People on Paper

I'd never heard of the short People on Paper before, which is airing early tomorrow morning a little after 5:40 AM, or just after The People Against O'Hara which begins at 4:00 AM. Apparently, this one doesn't get shown very often on TCM, since it doesn't have any user reviews as of the time I'm writing this. Most of the shorts that get shown on TCM (like the Traveltalks shorts) wind up with a review or two, if only to mention that it's another entry in whichever series it was part of.

In the case of People on Paper, that series would be John Nesbitt's Passing Parade. This particular entry, according to the IMDb synopsis, looks at the people who draw the comic strips that appear in our newspapers. Or appeared past tense, since they're all long since dead. There are a couple of names I recognize: Chester Gould of Dick Tracy fame; Chic Young who did Blondie; Hal Foster gave us Prince Valiant; and Fred Lasswell whom I always associated with Snuffy Smith since that's how the cartoon was titled in my Sunday newspaper. Apparently the full name was Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, with Google having been written out of the stripa long time ago.

I have no idea if the presentation is well-down, but for anybody interested in comic strips, this might be worth a look.