I’m not sure anyone can help me with this, but it’s worth a shot…
I have a few collections of Li’l Abner comic strips dating from 1934 to 1940 (daily and Sunday strips) and from 1940 to 1949 (daily strips only). One series of Sunday strips I remember reading involved Li’l Abner getting caught by a bunch of female centaurs who lived on a mysterious isolated plateau (I think) who had a whole bunch of Dogpatch men they treated like horses. I.e., they fed them from a trough, made them run races, forced them to wear a bridle, treated them with apples and sugar lumps, etc.
I figured it must have been in one of my books covering 1934-1940, but I have looked through them and I can’t find that sequence. I found a similar one where giant women living on a mysterious isolated island caught Dogpatch men and treated them like women (raising kids, cooking dinner, buying them pretty clothes, etc.) but I’m pretty sure I’m not mixing it up with the sequence with the female centaurs. (Al Capp had no qualms with borrowing an idea from himself and using it again.)
The only thing I can think of is that I must have been in a book store browsing through the Sunday strips for one of the years from 1941-1949. If anyone has the Sunday strips from that period, can you let me know what year it was? It was definitely a memorable sequence and one of the more bizarre stories. Unfortunately, searching Google for Li’l Abner and centaurs just brings up the character Sam the Centaur which doesn’t help me.
IDW publishing is reprinting daily + Sunday collections, two years per book. They’re up to ~1950 by now, I think. The down side is that the daily strip printing is tiny. I mean, they’re REALLY tiny.
I have searched the Sunday strips available in my historic newspaper databases. Very time consuming as I have to bring up each strip and read it. So far I have searched 1940, 1941, 1949, 1950. There are some holes in there. But, so far, nothing. I’ll post an update in a few days.
It wasn’t L’il Abner. It was a comic strip by golden age cartoonist Boody Rogers that appeared in Raw Comix #2. Definitely an imitation of Capp’s style.
The main difference from you description is that the centaurs were male, but you are likely misremembering.
And really, it happens to all by our minds assigning images or scenes to movies or creators that had nothing to do with it. For example my mind insisted for ages that a bonus stage of a ninja game was part of a spy scrolling shooting game. Well, after so many searches I found on my own how faulty and malleable memories can be.
And how memory mixes and matches in our brains is a bit of a pet research thing that I investigated several times in the past:
In that example SirRay “knew” that an animated movie scene that he was looking for had a style that reminded him of a movie, but that that movie was not the one that contained that scene. So he told us to look elsewhere. :dubious:
Turns out that was the movie that had the scene he was looking for. In the case here it goes the other way, I do think this a case where the images do not belong to the creator the OP thinks.
Now I remember where I saw it: I was in the library one day and I picked up “Boody: The Bizarre Comics of Boody Rogers”.
Thank you so much for helping me figure it out! The fact that there was a Li’l Abner Sunday strip that was roughly the same in terms of plot confused me to no end.
