This isn’t about journalism’s “newspaper heroes,” but another convergence of America’s 20th century “newspaper culture” and that mass media upstart, radio broadcasting — and the more recent “collector culture” of old time radio on the internet. The crossover medium here is a radio show featuring the Hearst Corporation’s “Comic Weekly” color Sunday supplement… and maybe it even mentioned a newspaper reporter once in a while. It did suggest that listeners have the paper open while they listened, which isn’t practical today, but one oldtime radio collector tried to put a simulation on YouTube. Here’s a sample:

https://youtu.be/TAd-G_2govc?si=2h4tpbwdZ2ZazD8K

(The Wikipedia page about Hearst’s King Features Syndicate and Puck: The Comic Weekly includes a section about William Randolph Hearst’s personal involvement in creating the patriotic/historical series “Dick’s Adventures in Dreamland” — “a strip that made its debut on Sunday, January 12, 1947; written by former Daily News reporter Max Trell and illustrated by Neil O’Keefe.”)

Back when newspapers routinely carried dozens of color comic strips, and radio was a few decades into figuring out its role among “the mass media,” someone came up with the idea of having a dramatic reading of those newspaper comic strips on the air, a radio show titled “The Comic Weekly Man.” It ran only from 1947 to 1954. I came around about the same time, but I don’t remember listening to it as a child, even though I loved the Sunday comics, which were where I learned to read. (My mother and my grandmother did the comic-reading until I was ready to do it on my own.)

The “someone” who came up with the idea was presumably at Hearst, which syndicated the radio series as well as providing “Puck, The Comic Weekly” to members of its newspaper chain. Radio historian J. David Goldin’s RadioGoldin database of episode summaries at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, identifies the unnamed-on-air actor reading the funnies as Lon Clark, and speculates that “Little Miss Honey,” the girl to whom he read the comics, may have been played by actress Cecil Roy.

In the past 30 years or so, collectors of the “transcription discs” of those shows have taped, traded, bought, sold and digitized more than 100 episodes… Now you can download them for free at The Internet Archive, stream them at YouTube or buy from radio-archive retailers. Just search the Web for “Comic Weekly Man.”

One set of YouTube videos is among many multimedia projects by an Old Time Radio Researchers group member, blogger and podcaster, who went by the pseudonyms “James Mason” and “Jimbo,” and died a few years ago.

For this project, 13 years ago, he managed to unearth about 40 original comic strips that corresponded with Comic Weekly Man broadcasts, photograph them, and combine them with the radio show episodes. They are jumbled together with his other YouTube projects at https://www.youtube.com/@FanApart/videos, but I think the sample above is a fine starting place…

“Dick’s Adventures in Dreamland” was a comic strip whose young hero dreamed his way into adventures with historical figures. In this one he runs into some of his heroes from 1775. To get to the sequel, you might have to settle for the audio-only archives. But I think you know how the story turns out — until next week, at least.

Here’s an Old TIme Radio Researchers collection of 120 half-hour episodes of the radio show posted at YouTube — no comic strips to read along, but sometimes it’s fun to rest your eyes and just listen.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlUoyloCGlWz0rnM-NAOETtieLJWjG256&si=w8iafLNjF8VKwwc7

If you’d rather just download MP3 files to play on an MP3 player or smartphone, you can do that from OTRR at the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/OTRR_Comic_Weekly_Man_Singles

Back to video for another of Jimbo’s composites of Comic Weekly Man and an actual Comic Weekly, in which our friend “Dick’s Adventures” do turn him into something like a journalist — a courier delivering the Declaration of Independence to General Washington and a hostile audience of tories.