In the 40's a very popular comic strip about a matronly woman who got involved in the lives and loves of a wide assortment of people, Mary Worth, came into the homes of people every day in the newspaper. It was no surprise that with its success would come a variety of imitators. One such strip was that of Cynthia which got its start in October, 1946.
The main difference between Mary and Cynthia was that instead of a silver-haired grandmother like Mary was, the protagonist Cynthia was a fairly young and quite attractive blonde. She was labeled as a 'career woman' as she preferred to dress nicely and head to the office every day.
I believe that the still fairly young and ambitious Irv Novick, who would years later make his mark with the DC comicbook Batman, was the creator of this strip. He certainly was the artist for the strip and his style was intentionally quite similar to the Mary Worth strips. From what I read about it, the strip was never very popular and did not appear in that many newspapers around the country. Nevertheless, it had to have been good enough to have survived daily, including Sunday, exposure a half decade.
Novick left the series in 1951 and he was replaced by Milton Luros.
A whole book could be written about Luros (and maybe already has been) because the man would eventually leave comicstrip drawing for the more lucrative soft porn industry, become quite wealthy, and even have a major obscenity case brought before the US Supreme Court (check out Wikipedia for a ton of info on this). None of what would come later for Luros has, of course, anything to do with Cynthia or Roger Lincoln but it is fascinating reading.
Back of the subject of Cynthia, it seems to me that with Novick gone and Luros in, the desire to change the direction of the strip was strong as it moved from largely romance soap-opera style stories to more adventurous outings. Either that was not enough or the desire of the creative team was to step up the change but in what would be the last story arc for Cynthia, she would come into contact with a new character named Roger Lincoln and take part in several missions with him.
Then on Nov. 4, 1951, the title of the strip changed from Cynthia with her leaving completely to Roger Lincoln. The Sunday strip would expand to be Roger Lincoln, S-Man. That appellation of "S-Man" was used in the very early strips of his participation and were shown to likely stand for "State Department Man" in the same vein as the more commonly used "G-Man" and "T-Man".
Within a few months of the new series, the direction of the adventures will take an even stranger turn as Lincoln is shown to be a representative of the State Department in outer space! That is a pretty wide jurisdiction. Three of the daily story arcs would center around this concept and several of the Sunday arcs would. Then, apparently seeing that the space angle was not what the public wanted, the storyline switched back to standard spy-fi fare with U.S. vs U.S.S.R. back as the main theme.
While the creator of Cynthia was Novick, I do not know for certain the creator of the character of Roger Lincoln was Milton Luros but since I would be willing to bet $1 on it, I will list it that way until proven wrong.
The Sunday element is confusing to me so I am sure I will make it confusing to you here.
For most of its existence, the pre-Roger Cyntha Sunday page was in line with the dailies; I mean that what was happening on Saturday would carry onto Sunday for usually 3x the content and then on to Monday. This meant that, for the newspapers that did not carry the strip on Sunday or did not have a Sunday edition at all, nothing vital would likely happen OR there would have to be a quick recap on Monday.
With the introduction of Roger Lincoln, though, this changed.
Inn Saturday, 01/20/1951, daily, Cynthia receives a telegram from her boss to come back to company headquarters right away. The next day in the Sunday page, it is shown that she was to work to explore a matter dealing with what will turn out to be a Svengali of an artist and that storyline will continue in the Sunday editions until 04/22/1951. In the dailies, however, starting on the Monday following the telegram receipt, Cynthis begins her train journey that will lead to her meeting Roger and an adventure dealing with counterfeit money and foreign agents.
The separation of the daily arc and the Sunday arc would continue for some time. That pre-Roger Sunday arc with the Svengali will be followed by six Roger arcs, all having no direction connection to the eight Roger arcs in the dailies that went on during the same timeframe.
Then on 10/26/1952, the Sunday edition would suddenly again fit snuggly between the daily's Saturday and Monday storyline and would continue that way until the end of the strip, at least as far as I have found since the Sunday's near the end of the strip's run have proven difficult to find.
Really good articles to read on the matter of Cynthia and/or Roger Lincoln can be found at:
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