Friday Christmas treat.
For many years several syndicates would offer newspaper a free strip for the month leading up to christmas. One of the most famous ones was NEA, whose series included a retelling of A Christmas Carol, a strip with The Little People, which lead to a new syndicated series and an offering by famous comic book artist Wallace Wood. Here is a lesser know strip, by an artist I have never heard about before, Ben Martin. The ony mention I ca find is on Alan Holtz excellent Stripper's Guide page. He mentions a Ben Martin who was an editor at the Herald Tribune later in that decade. As such he may have been responsible for a lot of very good buys, including Johnny Reb, Al Jaffee's Tall Tales, Arnold Roth's Poor Arnold's Almanac and a strip by David Gantz which I'll show next year.
Tomorrow a Christmas sequence from a running strip with a much more serious tone.