Chew the Fat: Newspaper Comic Strips!
Redartz: Once upon a time, many of us started the day off with a newspaper. For years the daily paper was part of my morning routine, providing an entertaining and educational accompaniment to breakfast. And the paper came with a reward for wading through pages of news, disasters, politics, editorials, and weather reports: the comics.
Newspaper comic strips served as an origin for comic books themselves: the first comic books were composed of reprinted newspaper strips. And they also provided an entry into sequential art for this reader: I was following the adventures of "Mandrake the Magician" long before I ever heard of "Dr. Strange".
So, it's long past due that we give some love to these daily strips; old and new. Adventure strips and gag strips. Dailys and Sundays. And to start off, here's a few of my personal favorites; from 'then' to now...
 |
| Peanuts |
 |
| Pogo |
 |
| Mandrake the Magician |
 |
| The Phantom |
 |
| Popeye |
 |
| Calvin and Hobbes |
 |
| Luann |
 |
| The Far Side |
 |
| Tumbleweeds |
 |
| Mutts |
Well, it's almost a paper's worth. So, what strips were your favorites? Which ones did you skip over? What effect did new creators have on the strips when replacing the original (say, Bud Sagendorf following up on E.C. Segar's "Thimble Theatre")? Do you still follow any newspaper strips? Do you read any online? What strips would you recommend to others? The column is now yours...
11 comments:
Funny how much of this hinged on which newspaper your parents subscribed to and which comic "syndicate(s)" that paper provided, LOL.
SO... we are taking late 1960s / early 1970s for me.
MY parent's daily, local Gary, Indiana paper provided strips like Alley Oop and Steve Canyon which I really liked (1960s).
My parent's Sunday-only Chicago Tribune had strips like Dick Tracy and Dondi and which I really enjoyed.
The Chicago Sun Times had yet another batch of strips that I seldom saw like The Phantom.
I'm sure as the day goes by I'll remember more!
Strips like Spider Man, Calvin and Hobbes, and the Far Side are, of course, favorites but they came along later in my life, like my mid-teen years.
Oh man-- another good topic, Red!
CH47, I feel like that all three of your papers and Red's childhood paper may have come from the same syndicate (or at least allied syndicates?). A lot of King Feature fare across those pages, if I'm not mistaken. Other than Steve Canyon, none of your Chicago strips showed up in our own South Bend Tribune. And when we'd visit my grandparents in Paragould, Arkansas, I would spend hours reading the comics pages from a 4' tall collected stack of newspapers by their air-conditioner--- and they had all of the "exotic" (to me) strips that you guys cite: Dondi, Tumbleweeds, Alley-Oop, Dick Tracy, Phantom (oy, that outfit. . . ), Mandrake (oy, that outfit again. . . )-- as well as Brenda Starr, Gasoline Alley, etc--- a lot "legacy" strips, even for the late 60's/early 70's. And of course several more widely-read strips that we shared.
SB Tribune had a pretty decent selection for being a small-city paper-- a lot of the big "usuals": Peanuts (a personal favorite), Family Circus (which I loved as a child, until Bil Keane fell too deeply into the well of cloying sentimentalism), Wizard of Id & BC & Crock in their hey-day; Lil Abner (good til the end!); Pogo (same!); Blondie (I love the fact that Blondie has hung on through the decades-- geeze, she herself was a Flapper-girl. . . no kidding!); Kerry Drake; Steve Roper & Mike Nomad (remember the art more than the stories). In the years I was learning to read, it was still running artifacts like Mutt & Jeff, Bringing Up Father (man, that was a TOUGH strip to figure out w/out the premise ever being presented); Hatlo's They'll Do It Every Time (and Hatlo's History); Grin n' Bear It; and Ripley's Believe It or Not. Later in the 70's they picked up favorites like Tank McNamara and For Better Or Worse, and were really early with Doonesbury, in fact-- pretty good comics editor at the Tribune, I'd say.
Personal Favorites from the past, then?
Peanuts, no question. Still buying a few volumes of Fantagraphic's GREAT Complete Collection each Christmas w/ Amazon Gift cards. . .
BC/Wizard of Id (as I said)-- until Johnny Hart really fell off the deep end of extremely hard-line evangelical Christianity, and it began permeating all of his work. And not in an appealing way at all.
Doonesbury-- which has never NOT been good. Man, I wish Trudeau could gear up to doing a daily strip again. But I loved him even in junior high.
