We’ve had threads about favorite and least favorite comics, but they’ve been mostly about strips that are alive (or in some cases, moribund). Today, in the spirit of Memorial Day, let’s remember the dead.
Does anyone out there remember Smokey Stover, featuring a fireman who looked vaguely like Dagwood Bumstead and a firehouse with weird signs on the walls? I had forgotten about it for 30 years (it folded in 1973), until placekicker Matt Stover made the NFL and Chirs Berman started calling him Matt “Smokey” Stover.
How about The Ryatts, for second rate newspapers that couldn’t afford Hi and Lois?
Or Little Iodine, a forerunner of Agnes, involving Io and her friend Shalamar getting her father into trouble? The last panel usually featured her father with a tin cup on the street, begging for change after getting fired by J.P. Bigdome.
Then there was Lolly, whose most frequent gag involved her boss’ dissolute son being so drunk that he conversed with pink elephants, at a time when alcoholism was considered funny.
The Dropouts, Teenie Weenies, Moon Mullins, Travels with Farley . . . I could go on all day. What were some of your favorites, and which ones make you gag on the rare occasions when you force yourself to think of them?
There was one back in the 80’s, like around the time of the LA olympics (I think). Olympic fever was high in the US and one of the story lines involved the womanizer dude picking up chicks by telling them he was an olympian competing in the heptathaluge. He was surprised when a representative approached him to get him ready to compete. Turns out there really was a heptathaluge but no one had heard of it recently because the last American entrant was in 1938 and in the third period near the final cross bar, his sled overheated an caused his gun to burst into flames. Unfortunately his chute failed at about 4000 feet.
Also the first time I’d heard the “turkey comes to life and becomes a poultrygeist” joke.
Krazy Kat was already defunct when I was a little kid, but my father had a book of collected comic strips from Krazy’s heyday. I loved that book with a passion. I literally read it to death, until the pages were falling out. Years later, I found another copy in a used book store. It is my precious. I never get tired of Krazy, Offissa Pupp, and Ignatz.
I was too young to read Smokey Stover in the papers, but I’ve seen examples of it in books, and I love all the nonsense phrases, such as “1506 nix nix,” “scramgravy ain’t wavy,” “notary sojac,” and of course, “foo.”
It would be criminal to let a thread like this exist without mentioning Walt Kelly’s Pogo. There is nothing not to like! Kelly took jabs at McCarthy and risked his career in doing so, but unlike modern political cartoonists, he kept it funny. Sometimes it was a couple of little bugs in the corner that injected some humor into a highly unfunny situation, and even as a kid reading the collected works and having no idea who was being lampooned, I still found something to love in nearly every strip.
I have vaguely pleasurable memories of reading ‘Pogo’ when I was a kid, although it’s been so very long since I even looked at one of those strips I remember next to nothing about it except for the names and appearances of some of the major characters, and a lot of deliberate mispronumsipations of words.
On preview, I see mobo85 and Bobotheoptimist got there ahead of me.
Like wise for ‘Li’l Abner’; used to read it constantly but it has now pretty much faded from memory.
For some reason, the strips that remain most vivid in my mind (although not technically defunct) are the late-‘60s’ vewrsion of Chester Gould’s ‘Dick Tracy’, featuring a spectacularly bizarre combination of goofball sci-fi elements, semi-fascist rant and increasingly impressionistic, swirling artwork often, it seemed, depicting evil criminals suffering horrifying deaths by fire. The whole lengthy ‘Moon Valley’ story arc, which, started with Tracy inexplicably going on a trip by magnetically-powered vehicle to our nearest satellite, befriending a race of aliens who discovered to be living there, and IIRC eventually culminating in Tracy’s son marrying the aptly-named Moon Maid and siring an antenna’d daughter, remains so strange in my mind that I had to do a bit of research to make sure I didn’t hallucinate it. Turns out I didn’t.
I kind of miss Andy Capp, if not for just the absurdity of the whole thing. He was an alcoholic wife beater. I believe that type of humor is not politically correct anymore.
Politically incorrect or not, Andy Capp is still being syndicated. I don’t know how many papers it’s currently running in, but you can view it on the web.
When my family moved to Torrance, CA in 1964 (I was eight), the South Bay Daily Breeze ran something in the Sunday funnies called The Little People. It lasted for a few years, then had disappeared by the time I was ten.
When I was twelve, I picked up The Hobbit, and I’ve been kicking myself mentally ever since for not checking to see if the characters had shoeless, hairy feet. From the very few other details I can recall, I’m inclined to think they did.
I seem to recall that they regularly beat each other up, with Florrie oft times coming out on top with that rolling pin. Wikipedia seems to bear me out. Maybe they were both spouse beaters.