The earliest comic strips carried in an Island newspaper appeared in the Evening Bulletin on Saturday, January 30, 1904. Seven multipanel strips, all in color, were printed in a weekly comic supplement. Rather simple-minded and not very funny, the cartoon feature was eventually dropped.

The first daily comic strip in a Honolulu newspaper was Bud Fisher’s “Mutt and Jeff,” which made its Star-Bulletin debut on March 7, 1916. In its inaugural, the strip sardonically shows the two friends as World War I soldiers huddled in a trench, watching an “Australian bullet jumper” bird successfully dodge a barrage of machine-gun and cannon fire, only to succumb in the last panel to an unexpected cloud of poison gas. “Mutt and Jeff” remained a comic page fixture in Honolulu for almost forty-two years.

The earliest crossword puzzles published in Honolulu newspapers appeared on November 6, 1924, in the Star-Bulletin and January 12, 1925 in the Advertiser.

By Robert C. Schmitt