Jay Irving's Willie Doodle, 1946 Promotional Book

I’ve long been a fan of Jay Irving’s bigfoot flatfoot comic strips and cartoons, from his Collier’s Cops in Collier’s magazine, to his Willie Doodle and Pottsy Sunday page-only comic strips. I won’t go into a detailed description of Irving’s career, as I’ve already covered that in this article I wrote for Hogan’s Alley #16 back in 2009. Irving’s work, with his wonderfully active pen line, dry-brush shading, and terrific figure movement, has always appealed to me. Given that, when I ran across this promotional booklet for Willie Doodle, I was thrilled. Promo books for comic strips, especially of this vintage, rarely survived. They were considered cheap, disposable items, used to try and garner support (and subscriptions) for strips. Then they were thrown out. Thankfully, this one survived. Willie Doodle did not have a long run, starting on May 19, 1946 and running for nearly two years, until May 9, 1948. Willie was Irving’s standard cop, with a portly figure, large nose and small feet. If you’ve seen Willie, you’ve also seen Pottsy and Irving’s cop cartoons that ran in Collier’s. And yes, I realize that I referred to the strip as “bigfoot”, which it is, even though the main character has small feet.

The promo book measures just over 11″x16″ when closed. Including the covers, the book consists of 12 pages, giving brief background about Irving and his feature. Sunday pages in the forties were usually run as half and third-page features. The book features both formats, so prospective clients could see how the strip might look in their newspaper.

Without further ado, Willie Doodle: Pride O’ The Finest!