Number 450


Terry gives it away


Who made Popped Wheat? If it's anything like Puffed Wheat, which was produced by my father's employer, the Quaker Oats Company, then Popped Wheat was basically packing material in a cereal box. In the 1940s and '50s, before sugared cereals became common, cereals like Popped (and Puffed) Wheat were more common. I hated those cereals. The only taste I could determine from a bowlful of those products was from the milk and sugar I poured on them to disguise their disgusting consistency.

Ah, but enough about my youthful culinary dislikes. Popped Wheat gave out Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates as a premium, part of a series of weekly 16-page comic books. Sig Feuchtwanger is listed as publisher, producing comics from the Chicago Tribune syndicate, which included Little Orphan Annie, Dick Tracy, Terry, and Smilin' Jack. I bought a set of the four in the mid-1970s for $6.00. I believe someone made a warehouse find. As far as I know, the four I have are the only four issues produced. Even though the copyright date is 1938, the Popped Wheat giveaways were put out in 1947.

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Number 111



Popped Wheat's Giveaway Smilin' Jack


Smilin' Jack was a popular newspaper comic strip which ran from 1933 to 1973. Forty years is a respectable run for any strip, especially one that was centered around aviation. That field seemed much more exotic in the early 1930s than it was in the early 1970s. The creator/artist was Zack Mosley (1906-1994).

This posting is of a 16-page Popped Wheat giveaway comic book from 1947, with reprints of a 1938 Smilin' Jack continuity. There were four titles in the Popped Wheat series, Terry and the Pirates, Little Orphan Annie and Dick Tracy, all strips from the Chicago Tribune Syndicate. There was only one issue of each title.


This issue of Smilin' Jack seems to be pretty typical of the comic strip I read from the late 1950s until its demise in '73; it has its soap opera elements mixed in with comic relief. The gimmick of the lothario Downwind Johnson keeping his face away from the reader was used with great effect for the life of the strip. The gimmick of Fat Stuff popping his buttons into the mouth of a waiting chicken seems like something that should have been ended right after it began. Fat Stuff--and his girlfriend--are pretty awful racial caricatures, but that sort of thing was more acceptable in that time.

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