The Fabuleous Fifties

King Kent

Saturday leftover day.

This week, John K. showed some pictures of 1950's puppets, including on that looked remarkably like the comic strip character King Aroo. King Aroo was created by Jack Kent in the early fifties. At first it was widely syndicated, but after five years it is supposed to have been withdrawn from syndication and continued just for one paper for another ten years. Funny enough, I have come across many samples of this strip from every period. Maybe it's just that I have long runs of the right papers. Anyway, I had decided to wait with showing you this strip, because it is quite well known among cartoonists, even though it has never been collected. There was a good representation of the strip with a great article in Nemo, the comic strip magazine from the eighties and nineties. If you come across issues of this old forerunner of Hogan's Alley, I can highly recommend it.

Anyway, John's mention of the strip did prompt me to go an have a look what I have scanned in from it. These are some of my oldest scans, dating from four years back. In the future I intend to show you a larger sampling of this cute strip, maybe even a longer run as I have so many. I have also included a daily sample, as I find that this strip works better in the daily than the Sunday. For some reason, in the Sunday it only proves that it is not in the same league as it's two inspirators, Pogo and Krazy Kat.

Still, there's a lot to enjoy from a cartooning point of view.