Saturday, March 15, 2014

Just A Perfect Day

Saturday Birthday Post.

I was born on a Sunday. So every year I put up this same post with all the Sunday strips I can find from my borthday. I have been able to replace some balck and white ones with color ones and even added a few.  More next year. If any of you has a replacement scan for any of these, it would be a great birthday present.

B.C.


Beetle Bailey


Hi and Lois


Miss Peach


Peanuts


Tillie the Toiler. Famous longrunning strip started by Russ Westover and continued by later Mort Walker associate Bob Gustavson. John W Kennedy notes that this was in fact the last episode of this strip.


Tom Trick. I love these game panels, of which there were several over the years.


Cappy Dick


Uncle Remus


They Do It Every Time


There Ougtha Be A Law


The Nebbishes. A very weird and quirky strip by the later famous play and film writer. One of these days I should do a run of these.


The Comic Zoo


Stees Sees. One of many themed gag panels.


Our Boarding House


On the Record. A perennial gag panel, which seems to have more succes than it deserves.


Cartoon by Harry Mace from the Sunday section This Week.


Louie, possibly the best silent strip ever. Not the weirdest, but the most consequently funniest.


Life's Like That. Another not so funny gag panel series.


Jack's Diary. Jack Mendelsohn tour the force cartoon series.


Grin and Bear It. Not my cup of tea, but funnier than most of these panels.


Fanfare. An oddball sports series does a Sunday version as well.


Cartoon by Claude from another Sunday section.


Channel Chuckles. In my eye the best thing Bill Keane ever did.


Cartoons by Boltinoff from American Weekly, another syndicated section.


Carnival. Another ho-hum cartoon series.


Around Home. A recent article on this feature in Hogan's Alley was very interesting, but sort of skipped over the the later years.


Scamp, never as funny as it seemed, but certainly charming.


Rivets


Pogo. I love Pogo as much for it's gags and storylines as the terrific art, but the silent Sundays may be the the best. I am honored there was one on my birthday.


Mickey Mouse. Another strip that was so common for so many years that there never has been a collection. I wish someobe would give these later years the same attention the thirsties and forties get.


Donald Duck


Cicero Cat. Mutt and Jeff's cat became a force of it's own.


Ceasar





Smokey Stover. More screwball madness.




























Lolly


Dennis the Menace. I love Hank Ketcham's work and so I have resisted looking at the Sunday page, which was neither written nor drawn by him. Maybe I should have another look and do a piece o them, though.








Moon Mullins
The Flop Family. Long running slapstick strip on it's last legs.


Mostly Malarky




The Teenie Weenies. Before Walter Scott drew The Little People, he did a cartoon panel in the thirties about a group of small people doing all sorts of stuff together. How this relates to the Teenie Weenies I don't know, but tne again - I never bothered to aactually read one.







Little Orphan Annie


Smilin' Jack. Another one of those Chicago style adventure strips.


 
Bob Lubbers' artistic tour de force with Al Capp (but probably actually written by his brother Elliott)



Gasoline Alley. A strip that outlived it's welcome for over a decade before being reborn to absolute brilliance.







Colgate Ad



Closer Than We Think. This is the weirdest strip ever. It came over all serieus, with actual advisors and such, but I always imagine the artist silently giggling when he drew it. If have seen over three years of these 'predictions' and not one of them ever actually came true.

 
Buck Rogers by Murphy Anderson.

Dondi. In color it is even more impressive.


Winnie Winkle. Did you know the thirties incarnation pf this strip actually formed the basis of one of Holland's most succesful strips, taking Winnie's nephew Perry as a starting point? And there was a shortlived French version as well, all due to the war and the fact that orignal material was harder to come by.



Jed Cooper. Never a big hit, but solidly drawn.


Old Glory was a lot like Jed Cooper and it was drawn by Rick Fletcher instead of Dick Fletcher. I am never sure which one of the two went on to work with on Dick Tracy, but you can look it up.




Terry and the Pirates. Too much the same for over thirty years to become the classic it may actually deserve to be.






On Stage. I know it's been reprinted and reprinted well, but these were made to be seen in color.
























Kevin the Bold. The two and three tier are totally different.




8 comments:

Brett Koth said...

Happy Birthday, Ger!

Angeline B. Adams said...

Happy birthday! Perhaps a separate post with Dutch strips from your birthday? You might have to go for the saturday, seeing the lack of Dutch sunday papers, but would be lovely to acquaint the international audience with Tom Poes, Eric de Noorman, Suske en Wiske and whatever else was around...

Ger Apeldoorn said...

I think it woud be better to do seperate posts abouth those. Hiw about a post with The Tjong Khing and Jan Wesselings' soap opera strip from the early sixties, Marion? Part of an international tendency to dipo strips like Juliet Jones. Gillon did one in France, like Khing a major artist.

fortunato said...

Happy birthday (a little late…) to you.
Here Buck Rogers Sunday in color:

http://i62.tinypic.com/ngoffd.jpg

Ger Apeldoorn said...

Thanks, I added it. I have many more upstairs but they will have to wait until next year...

Rich Clabaugh said...

Happy Birthday Ger! But what presents you gave US! Thanks for another amazing year of incredible stuff! Always appreciated!

About this post, wow what an amazing variety of comic strips! Makes it all the more sad of what's disappeared. Never saw that 'SOONER THAN YOU THINK!' Strip. I wonder how disappointed visionaries of the past would be with 2014!

rnigma said...

Happy belated birthday, Ger!
What amazes me isn't the amount of strips that have gone, but those that are still with us... Dick Tracy, Mary Worth, Blondie, Gasoline Alley, Rex Morgan, Judge Parker...

It's interesting to compare how the strips were differently formatted (2-tier vs. 3-tier, half-page vs. tabloid, etc.) For instance, how the panels in the color Blondie are stretched by placing the elements further apart than they appear in the B&W version. And in Joe Palooka (which Moe Leff finally got to sign - this must have been after Ham Fisher died), the entire top row isn't thrown away to convert it from 3-tier to 2-tier; only panels 1 and 6 are dumped and the others are slightly trimmed.

Incidentally, Kin Platt, the last artist on "Mr. and Mrs.", later found success as a writer of novels for young adults.

Ger Apeldoorn said...

KIn Platt was a fascinating guy. On his wikipedia page Al Jaffee is uoted (from an Alter Ego interview) as saying Platt probably created the Squat Car Squad which I showed a couple of months ago.