CURIOSITIES: HAIRBREADTH HARRY (1906-1940)

 In official histories of the comic strip, it's almost de riguer to observe that for about the first 30 years of the medium, almost every kind of strip focused largely on the appeal of "the gag." Not until 1929, which launched characters like Buck Rogers and Tarzan in their own newspaper features, did comic strips begin a love affair with combative adventure-stories. Still, I decided to do some quick research of the early comic strip era, to see if I could find exceptions to the general rule. This consisted of my going through a Wikipedia list of all the prominent strips of the 1900s decade. Sure enough, I saw nothing that suggested the call of adventure-- except one strip, whose description I'll borrow from the late Don Markstein's TOONOPEDIA:

Harry was introduced on October 21, 1906, in a Philadelphia Press Sunday page titled Our Hero's Hairbreath Escapes. The following January the spelling of the word "hairbreadth" was corrected, and the title became Hairbreadth Harry, the Boy Hero. At first, Harry (whose full name was Harold Hollingsworth, by the way) was, as suggested by the title, a mere lad. But he anticipated Gasoline Alley's Skeezix by growing up. Unlike Skeezix, however, Harry stopped aging soon as he'd become big enough to function as an adult.

Harry got his incentive to grow on September 21, 1907, with the introduction of Belinda Blinks, beautiful boilermaker, an adult rescue object (who thoughtfully put off aging while he caught up). Belinda completed the cast, as Relentless Rudolph Ruddigore Rassendale, relentless rogue (whose name was a reference to the works of Anthony Hope and Gilbert & Sullivan), had been on the scene since March 3. Together, the three went through endlessly funny and inventive spoofs of the old music hall melodramas of the 18th and 19th centuries, complete with mortgages, sawmills and railroad tracks.

A problem with evaluating HARRY's combative status arises, though, in the fact that copies of the earliest strips are almost totally unavailable for review. One would think that a strip spoofing the old "mellerdrammers" in which a stalwart hero rescued a damsel from a black-hearted villain would have to involve sustained scenes of combat. But was that the case?

The only online sources for HARRY reprints are reproductions of original comic strip art for sale, or, much more rarely, reprints on sites like this one.     

These two Sunday strips from 1913 are the earliest ones I found, and they don't involve combat as such; just gags. Slightly more promising is this reprint from 1925:

  So this strip at least ends with villain Rudolph getting punched out a window by Harry. But these are the only legible items I found from the strip's creator, C.W. Kahles. He died in 1931, and the strip was continued for the rest of its run by one F.O. Alexander. There are numerous reprints of Alexander's work in Eastern Color's FAMOUS FUNNIES, often styled as the first real "comic book." But of course, by then other strips were getting into adventure in a big way. Here's a smattering of Alexander Sunday strips from FUNNIES. I would judge this version of the ongoing strip as combative, since most of the scenarios end with Rudolph being clobbered or thwarted somehow, usually by Harry. Some verbal testimony suggests that Kahles had been doing the same thing, and it certainly makes sense that Alexander would stick with what had already been working for his predecessor.

The first is interesting in showing Rudolph having access to a one-shot "super-power," that of invisibility.        

Later Rudolph has access to a "diathermic ray." 

Most amusing of these 1934 strips, though, is one in which Rudolph chases heroine Belinda into a women's spa. Harry and the cops can't chase the villain in there, because they're gentlemen, but Harry still triumphs by tossing (through a window) a bar of soap, on which Rudolph slips and knocks himself out. I suspect that the conclusion, in which a dialogue-balloon suggests that Belinda's going to get even by working over the unconscious villain with an Indian club, was a pretty rare instance of her getting some of her own back.