Diario La Nación
- Laura
- Felix
On 3 October 1926, Santiago's La Nación ran a comics page with syndicated strips signed by Pat Sullivan, the name tied to Felix the Cat. One legible caption, in the Laura strip, picked up the big sports story of the moment, the heavyweight fight between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey: Tunney drives Dempsey to the ropes, and then the strip asks whether Tunney is declared the winner. In the Felix strip, a character orders a sleeper to get up and start training every day. Nothing else on the page can be read reliably.
This reading covers only two clearly legible passages from the comics page: the Laura caption about the Tunney–Dempsey fight and one speech balloon from Felix. Several balloons run across tile boundaries, parts of the upper strip are cropped or faint, and the narrow fragments of the facing page cannot be read as articles. There was not enough evidence to answer how Chilean papers used radio to deliver sports results, or how La Nación got the Chilean rights to these syndicated comics, so those questions are not covered.
Translation
Laura
Tunney drives Dempsey to the ropes. — Is Tunney declared the winner?
Felix
Quit your sleeping! You've got to train every day from now on!
Context
The Philadelphia fight: action at the ropes and the verdict
The Laura caption refers to a real fight that took place ten days before this issue. Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney met on 23 September 1926 for the undisputed heavyweight championship. The strip shows Tunney driving Dempsey to the ropes and then asks whether Tunney is declared the winner. In the actual fight, Tunney dominated the champion in the rain over 10 rounds, and by the end Dempsey's left eye was completely closed. Tunney won by unanimous decision. The answer to the strip's question was therefore already known when the page appeared, but the readable text does not show how the strip itself answered it.
Why a Tunney win made a story
Tunney's win was an upset. Dempsey had been out of the ring for a long time: the Philadelphia fight came almost three years after his last title defence, a September 1923 win over Luis Ángel Firpo. Even so, bookmakers made Dempsey the favourite, at odds of as much as 13 to 5. The crowd of 120,557 remained the largest paid attendance for a boxing match until February 1993. A long-idle favourite losing in front of a record crowd was international news that a Santiago comic could expect readers to recognise. The strip frames the verdict as a question, but the official result was a unanimous decision for Tunney.
Pat Sullivan's signature and who actually drew Felix
Both legible strips carry the byline PAT SULLIVAN. That fits how Felix was marketed at the time. Felix came out of the New York studio of the Australian-born Sullivan, and from 1923 he also appeared in a newspaper comic strip drawn by Sullivan, Otto Messmer and later others. In the 1920s the public credit went only to Sullivan: neither Messmer nor the other studio animators got publicity or screen credit. Animation historians outside Australia now regard Messmer as Felix's true creator, although Australian cartoonists and historians dispute this. The Sullivan signature on this page therefore shows how the strips were branded, and does not by itself show who drew these particular panels.
Original
LAURA
TUNNEY LLEVA A DEMPSEY HASTA LOS CORDELES. - TUNNEY ES DECLARADO VENCEDOR?
FELIX
¡ DEJATE DE ESTAR DURMIENDO! TIENES QUE ENTRENARTE TODOS ESTOS DIAS
Source: Source: Internet Archive