A Super Sunday Comics Repeat
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Friday on the comics page seemed to be a preview of National Cartoonists’ Day as a number of comic strips had guest appearances by other comic strip characters.
Lio featured Snoopy, Over The Hedge guested Wednesday Addams, and Ziggy had Superman.
Cartoonist Gary Varvel utilized a famed Charlie Brown image to represent the flurry of Trump 2.0 actions, while Michael Cavna celebrates Black History Month with Jackie Ormes (a repeat?).
Also another Lio and another tribute as Mark Tatulli riffs on a famous children’s book today.
Gasoline Alley, Yesterdays and Tomorrows?
Then there was Mutt and Jeff visiting Walt Wallet in Gasoline Alley. Which fills the heart of every comics fan with the joyful prospect of a reappearance of the Old Comics Home and its residents.
It also revives some disturbing thoughts whenever the Old Comics Home becomes part of the continuity: Does this presage the passing of Walt Wallet? Will this lead to the end of the Gasoline Alley comic strip? Is Jim Scancarelli, turning 84 later this year, retiring?
As always – we shall see.
Who we apparently won’t see anymore is Grelber.
Who is all I could think of when I saw a Broom-Hilda comic strip earlier this week:
A Barney & Clyde repeat
Mike Peterson commented on the script of the above Barney & Clyde comic from today but I want to focus on cartoonist David Clark‘s layout – the three panel zooming in and the three panel zooming out. Nice, David.
10 Most Unique Comic Strips of All Time
Another list of comic strips, this one purporting to enumerate “The 10 Most Unique.” Of course I quibble.
Morgan Brady for CBR (Comic Book Resources) creates a list of idiosyncratic comic strips.
In many people’s opinion, the best comic strips are the most unique. The ones with strange characters from far-off lands or abstract art styles that diversify them from all other comic strips. Some of the best comics to this day are the strangest ones, the ones that leaped to branch out and create a lane all of their own. By formulating weird and wacky situations, insane villains, or odd main characters, these ten comic strips stand out as some of the most unique comic strips of all time.
He qualifies his “most” in the heading with “some of” in the introduction to the article itself.
Some are inarguably worthy of placement. It’s hard to disagree with Zippy the Pinhead or Krazy Kat being a part of the distinctive group, but others seems to be included because of their popularity or historical value over uniqueness.
Case in point is Little Nemo in Slumberland. The full page color Sunday page was Winsor McCay’s magnum opus, but it was preceded by McCay’s own Little Sammy Sneeze and The Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, both of which played with themes and layouts later fully illustrated in Little Nemo.
Anyway … Here are a few comic strips that popped into my mind when I though of “unique.”
Jack Diary’s by Jack Mendelsohn immediately came to mind. It may be the most individual comic of all time.
According to Jonathan Najarian the idea was the brainstorm of pre-Gasoline Alley creator Frank King who gathered the cartoonists at The Chicago Tribune bullpen – Everett Lowry, Charles Lederer, Quin Hall, Dean Cornwell, Lester J. Ambrose, and Frank King – to colloborate on a single comics page. Najarian calls the effort “the most compositionally ambitious, narratively bizarre, and visually experimental newspaper comic strip ever published.”
More about Crazy Quilt from Allan Holtz.
The Nut Bros came first and The Squirrel Cage carried on the Gene Ahern nuttiness to a new syndicate. So I guess the first is the unique-est. But screwball expert Paul Comey says, “Eventually Ahern’s Nut Brothers developed into something even greater –The Squirrel Cage (and Foozland).” And The Little Hitchhiker. So I include both.
He didn’t achieve fame and he didn’t achieve fortune, but he did make a comic that knowledgeable cartoon aficionados, a generation later, still look back on with fondness — and with regret, that it lasted so short a time.
The gentle, non-conformist Conchy was a unique treasure.
More at the Conchy Facebook page.
These days I find Liniers’ Macanudo to be the outlier on the comics pages.
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