“Mud Center Folks” (February 17, 1926)
by Charles Desaix Small (1882-1953)
14 x 9 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection

C. D. Small was born in Philadelphia and began comic sketching at age thirteen. He sold his first cartoon fresh out of high school. Small took a comic art course, worked at odd jobs in the advertising field, and contributed cartoons to Lifeand Judge. Next up was a stint as a sports cartoonist for a New York newspaper before being tagged by NEA.

Some of the strips he worked on were Mud Center Folks (1925-26), Bugs (1926–1927), and Salesman Sam (1927–1936).

In his “Stripper’s Guide” description, we learn that Charles D. Small was stuck taking up the slack where other cartoonists left off. He lived in Cleveland in 1925 and got hooked up with NEA there. His first signed assignment was Mud Center Folks. NEA had just lost the panel cartoon series The Old Home Town to Johnson Features and the syndicate had Small provide a replacement. His version was Mud Center Folks. Small did not follow the lead of Lee Stanley, whose Old Home Town was a rather frantic and slapstick look at small town life. Small instead chose a warmer, folksier approach that owed more to another NEA panel, J.R. Williams’ Out Our Way. The drawing style is very much like Williams’, and the gags are gentle.

This excellent feature did not immediately catch on as a replacement to The Old Home Town. Many NEA clients chose to continue the original feature through its new syndicate, and just how many folksy panels does a newspaper need? Even though Mud Center Folks came free as part of the NEA package service, it ran in few papers.

After Mud Center Folks, Small continued to pick up where other cartoonists left off. There was Bugs, and then the long-running Salesman Sam, in which Small did such a perfect impersonation of George Swanson that you can’t tell one from the other without looking for the signature.

Mud Center Folks ran for about 8 months, from July 6 1925 to April 20 1926.