Tuesday Comic Strip Day.
Tillie the Toiler was a long running strip, created in 1921 by cartoonist Russ Westover who wrote and drew it for most of it's time. It's about one of the newspaper strip's most popular cliché's, a young girl who works as a stenographer, part time model and secretary. There were many others in the same style, but best known to comic collectors are the variations Marvel Comics introduced in the late 1940s, eith names uch as such as Tessie the Typist, Nellie the Nurse, Sherry the Showgirl and Millie the Model. The Marvel girls co-mingled with another forties genre, that of the dumb blonde, which Stan Lee often wrote himself with some relish. Anyway, not often mentioned is the fact that at the end of her newspaper career Tillie the Toiler was taken over by Bob Gustafson (who died in 1966), complete changing the style of the strip. This period runds from somewhere in 1957 to the end of the strip in 1959. At that time Gustafson was working as part of Mort Walker's team. In fact, he is credited with producing most of the Betle Bailey comic books of that period. Apparently the commitment went both ways, because as you can see from this sundays, he seems to have had some help by his 'Walker Factory' friends. Or maybe not, since this strip is never mentioned as part of Walker's wide ranging output. There was a daily version as well, which I will show later.
Feb 10 1957:
March 24 1957:
April 14 1957:
Feb 23 1958:
March 23 1958:
March 30 1957:
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