Not to be overlooked; this is a superb overview of how a newspaper worked in the mid-1950s. Having worked on local papers in the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, I enjoyed seeing the graphic arts portion of this comic, especially the cameras! Used them all!
By The Australian Panther
They used 3 heads of Joe Palooka, one from the front, one from the back and one from the side and they pasted them in different permutations on every figure of Joe. Not drawn by Ham Fisher
Wondered if they payed copyright?
By Comeekz
In Chicago 30 years ago, before it was replaced by Trump Tower, you could freely walk through the Sun-Times building from one end to the other through a glass hallway and see the huge printing presses on both sides of you, similar to the scene on page 9 of this comic! The newspapers have sure faced a lot of death blows over the last several decades: television, the Internet, the loss of credibility due to fake news and most recently, the Covid lockdown of two months that caused them to lose massive amounts of advertising. I'm surprised any newspapers are still running these days!
By dwilt
I never noticed it in other Joe Palooka comics, but in this one, Joe has no teeth. Guess they were all knocked out during his boxing career.
By paw broon
Yes indeed. Evocative of hot metal, the noise of the big presses; hubbub; so many voices, and the smell. I also worked for local papers and one of Glasgow's big evening sheets. Not in production but in advertising. There were always excuses to go to type setting, or down to the presses. The difference from back then - the '70's - to the antiseptic newsrooms of today is staggering.
By The Ghost Man
This was excellent, I love seeing these publishing behind-the-scenes documentations. Terrific upload and grand addition to CB+
By crashryan
I never worked in the newspaper industry, sad to say, but as a kid I did get a peek into the backrooms of our local weekly. A friend's dad was a typesetter there. I remember most of all the huge Linotype machines, intricate mechanical creatures that almost dwarfed their operators. They bristled with pulleys and gears and mysterious adjusting wheels. Near each station was a pot full of molten metal which would be injected into matrices (molds) to form typeset lines. The room was hot! The pots were gas-fired and as the tops were only partly covered you could see the red-hot metal inside. The rapid tapping of the keys was drowned by the whoosh of the burner and the clatter of the matrices as they marched along their track, did their bit to shape a line, then fell back into their places in the magazine. Watching it thrilled me sixty years ago and I imagine it would thrill me all over again if I were able to visit an old-school pressroom.
Reading this booklet I'm reminded how "analogue" the process was. It was all raw materials reshaped by sophisticated machinery and lots of manual labor. Nary a computer chip to be seen. Amazing.
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