The Palooka strip included various curious but lovable supporting characters. There was Knobby Walsh, the boxer’s cynical, not-quite-trustworthy, yet somehow endearing manager and bestfriend. Fisher modeled him on a Wilkes-Barre cigar store owner. There was Smokey, the valet, at first a racist caricature rendered as a shuffling, subservient blackface. Like his buddy, Smokey underwent a transformation as he slowly lost some of his stereotypical characteristics and became a trusted sparring partner and friend to the champ throughout the 1930s. He remained one of the few black characters in comics until he suddenly disappeared from the strip in the early 1940s. Joe also had a love interest in the beautiful, ever faithful, ever chaste Ann Howe, the sophisticated daughter of a cheese tycoon. She loved Joe for his admirable integrity and despite his obvious lack of education and their different backgrounds.

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Never much of a cartoonist himself, Fisher eventually began to farm out the strip to a number of assistants. The story goes, though, that Fisher insisted that only he draw the faces on Joe and Knobby, so the assistants would always leave blank features on those two characters. One of Fisher’s illustrators was Al Capp, who would go on to create L’il Abner. Capp and Fisher later carried on an ugly feud that sometimes spilled over into their respective strips.

Boxing was a very popular sport in the 1930s, and so the fight sequences in the Palooka strip were often delightfully long, drawn-out affairs with lots of THUD! POW! and SOCK! Fisher typically described the action in print as if it were vocalized by a ringside radio announcer. ‘There’s the bell . . . sixth round coming up . . . Palooka rushes in close . . . Rodney tries to keep him away … but Palooka sends a short right to the body … and a left to the head . . . aaaaand Rodney’s down. The referee is sending Palooka to a neutral corner … Rodney didn’t take a count . . . he’s getting up . . . Palooka is waved back in . . . he’s shooting both hands like pistons . . . there goes a right to the chin … that must be it ……

Joe left boxing behind for one of the most popular of the Palooka storylines from the 1930s, when Joe and Smokey enlisted in the French Foreign Legion after falling out with Knobby and losing the championship. The story shifted to a desert outpost in North Africa where Joe and Smokey endured the harsh and rigorous conditions of military service in the gritty unit and unforgiving climate. Fisher played out the Foreign Legion saga over six months in 1938, putting Joe in one dangerous adventure after another while finding ways to throw in a fistfight or two along the way. Toward the end of the storyline, Fisher had Joe falsely accused of desertion and sentenced to be shot. At this dramatic juncture, the cartoonist decided it was time to bring his hero home but discovered an interesting dilemma. In the strip Joe had enlisted in the Foreign Legion for five years, and Fisher felt it would harm the wholesome boxer’s image if he reneged on his commitment.

To get out of this bind, Fisher contacted White House secretaries Stephen Early and Marvin McIntyre to see if President Franklin D. Roosevelt would agree to ‘appear’ in the strip and extricate Joe and Smokey from their predicament. The White House agreed, and FDR showed up in the Palooka strip on two consecutive days in June 1938 to obtain Joe’s release from the Foreign Legion and a full pardon from the French president for the desertion charges.

By this time Joe Palooka was featured in newspapers in more than 20 countries. Even as Great Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, Britons remained obsessed with Joe’s adventures. When a wartime shortage of newsprint forced Britain’s newspapers to scale back their editions, the editors at the London Star cancelled the newspaper’s contract for the Palooka strip. Response from British fans was so vociferous that the paper sent a cable to the comic’s syndication company. ‘War or no war, space or no space, London demands Joe Palooka,’ it read. ‘Please ship by Clipper immediately.’

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