It's not a comic strip…but then neither is the daily Dennis the Menace, which is a panel Monday through Saturdays. Also, the puzzle panel Jumble competes for space with comic panels and is often featured with them on the funnies pages in newspapers. Jumble, which challenges you to unscramble words to arrive at the punch line of a cartoon, has been running in papers since 1954…only two years less than I've been running.
It was created by Martin Naydel, who also sometimes signed his other work "Martin Nadle" and "Martin Dell." His brother was Larry Nadle (née Naydel), a longtime comic book (and strip) writer and editor who also worked under different names. Larry was an editor for All-American Comics around 1943 and stayed on when that firm was absorbed a few years later by National Comics to form the company we now know as DC. Larry specialized in funny comics, romance comics and comics which featured movie stars like Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis.
Martin did a little work on super-hero comics. He ghosted for artist E.E. Hibbard on early Flash stories in the forties and was among those who ghosted the Slam Bradley feature in Detective Comics after its creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, went full-time on their other creation, Superman. For a time, Martin did a cartoony feature for All-American called "McSnurtle the Turtle," which was basically, "What if The Flash was a turtle?" I recommend it to any of you who might have been wondering about that.
There were other such strips but eventually Martin did most of his work for DC on puzzle pages and cartoon fillers. He is often confused with Martin Nodell, the co-creator of Green Lantern. On a panel I hosted once at Comic-Con, someone asked Mr. Nodell how he created Jumble.
As mentioned, Martin Naydel did that. It was originally called Scramble in '54 and he produced the panel until 1960 when it was taken over by Henry Arnold and Bob Lee. There is no record of Martin doing anything in comics after '60 and it's assumed he died — he would have been 49 years old — but I also can't find a source for his date of death. In any case, Arnold and Lee produced Jumble for a long, long time. and it's now the work of writer David L. Hoyt and artist Jeff Knurek who do very good work.
It's available in many different formats — I play it on my iPad — and yesterday, it guest-starred longtime MAD art director Sam Viviano and longer-time MAD cartoonist Sergio Aragonés. The answer (I figured it out) is "That's the last draw!" Thanks to "Gary from Buffalo" who alerted me to my partner's cameo.