"From flapper and playboy to pop culture icons. It was way back in 1930 when Dagwood Bumstead first met Blondie. (Consider yourself a true fan if you know Blondie’s maiden name.) "
Boopadoop. She was a flapper with a well off husband, Dagwood, whose family thought she was too common for him. Eventually that aspect of the strip went by the wayside.
Huh, so apparently Blondie’s family was at least well-off enough to have a live-in cook… Was the culture at the time such that that could still be considered “not well-off enough”?
That strip that @cbird703 posted is a fascinating find. But it has no context.
Without any question at all, Blondie’s last name was Boopadoop. She was introduced that way and referred to in the strip that way. When the syndicate did publicity and put ads in newspapers, they referred to Blondie Boopadoop.
In August 1930, Blondie and Dagwood got engaged. Newspapers received a press release, like this one printed in the The Belleville [IL] News-Democrat.
Mr. and Mrs. J. Bolling Bumstead have the honor of announcing the engagement of their only son, Dagwood, to Miss Blondie Boopadoop, August Sixteenth, Nineteen Hundred Thirty.
When the Lebanon [PA] Daily News announced they were adding the Blondie comic strip on Oct. 8, 1930, the ad read “Blondie Boopadopp is a character whose life is one long laugh.” The San Francisco Examiner did the same on March 1, 1931, saying, “The female of the species is more deadly than the male. That’s Blondie Boopadoop…”
Every history of the comic strip in general (I have many) and every history of Blondie that I can find agrees that her maiden name was Boopadoop.
So who was Jinkers? He was pursuing Blondie’s mom! I don’t know why Blondie was at his home in that strip, but I know he wasn’t her father.
I also found the strip @Skywatcher ninja’d me with. But that indicates he not yet married to the mother, and that is what other sources say the relationship was.
I’ve been perusing Google’s newspaper archive for any clues but, so far, I’ve only found that runs early Blondie strips and they didn’t pick up the strip until a couple of years later.
I found the strip in newspapers.com and searched back and later a couple of months but the storyline wasn’t picked up. Oddly, putting Jinkers into their search doesn’t put up any hits. Apparently, the lettering in Blondie strips doesn’t get read by their OCR.
It’s fascinating to me that the Banks family from Mary Poppins is described in the book as not being rich despite the fact they had a maid and a governess.