Poor Arnold's Almanac
Encyclopedia
Poor Arnold's Alamanac was a newspaper
Newspaper
A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...

 comic
Comics
Comics denotes a hybrid medium having verbal side of its vocabulary tightly tied to its visual side in order to convey narrative or information only, the latter in case of non-fiction comics, seeking synergy by using both visual and verbal side in...

 strip by Arnold Roth
Arnold Roth
Arnold Roth is an American freelance cartoonist and illustrator for advertisements, album covers, books, magazines and newspapers.Novelist John Updike wrote, "All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so."...

. Each installment covered a single subject, with Roth devising gags on such topics as baseball, dogs, commuting, elephants, ice cream, smoking and the telephone.

Roth wrote and drew Poor Arnold's Almanac from 1959 to 1961 and again from 1989 to 1990. Roth initially created a color Sunday comic strip
Sunday strip
A Sunday strip is a newspaper comic strip format, where comic strips are printed in the Sunday newspaper, usually in a special section called the Sunday comics, and virtually always in color. Some readers called these sections the Sunday funnies...

 for the New York Herald Tribune Syndicate, and two years later, it was revived for the Creators Syndicate
Creators Syndicate
Creators Syndicate is an independent distributor of comic strips and syndicated columns for daily newspapers. It was founded in 1987 by Richard S. Newcombe, and is based in Los Angeles. Creators was one of the first syndicates to allow its clients to maintain creative control of their material...

 as both a daily and a Sunday feature. Roth recalled:
I think the only other times I’ve gotten a regular check for doing work was when I had a syndicated feature with the Herald Tribune
New York Herald Tribune
The New York Herald Tribune was a daily newspaper created in 1924 when the New York Tribune acquired the New York Herald.Other predecessors, which had earlier merged into the New York Tribune, included the original The New Yorker newsweekly , and the Whig Party's Log Cabin.The paper was home to...

. And then a revival of that 30 years later. That was Poor Arnold’s Almanac... They had a very good comics editor. It was almost completely a writer’s syndicate. They had a few comics and the newer ones were B.C.
B.C. (comic strip)
B.C. is a daily American comic strip created by cartoonist Johnny Hart. Set in prehistoric times, it features a group of cavemen and anthropomorphic animals from various geologic eras...

by Johnny Hart
Johnny Hart
Johnny Hart was an American cartoonist noted as the creator of the comic strip B.C. and co-creator of the strip The Wizard of Id. Hart was recognized with several awards, including the Swedish Adamson Award and five from the National Cartoonists Society...

 and Mell Lazarus’ Miss Peach
Miss Peach
Miss Peach was a syndicated comic strip created by American cartoonist Mell Lazarus. It ran for 45 years, from February 4, 1957 to September 8, 2002....

, which was very good also. It was sort of like Peanuts
Peanuts
Peanuts is a syndicated daily and Sunday American comic strip written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz, which ran from October 2, 1950, to February 13, 2000, continuing in reruns afterward...

in a way, with bright little kids saying sophisticated things. But they had a few old-time things that they kept alive. I think one was called Mr. And Mrs. I can’t rattle them off. So Al sold them Tall Tales, and I sold them Poor Arnold’s Almanac, which ran two years. It was a Sunday only, which was why they canceled me. They wanted a daily
Daily strip
A daily strip is a newspaper comic strip format, appearing on weekdays, Monday through Saturday, as contrasted with a Sunday strip, which typically only appears on Sundays....

. They said it makes the Sunday feature stronger. The Sunday feature was doing—not great, but well enough for me to make money. At that time I was living in England, and my magazine work and record album work was starting. I wasn’t in great haste to do a daily. But during one of my many moves, when I came back, I found that I had penciled a stack of dailies, but I was never going to ink them. I didn’t want to get too locked up in the syndicate thing.

Books

John Updike
John Updike
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic....

 did the introduction when Fantagraphics Books
Fantagraphics Books
Fantagraphics Books is an American publisher of alternative comics, classic comic strip anthologies, magazines, graphic novels, and the adult-oriented Eros Comix imprint...

published a book of Roth's strip in 1998. Updike later reprinted that essay in his collection Due Considerations (2007). “All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so,” wrote Updike in his introduction.
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