As must be clear by now when it comes to comic books and comic strips my tastes can be as wide as they are eclectic, but that having been said I’m mostly a middlebrow; I tend to skew more towards the pedestrian and mainstream rather that the outre and avant-garde. Which probably explains my inexplicable affection for the all but forgotten comic strip. Mickey Finn which even in it’s heyday was never a top-tier feature, either creatively or when it came to popularity. But it was popular enough to last a remarkably long time, starting in 1936 and ending in 1976, especially given it’s thin premise; a mostly light-hearted look at the work and home life of a uniformed policeman named Michael Aloysius Finn that lived with his mother. Mickey was a good-natured, big kid at heart type and like a lot of comic strip protagonists of this era was a paragon of virtue and all-around role model for kids, hence, not a load of laughs. So the comic relief was mostly relegated to his Uncle Phil, the living embodiment of every vice and failing ever ascribed to the Irish save one; though he regularly featured a tavern he was not a habitual drunk. He was, however, a fantastically stupid shiftless, stubborn, argumentative blowhard and know-it-all who had the aspect of a shaved ape, all of which inexplicably proved so popular with readers that his repetitive low-rent antics soon took soon took over the Sunday strips. As demonstrated here in this Sunday page reprinted from an issue of Feature Comics.

So basically these were the endless “adventures” of a complete imbecile screwing up but for some reason they became my favorite feature in Feature Comics. I also quite enjoyed the “topper”, a comic strip term for “the short strip that ran at the top of the main feature” Nippie about a know-it-all kid who, as the subtitle established was “often wrong”. It likewise was endless variations on a single theme, but it resonated with me, perhaps because I’m so often wrong myself.

Mickey Finn appeared in the pages of Feature and Big Shot Comics as well as 15 issues of his own comic which reprinted the dailies. #6 is a good place for those unfamiliar with the strip to starts as it’s a complete sequence focusing on Mickey that shows that when given the rare opportunity he’s actually fairly capable of actual police work. It also features the introduction of Sunny, the blonde, supernaturally well behaved little kid whose presence in the Sundays always kind of puzzled me as he bore no familial resemblance to any of the other Finn’s and yet was treated as one of the family.