Family Circus til I was about 7, maybe. I did have a fondness for the "cacophony of chatter" offerings in particular.
My wife and I do both lament the loss of favored strips like The Far Side, Calvin & Hobbes, For Better or Worse, and (for awhile) Bloom County (delighted it's returned on-line!). And one especially beloved and flippin' BRILLIANT strip from the late Richard Thompson, Cul-de-sac. Wonderful strip. We also recognize that, at different points of our life, we've fully related to Baby Blues, then Zits, and have lately been creaking into Pickles territory.
Favorite strip right now, by far-- Sherman's Lagoon.
HB
I grew up in a small town in middle Missouri, so our daily paper had one page of a fairly good selection of strips. On Sunday, we would get our color comics from the Springfield Journal, which had a slightly different selection, but always enjoyable.
We had all the other classics, from Blondie, Beetle Bailey, Dick Tracy, Henry, Nancy, Wee Pals and so many more, but Peanuts was always a favorite. I was drawing all the characters for classmates by 3rd grade. Archie was also a favorite, especially with the cartoon being so popular at the time.
For adventure strips, I loved Alley Oop, but my favorite was Captain Easy and Wash Tubbs and reprints of the Burne Hogarth Tarzan strips.
I acquired a love of puns very early on and one of the reasons for that had to be the strip Frank n Ernest. I still marvel at how they have a clever pun in just about every strip and have since the '70s.
Being a band geek, I loved Funky Winkerbean and all the Harry Dinkle band jokes!
By the time I was in high school and college, For Better or For Worse had started and I loved it. It also became a great time for fans of science fiction/fantasy & comic books, with Gil Kane's Star Hawks, Star Wars by Russ Manning, Amazing Spider-Man by Stan Lee & John Romita, along with various strips of the Hulk, Superman, Batman, JLA, etc.
I still start every day by reading around 30 current strips, a few reprinted classics and some editorial cartoons. It's in my blood and I'll keep reading them for as long as they're available.
Favorites now: Baby Blues, Ben, Dilbert, Dustin, Foxtrot, Frank & Ernest, Gil, Intelligent Life, Mallard Fillmore, Retail, Pajama Diaries, Pearls Before Swine, Pickles, Sally Forth, Thatababy & Zits.
Our city had two daily newspapers. The one to which my parents subscribed had, IIRC, Beetle Bailey, Blondie, Dennis the Menace, The Family Circus, Buz Sawyer, The Wizard of Id, Andy Capp, Tumbleweeds, and Brenda Starr.
My maternal grandparents, who lived in a nearby suburb, subscribed to the other paper, and saved the comics section for me, so I could follow The Phantom, Dick Tracy, and Juliet Jones. I think that paper also ran B.C., Snuffy Smith, and Mary Worth.
I seem to remember a Spider-Man strip in the very late 1970s, and there may have been a Justice League strip under the title World's Greatest Super-Heroes.
To this day, I've never seen Flash Gordon or Mandrake the Magician in a newspaper, although I remember seeing Charlton comic books with King Features characters in the late 1960s.
Our local newspaper now has Mallard Fillmore and Doonesbury on the op-ed page.
I've read paperback book reprints of the earlier Peanuts strips, and, IMHO, it was better when the kids acted like kids instead of intellectuals. Like Star Trek and Star Wars, Peanuts really got pretentious after it became an institution.
TC thanks for the Andy Capp recall! I enjoyed that guy a ton! Still have several paper backs along with Peanuts paper backs!
I was an avid funnies reader as a kid, though not any more. Back in the late 70s/early 80s the local paper had all the popular American strips: Peanuts, Hagar, Blondie, B.C., Wizard of Id, Hi and Lois, Andy Capp, For Better or For Worse, and later on, Garfield and Calvin & Hobbes. I liked pretty much all of them, except For Better or For Worse ... I guess I was too young for it. Much later, I liked Liberty Meadows, but it kept getting cancelled.
When I was really young (around 1977 or so) a guy on the local radio station used to read the weekend funnies, doing different voices for the characters. (No, it wasn't LaGuardia ... I'm not that old!) :)
HB- you're right, our local paper did carry the King Features Syndicate strips (at least the paper my parents subscribed to; our town had two papers. The afternoon paper carried Peanuts, which frustrated me as it was my favorite strip. I relied on the Fawcett paperback collections to get my fill. Also, nice mention of Hatlo's "They'll do it Every Time". If memory serves, the same artist did a strip called "Little Iodine"...
