Wednesday, July 08, 2015

Old School Bear

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

Recently, I got my hands on an almost complete set of the two first years of Sundays from one of my favorite strips from the sixties. While I am scanning and cleaning those, I am keep it a secret which one (although a quick peek at the date may give you a clue). On the back of those tabloids is a similarely almost complete run of Yogi Bear Sundays. Yogi Bear started a couple of years earlier, and I still have a whole lot of those from the first years waiting to be scanned and cleaned (in a paper that has about four to six strips I like, which makes going through them very slow work). But these were there, they were scanned and I decided to show you the first few (with many more to come). I have a love and hate relationship with these strips. Although I love the drawing style and appreciate most of the gags, I do not have any particular warm feelings for the character. I must have seen those shows, since the Huckleberry Hound Show was one of the first tv programs I followed religously in the early sixties. And I believe he was on them, or at least alongside them. After that I read the Sunday pages in the Dutch bi-weekly Taptoe for somewhere in the late fifties. Taptoe was a magazine that was distributed at schools only, in the fourth to sixth grade, so I must have seen them in 1968-1971. But I am not sure how far back they took their gags. Anyway, I have a huge deja view feeling with them, without the nostalgia of actually remembering them. Anyway, looking back on them they are beter then they looked at the time (but indeed, if they appeared in 1968, the competition of 'modern stuff' was huge, which made Yogi Bear (and The Flintstones) decidedly 'old school'.

Unfortunately, the tabloid pages were cut for the strip on the other side, so on some of these scans part of the top or bottom may be missing. I like the open first panel some of them have, by the way.

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