Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Character Building

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

When Mrs. Fitz' Flats first arrived in the late fifties, it was one of the sahrpest new comic strips. Written by the Mort Walker team (including Jerry Dumas) that was also responsible for the equeally good Hi and Lois and Beetle Bailey, it featured an elderly ladlady and her super who rent rooms to an assortment of weird guests. Very sharp humored and nicely drawn by the otherwise mundane Roberge. Somewhere in 1960 he wass allowed to continue the strip in hi onw (presumable when Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas went on to do the even better Sam's Strip). He moved Mrs. Fitz and her super (now her husband, I guess) to Miami or some other retirement state and turned it into a dull strip about the elderly. How he continued it trough the rest of the sixties I don't know. But I recently clipped a lot of the later strips and I was surprised to see some of the older characters back and the humor up to the old level. Did he return to his roots, or did he (as one of my readers suggests) simple reuse the older gags? Either way the results were as good as they had been, which leaves us with more to enjoy.



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