Disneymarvel- nice list of many great strips. Very cool that you were doing some "Peanuts" characters; did you ever try to create a strip or two? Also, good call on Bob Montana's "Archie" strip. Can't believe I forgot to mention that one...
TC- you mention "Mallard Fillmore" and "Doonesbury" being found on the editorial page. I seem to recall some other strips ending up there occasionally when they indulged in some controversial material. If I recall correctly, Walt Kelly's Pogo was one such strip.
Mike W.- yes, "Liberty Meadows", Frank Cho's strip. Was that actually carried in one of your local papers? I only recently discovered that strip, having seen the comic book first. Love the Oscar the dachsund...
Mike W & Red-- "Liberty Meadows" was carried by the Washington Post from its beginning, and had a special place of fondness in our household, as Frank Cho (tho we didn't know him) was a product of our County and our town's high school (about a mile away, in fact--), and U of MD, which is only a couple of miles away. His perpetual Easter Eggs referencing the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) and it's odd monolithic, solitary building were always a source of delight for us, as we've always lived in a neighborhood that abuts that institution.
And man--WHAT an artist---!
IIRC, he dropped doing the strip 'cause he wanted to focus on comic books, and the deadlines were murder. . .
HB
Okay, some things I remember:
Our daily newspaper had a two page spread where the lower half was the TV schedule and Dear Abby letters. The other page was comics. I can't specifically say which ones but I'm fairly certain Beetle Bailey and Blondie were two. Also, one about Hillbillies? Peanuts may have been one since I know I knew the characters before I started buying their books. The Sunday edition came out on Saturday so there was a double TV listing on Saturday.
My mother would buy the Sunday Houston Chronicle, back then, Houston had two (TWO!!!) daily papers, for all the coupons so I got to read the separate color comic section. I know for sure that introduced me to Prince Valiant.
One day, some one came to our house and offered us a subscription. For the same price as the single Sunday paper, we could get Thursday - Sunday delivered to our house. More days of comic strips!!! Delivered to our house!!! Dear Abby!!! Hints from Heloise!!! That weird bridge column I still don't understand!!!
I remember all the "serious" strips were on one page. Spider-Man, Rex Morgan, The Phantom. On the other page were all the "funny" stripes.
I know my "phone" has a newsstand app where I can read the news; there has to be an app for comic strips... right?
(La reina de la noche
La diosa del vudú
Yo no podré salvarme
Podrás salvarte tú?
La tela de la araña
La uña del dragón
Te lleva a los infiernos
Ella es tu adicción
Te besa y te desnuda con su baile demencial
Tú cierras los ojitos y te dejas arrastrar
Tú te dejas arrastrar:
Ella que será
She's livin' la vida loca
Y te dolerá
Sí, de verdad te toca
Ella es tu final
Vive la vida loca
Ella te dirá
Vive la vida loca
She's livin' la vida loca
Se fue a new york city
A la torre de un hotel
Te ha robado la cartera
Se ha llevado hasta tu piel
Por eso no bebía
De tu copa de licor
Por eso te besaba
Con narcótico sabor
Es el beso de calor
Ella que será
She's livin' la vida loca
Y te dolerá
Sí, de verdad te toca
Ella es tu final
Vive la vida loca
Ella te dirá
Vive la vida loca
She's livin' la vida loca
Te besa y te desnuda con su baile demencial
Tú cierras los ojitos y te dejas arrastrar
Tú te dejas arrastrar
Ella que será
She's livin' la vida loca
Y te dolerá
Sí, de verdad te toca
Ella es tu final
Vive la vida loca
Ella te dirá
Vive la vida loca
She's livin' la vida loca).
PS: This concludes our Salute To Spanish Heritage Month.
We now return to our normal programming, already in progress.
Redartz and HB: I think Liberty Meadows may have been in the local paper for a while, but was dropped, either for low readership or because it was too "controversial". I ended up reading most of the strip online a few years later. If I remember right, it ended on kind of a cliffhanger, with Frank at Brandy's wedding or something; did Cho ever follow up on that?
My favourites back in the day were the Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, Wizard of Id, Hagar the Horrible and of course the Spider-Man comic strip.
- Mike 'my life should be in the funny pages' from Trinidad & Tobago.
Post a Comment