more than hazard a guess by process of elimination. Now after carefully reviewing Biff Baxter’s Adventures I feel that I have found a few ‘tells’, but his art is so typical of the barely-past-amateur level that I’ll still not have much confidence. Artists develop their own singular styles over time, and Antonette is still at the level of competence where he’s just trying to get functional material down on the art board. Here’s a few ‘tells’ I picked up:
- His hero and bad guy faces tend to be blocky and have deep lines on the cheeks, like scars more than cheekbones.
- He has a habit of drawing overly large hands with individual splayed fingers
- He likes a lot of deep shadows in his backgrounds, probably so he doesn’t have to draw a lot of scenery ‘furniture.’
- He tends to draw beady dot eyes.
That’s not a tremendous amount to hang your hat on; in fact the only really solid item in that group are the hands, which are bizarre enough to be a real solid tell. But he doesn’t always draw hands that badly, so IDing based solely on that is hit-or-miss. Luckily, though, his work is certainly different than most of the bullpenners that confusion of styles is unlikely. His work is closest to Elmo’s, but Elmo’s style is (hmm, how do I put this) sorta rounded and gushy while Antonette’s is more slashy and noodly.
But let’s get back to the strip. Biff Baxter’s Adventures earliest debut that I can find online is on May 30 1935 in the Atmore Advance. In fact that’s about the only paper that I’ve found it in other than a few stragglers printing very short runs in 1936. I have a theory why Biff ran in so few papers compared to the rest of the early Lincoln line-up. My guess is that Elmo invested in a major marketing effort in early 1935 to harvest his initial client list. When Biff came along a few months later Elmo didn’t have the cash to do another big marketing push. So it may be that the only promotion it got was an insert sent to current clients. And my guess is even that didn’t happen because weekly papers tend to run anything they get their hands on. If some samples of the strip had been sent out, we’d surely have papers running them.
Somehow Biff Baxter’s Adventures got lost in the shuffle. But Antonette’s other feature, Dash Dixon, which began at the same time, found quite a few clients. So maybe I’m all wet with my scenario above. Maybe clients really just didn’t take to poor ol’ Biff. We know that Elmo sure didn’t press the issue, either. Biff was unceremoniously dumped from the line-up after a one-year run, just as he was getting set to begin his next adventure. And unlike just about every other feature Elmo offered, Biff Baxter’s Adventures seems never to have been offered in re-runs. Harsh treatment!
Samples of what I believe to be the complete run are available at the link below. The introductory strip is labelled ‘A’, and then we go to #13 (to mesh with the numbering of Lincoln’s other pre-existing features). I cannot find a #14 but there is no obvious gap in the story, so I’m guessing that number was lopped off to better align the numbering. The final strip is #64. This makes for a run of exactly 52 installments, one year’s worth. A perfect run, then, should end on May 21 1936 if we take the start date at the Ardmore Advance as the official starting date.
Biff Baxter’s Adventures #A, 13, 15-64
- We know it is Larry Antonette lurking behind that pseudonym because he filed for copyright on the strip. ↩︎