Lincoln Features was a relatively obscure syndicate that offered daily-style comic strips to weekly newspapers from 1935 to 1945. The syndicate was headed by H.T. Elmo, a writer and cartoonist himself, and known contributors to the syndicate’s wares included Irv Tirman, M.E. Brady, Larry Antonette, Bill Warren, several unknown hands, and most notably, the future King of comic books, Jack Kirby.
Weekly newspapers of this era (and most any other) are known for their frugality when it relates to purchasing syndicated material. Comic strips were a luxury many weeklies wanted but few could afford. Many weekly papers were enthusiastic about taking the Lincoln Features material in spite of the questionable quality of the offerings, but very few of Lincoln’s clients were able (or perhaps willing) to keep their accounts up to date. So attempts to determine the extent and details of the syndicat’e output have long been hampered by the relative obscurity of the papers that used their wares, and compounded by the fits and starts of their appearances, which were often due to their accounts being past due.
In 2026 we have finally reached the point with the burgeoning quantity of online-accessible microfilm that this researcher finally sees some hope of bringing enough sources together to tease some logic out of the incoherence. There are enough sources available at this point that when one paper drops the syndicate’s offerings, there is usually some other paper picking it up so that we can chain all these sources together into some sort of rational picture of the syndicate’s offerings.
Two additional factors also helped to make me take the plunge into this major research effort. First was the appearance of Alex Jay’s reference to the Lincoln strip Facts You Never Knew in 2017. He proved almost a decade ago that if you have enough dogged determination that it is actually possible to make some sense out of the tangled mess of Lincoln Features strips. His index also offered an important framework to understand Lincoln. First, you have to be cognizant of the fact that they reused material, but that they played a relatively fair game of it in that they renumbered the strips when they were reprinted. The second key takeaway from the Facts You Never Knew index is that the Lincoln strip numbering sometimes takes unexpected jumps. This is where having lots of source papers to review becomes really important, because you absolutely have to determine that nobody ran those missing numbers. Many if not most weekly papers are absolutely awful at printing syndicated material in date or number order, so just because you see a strip jump twenty strip numbers ahead from one week to the next does not mean that the strips don’t exist. It often just means that this particular paper printed out of order, or just as likely, had a long gap because they failed to pay their bill for a few months.
The second factor that made me finally ante up is that Ray Bottorff Jr. messaged me about a very interesting item he found in a relatively obscure online archive, the Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive. I won’t tell you what that interesting thing is because it was not what he told me about that got me really excited about researching Lincoln Features. (Yes, we will cover Ray’s very interesting find pretty soon). Ray alerted me to the existence of a paper called the Dallas (Pa.) Post there, and when I saw the quality of the reproduction the eyes pretty much jumped out of my head. The pages were photographed not from microfilm but directly from bound volumes, and at high resolution. They were Gorgeous! And so naturally I went trolling around looking for interesting content and found that they were a long term client of Lincoln Features. Granted, they didn’t run Lincoln’s whole gamut of material and they had plenty of gaps in their runs of the strips they did use, but what was there looked about a hundred times better than what we see in the typical e-microfilm material. And that is actually extremely important to researching Lincoln Features material because in many of these e-film archives the numbering on the strips becomes too blurry or obscured to read. If you can’t read strip numbers, you may as well be trying to put together an all-white jigsaw puzzle.
Stripper’s Guide in general doesn’t go in for exhibiting long runs of any comic strip — we are more about giving you a taste and letting you go off and find more online or in the marketplace. But I found that the only way to adequately determine what was going on at Lincoln was to collect every single numbered strip. When a syndicate starts strips at random numbers, and then mangles the numbering scheme at various points in the run, I don’t see any way around that. Since I am trying to collect every single Lincoln strip, and I happen to think they vary from adorably looney to bizarrely ridiculous to guilty pleasure entertaining, I want to inflict them on you as well. So as we cover each feature on the blog, this page will become a gateway to what will eventually be complete runs of all the Lincoln strips. Well, at least as long as my web server space holds up!
Lincoln Features Strips
The Cloud Busters
Little Buddy
The Goofus Family
Our Puzzle Corner