fabulous adventure, such as joining a circus and touring with them for months. Teenage daughter Betsy, a typical young woman of the flapper era, was the only one who didn't have an analog in the other strip. Despite its similarity to an established property, The Nebbs caught on and appeared in about 500 papers. In fact, it was in most of the Hearst papers, despite being distributed by a rival of Hearst's King Features Syndicate, because William Randolph Hearst himself liked it. But it never reached the stellar heights of The Gumps. There were a few Big Little Books in the 1930s, a short-lived radio show in the mid-'40s, and not much else in the way of merchandising or media spin-offs. Interviewed in 1929, Hess talked about his characters and finding humor in real-life situations: Where does he get his ideas? From life, he said, and for that reason he must be very observing at all times to see the little things that happen at home, on the streets, among his friends, that may be incorporated into a strip of Nebbs. "The characters! Oh, they are entirely imaginary," he declared. "I haven't taken them from life at all. It is just the things that they do that are little glimpses of real life." Reprints Cupples & Leon collected The Nebbs into a 1928 book. Dell published The Nebbs comic book in 1941, and four years later, Croydon Publishing printed a single issue of The Nebbs comic book (1945). Through Chicago's Artists and Creators Guild, Hess issued a Nebbs Bridge Scorepad in 1932. Other merchandising included bisque statuettes and a Nebbs board game. Radio Heard on the Mutual Broadcasting System in 1945, The Nebbs radio series aired on Sunday afternoons. It featured Gene Lockhart as Rudy Nebbs and Kathleen Lockhart as Fanny Nebbs. Others in the cast were Ruth Perrott, Francis "Dink" Trout and Dick Ryan. The Toodle Family With Hess' death in 1941, the scripts for The Nebbs were taken over by his daughter, Betsy Hess, and her husband, Stanley Baer. They ran another strip called The Toodle Family, and by 1947, The Nebbs had been folded into the newer comic as subsidiary characters. Death Hess died at his apartment at the Shoreland Hotel, in Chicago, of a heart attack, on December 31, 1941. See also The Nebbishes References American comics writers 1872 births 1941 deaths