So, this is a bit of a fun mystery. I bought
this piece off of Heritage a few years ago. Dickie Dare is a comic strip that Milton Caniff created in 1933 before he moved on to Terry and Pirates. The Dickie Dare strip ran for quite some time after Caniff left but the dailies from Caniff's run are pretty scarce. Maybe 2 dozen or so out there if even that many. I was in the market and when this piece came up at Heritage I went all in on it needing to have a Dickie Dare piece. It appears to be 3 dailies reformatted on to a board. It was mounted to an aging piece of illustration board so I sent it to have it removed from the board and for conservation. As the panels came off and we worked on it, it became readily apparent that this was assembled from multiple other strips and in fact despite having 3 tiers, there is not a complete daily in there. I wanted them in a daily format so I had to be a bit creative and so what I have done is create the equivalent of 2 dailes. The extra panels will be kept as orphans and perhaps sold off at some point.
So what you see here are the two "daily" format piece I came up with. In extra images you will see the printed pieces as well. It is the only reference images I have for Dickie Dare and one of the neat things is the dates written on the art are different than the dates in the reprinted strips by a day or two. I am assuming schedules were off or perhaps a day was missed or delayed.
The first of the two also has something neat. The first panel is not published in the reprint book. With Terry and Pirates there was introductory strip published a day or two before Terry actually started. I suspect that this is the case for Dickie Dare too! So, really cool to have his first appearance. The rest of this strip is made up of panel 1 and 4 of 9/11/33 daily even if you can clearly see the 9/14 date in the last panel.
The second reformatting is of panels 1-3 from 9/14/33 and panel 1 from 9/15/33. You can clearly see the date 9/16 in the third panel of this one.
The stand alone panel is nice because it features Dickie and Wags and is a nice example that I might sell or trade in the future and is from 9/13/33. As for the other 2 panels from 9/12...you will have your chance at them at Heritage as they are on their way there.
I have since added a complete Dickie Dare daily to my collection too.
