Here's another charming feature of the Daily News: their consuming obsession with mangled automobiles. They positively salivate over car crashes, especially if they involve fatalities. I wonder how many drivers, just before their car smashed into a crumpled, flaming heap of metal, thought, "Man, this is going to make one kickass picture in the Daily News."
Fortunately, the paper isn't in full color. You can't see the driver carved up like a honey ham by the windshield, or any internal organs strewn about. Unfortunately, though, most of the readers were probably disappointed about this.
An auto doesn't need to be in motion to be a hazard. Try digging it out of a heavy snow storm with a heart condition or your too many years and you may find out mortally.
Do you ever page through the comics section of the paper and say, "These are okay, but consarn it, why won't someone write a morbid strip about car accidents?" Friend, you're reading the wrong paper. You need the Daily News!
"Inviting the Undertaker," a cartoon about traffic safety, was created by Clarence D. Batchelor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist. According to Time magazine, Batchelor started it up in the '30s. In 1939, managing editor Harvey Deuell had a heart attack on the way to work and crashed into a fence. After that, the newspaper's publisher Joseph Patterson apparently was more or less obsessed with "Inviting the Undertaker" and as you can see, more than one thousand strips were eventually published.
I don't know if I'd feel comfortable around someone who can come up with 1,071 ways to kill yourself with a car.
