Comical comics
Comical comics |
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Page 16 of 34  Pages from The Pogo Party (Simon and Schuster, 1956). Art/script: Walt Kelly. Starring Pogo the Possum: a strip that grew in sophistication over the years, and made the unusual transition from comic to newspaper strip. To mention just a few favourites: Chic Young's 'Blondie' (1930) became one of the most widely syndicated strips in American history. Its star, Blondie Boopadoop was originally a flighty, dumb stereotype, but the gags became more domesticated when she married her beau, Dagwood Bumstead, and had a baby. VT Hamlin's 'Alley Oop' (1933) was a family strip with a difference in that it was set during the Neaderthal era (a sort of proto-Flintstones). The eponymous hero was a good-hearted caveman with a wife, female admirers, and a doting stegosaurus; later stories saw Alley and co time-travelling to various, more recent, historical eras, with predictably chucklesome results. Al Capp's 'Li'l Abner' (1934) was about a hick family and their sentimental, occasionally satirical, shenanigans in 'Dogpatch', a mythical mid-Western neighbourhood. Hal Fisher's 'Joe Palooka' (1930), about a dumb boxer, was a family strip in the sense that Joe had a sweetheart and devoted relatives, but was more about the surrogate family he collects as a result of his profession: notably, his manager, 'Knobby', and his black second, 'Smokey'. |