Conchy part 4 of 4 - the last strip

Before we dive into the strips, a little oddity I found.


This is from the front page of the Tennessean, dated June 17, 1976. On the left side of the paper's name there would be a "today's weather" box. On that day it used a drawing from the strip. Childress mentioned that the Tennessean paper has been one of his first sale. This leads to a theory that the paper was very faithful to the strip. I don't think I've ever seen this with another strip. I might find one soon, though...




And with that note, here is the final Conchy daily. It was published on February 5, 1977, exactly two weeks after James Childress's death.



However, that's not the end yet. Because the Sunday comics are produced on a different schedule, the Conchy Sundays ran a month longer. Below is the last strip, which ran on March 13, 1977.



And that's it. Conchy ran just over 7 years (1970-1977). It was never a big hit and even today it's still obscure, but there's no denying that it had a small following, and still does. Here's hoping that the complete collection will be published eventually.

Conchy part 3 of 4

Conchy part 2 of 4

(the above strip was published in January 22, 1977, the day Childress shot himself)

Conchy part 1 of 4

The local library down here has archives of The Nashville Tennessean in the form of microfilms. It only goes back to 1974 but already I found some goodies. Among those is Conchy by James Childress.

I've already talked about the strip many times on this blog, but the Tennessean archive was important to me in particular, because they actually published the strip from start to finish. I was able to find the final strips through their microfilms.

I randomly had 16 strips scanned (including the last strip). I will post four per day on this blog until this Sunday. These are all from the final year, 1976-77. One thing I found interesting was that the titular character didn't appear much. In fact, of the sixteen strips Conchy only appears in one. He doesn't even appear in the last strip (which, in all honesty, was just another strip that happened to be published last).

Anyway, here are the first batch.

Early FoxTrot interview

This is probably one of the first interviews Bill Amend did when FoxTrot just started. This is from the December 1989 issue of Cartoonist PROfiles.

At the Zü part 5

At the Zü part 4

At the Zü part 3

At the Zü part 2

At the Zü part 1

At the Zü is a great comic that nobody has ever heard of. The strip was by Ron Ruelle and it was distributed by Creators Syndicate from 11/20/1995 to 6/20/1998, but was later continued as a weekly webcomic, retitled "Darwin and Co" at this point, until 2000. Roughly 30 newspapers ran it altogether.

I've written about it before so I won't go into too much, but I found a bunch more strips in the Google News Archive and I couldn't bear to not post some. In a similar manner to the Jack & Tyler posts I did, I'm going to post a bunch of Zu strips for the rest of the week. Enjoy.

JACK AND TYLER part 6

More Jack & Tyler...