kartooner

Did you know Archivist George Red­monds of Great Britain dis­cov­ered that a girl born in 1379 in York­shire, Eng­land was named “Diot Coke”? How about the soft­ware engi­neer Jon Blake Cusak and his wife who named their baby boy Jon Blake Cusak 2.0 or the 60-inch 121-pound cat­fish caught by Jason Hol­brook and Cody Mul­lenix at Lake Tex­oma, Texas.

These are obscure facts that tran­scend the bizarre and unusual, began by a man named Robert Rip­ley who in his trav­els doc­u­mented these strange facts with car­toons. Rip­ley, a fact hound, was born on Christ­mas Day in 1893 and orig­i­nally began his career as a sports cartoonist.

In 1918 Robert Rip­ley cre­ated what is regarded as the first “Believe it Or Not” car­toon (Champs and Chumps) but did not pub­lish the ini­tial BION car­toon until a year later in 1919. Ripley’s Believe it Or Not was an agglom­er­a­tion of facts col­lected from his trav­els to over 198 coun­tries, a way of doc­u­ment­ing and shar­ing his odd and extra­or­di­nary cul­tural find­ings. This included his most prized pos­s­e­sion; a sculp­ture of Japan­ese artist Hananuma Masakichi.

Masa­kichi incor­po­rated his own fin­ger­nails, toe­nails and hair to make the statue appear more life-like. The statue makes it’s rounds today to the var­i­ous Rip­ley museum loca­tions but at one time was kept in a spe­cial cur­tained sec­tion of Ripley’s bed­room. This and many other items as men­tioned are dis­played at the sev­eral Ripley’s Believe it Or Not Muse­ums around the globe in addi­tion to a prime-time tele­vi­sion show star­ring Dean “Super­man” Cain. All for a man who made it his hobby to log his trav­els with bizarre find­ings and cre­at­ing a suc­cess­ful comic strip to dis­play them.

The offi­cial web site for the Ripley’s tele­vi­sion show refers to a man named Wayne Har­bour who made it his life­long mis­sion to debunk Ripley’s claims and prove that he was in fact a liar. The site explains “For 26 years, this post­mas­ter wrote a let­ter a day chal­leng­ing at least one of the claims in the daily car­toon. As of 1970, he had writ­ten 22,708 let­ters to peo­ple high­lighted in the car­toon. He never received a sin­gle con­tra­dic­tion to the claims Rip­ley made. His let­ters are now part of the Ripley’s collection.”

Despite Wayne Harbour’s claims, Rip­ley received 3,500 let­ters per day result­ing in over one mil­lion let­ters per year from fans from around the world.

Believe it or not!

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