If you like sci-fi strips featuring death rays, BEMs and rocket ships, and you don’t mind unskilled art and plot holes that could engulf a Death Star, this is the Lincoln Features strip for you. Dash Dixon was Lincoln’s answer to Buck Rogers. The two strips share a definite kissin’ cousins kinship in their wonky, childlike ideas about the nature of cosmos and the endless planets populated by bloodthirsty monsters and evil warlords. It’s all good fun if you can just turn your logical brain off, strap in and enjoy the rocket-powered ride.
The story begins with Dash and his girlfriend Dot (har har, Morse humour!) marooned on an island when their speedboat’s engine conks out. By the end of the very first strip they have been beamed aboard a Martian spaceship and they’re off on their intergalactic adventure. In the course of the strip’s run they will meet an impressive collection of aliens, including a few whose names may ring a bell — Bat Man and Iron Man!
There’s really no way to summarize Dash Dixon because the story moves along so hypersonically fast that the strip itself is a summarization of what more realistically would have been a hugely long tale. But as we’ve discussed with other Lincoln strips, this pace is intentional and for the best — when readers only get four panels of story once a week you’ve got to give them lots of meat and hold the veggies. Readers can’t remember intricate plot details from week to week so the smart way to do a strip like this is to set it at warp 12 and leave it to Scotty to fret about the engines overheating.
Dash Dixon started just a little bit late in 1935, about three months after the initial wave of Lincoln strips. The earliest I have found the strip debuting is May 23 1935 in the White River Leader. Unlike most other Lincoln strips of the time, which started with an unnumbered strip or two, Dash Dixon began with strips marked A and B. Then it changed over to numbered strips, starting with #15, a concession to bring the new strip into line with the numbering on the already running series.
Dash Dixon was credited to Dean Carr. That’s a house name, of course, and we don’t have to guess at the real identity of the cartoonist because he took credit for the strip in the copyright paperwork. The application listed Larry Antonette as the responsible party. Antonette introduced his two Lincoln series all but simultaneously; one week later Biff Baxter’s Adventures would debut.
Dash Dixon was a pretty popular feature in Lincoln’s line-up. Unlike Antonette’s Biff Baxter, which went begging for clients, the sci-fi strip rivalled Lincoln’s other A-listers (Little Buddy, Facts You Never Knew, and Detective Riley). And when it came time to re-run the series, as was the norm with Lincoln, Dash Dixon was renumbered for another go-round, an honour not bestowed on poor Biff Baxter.
The strip ran for 125 installments and offers a really neat feature, one I don’t think I’ve ever before encountered. The final sequence in the series has Dot and Dash on a planet of prehistoric beasts. As they try to escape the dinosaurs they come upon a speedboat, of all things. They jump in the boat and motor off to an island where the boat conks out, leaving them stranded. Sounding familiar? Dash Dixon is a neverending story, a Moebius strip in comic strip form. When the reruns start the following week, Dot and Dash — of course — get beamed up onto a Martian spaceship from their island, and we’re off on another go-round, slick as 0W-20!
Interestingly, we don’t have Antonette to thank for this delightful plot contrivance. The final strip, #137, the one that is wholly responsible for making the strip eat its own tail, was drawn by none other than Jack Kirby. This is his only contribution to the series, but what a humdinger it is!
Speaking of artwork, there’s some question in my mind regarding Antonette’s work on the series. Up until strip #80 it is 100% Antonette without a doubt. But strip #81 exhibits some differences in style — eyes drawn quite differently, perspective a bit more assured, heavier inking. On the subsequent strips the difference is often all but gone, but these new stylistic tics continue to show up every once in awhile. The eyes, in particular, are quite noticeable. Antonette tends to draw them as little more than slits usually, but the big doll eyes of the new style keep appearing almost randomly. Is Antonette experimenting, or is he getting help from someone? To my eyes, it seems like Antonette is perhaps taking some art classes and trying out his lessons in the strip. But why only sporadically?
A new wrinkle happens in the last two panels of strip #106 — an impressive improvement in perspective, inking and anatomy that really took me by surprise. This much improved style also continues in fits and starts in subsequent strips. Here I don’t think we have conventional art lessons to explain it; My guess in this case is that Antonette has been inducted into the practice of art swiping. Perhaps his teacher was that consummate art swiper in Lincoln’s bullpen, George Newman? The timeline seems to be workable, as Newman had arrived in the bullpen by then. One problem with my guess is that I don’t recognize who the swipee might be.
If we take the official start date to be May 23 1935, the 125 strip run puts our end date for the series at October 7 1937. For reasons unknown, the rerun series that then began was never completed in any newspaper to which I have access. The last newspapers to run the reprint series sputtered out in the #230s, right in the middle of the moon sequence.
Here are links to the complete series. In choosing the best examples, I often went with the excellent Dallas Post versions, which are mostly from the reprint series. So ignore the numbers you see on them, I’ve determined their original numbering.