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| Tip Top Comics, featuring "Nancy and Sluggo", "The Katzenjammer Kids", and some strip about a boy and his dog. |
Redartz: Hi all! For today's look at four color humor, we join up with the kid stars of the comic world. Kid comics have been a mainstay of the comics industry since the very beginning ("Katzenjammer Kids", anyone?). Perhaps some of us started out reading comics featuring some of these mischievous moppets. I did; the first comic I ever read was an issue of "Casper" (okay, so technically it was a deceased kid, but still). I soon added Richie Rich to the pile, and Little Dot. Then there were these two early favorites: Little Lulu, especially when scribed by John Stanley...
and Little Archie ( definitely a 'little' pattern going on there). Little Archie, beneficiary of the talents of writer/artist Bob Bolling...
Incidentally, Archie Comics often carried strips of another kid heroine: Lil' Jinx:
My ultimate fave kid book escaped my notice until years later, in college: "Sugar and Spike". I discovered those tots in college, and fell in love with them. DC Comics pioneer Sheldon Mayer created these two torrid tots, with the kick that they could understand each other perfectly, but not 'grown-up talk' ( oh, as often depicted in the stories, animals can speak fluent 'baby talk', as can the elderly- second childhood).
Even today, while my comics purchases are limited, I still look out for back issues of that title (which are notoriously hard to find complete- they featured a page of cut-outs, which of course frequently got 'cut out').
There were many others, some I read occasionally and others that remain obscure today. Some of these are shown below (by the way- the "Cave Kids" were pretty fun, they often appeared in those great old Golden Comics Digests). Sooo, let's invite the whole gang over and look at a few covers!
