Monday’s Mother Goose and Grimm paid tribute to 120 years of comic strip history. Mike Peter’s cartoon depicting The Yellow Kid as the “First Comic Standing” surrounded by iconic comic characters such as Dick Tracy, Hagar the Horrible, Beetle Bailey, Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts, Dilbert, Zits, For Better or For Worse, Annie, Garfield among others.
I asked him if there was a back story to this cartoon. March 2 wasn’t an anniversary of The Yellow Kid (first appearance was February 17, 1895). He writes:
It had started out as sort of an editorial about comic strips today. I had it as “last comic standing.” The editorial cartoonist side of me got excited about this idea. I put the comic strips in the audience that had stopped being drawn, Peanuts, Calvin, The Far Side, For Better or For Worse, some reality strips, there are a bunch of them. The problem was who would be the last one standing? I thought it could be Calvin or Charlie Brown (since they will go on being printed long after newspapers are around) but I thought that would be a little confusing since they too stopped being drawn. So I thought maybe I could honor one of the giants in the comics business like Hagar, Dagwood, Garfield, But that would look like the point of the cartoon was just to honor who ever I put in to the spot light. Then I thought of the “First” comic standing. I called my son Ben and asked what week I was working on and he told me First of march. I said ” Damn” I realized I was like a month off of the Yellow Kid’s anniversary, but waiting a year for the 121st anniversary didn’t quite have the same effect as this year the 120th.
My thanks to Mike for giving us this sneak peak behind the curtain. You can read Mother Goose and Grimm each day over at ComicsKingdom.com or on Mike’s website Grimmy.com.