Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Less talk, more comix

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Mike Peterson Published: October 9, 2017 1 minute 4 comments

Having done a lot of talk in the past couple of days, I'm correcting the average with a look back a half century at Oct 9, 1967.

There were several strips I had forgotten, but also several I'd never seen before.

Here's a heaping helping of 10/09/67, with minimal commentary:

(A little commentary here — We didn't know what a jerk Al Capp was in his private life yet, but he was already wringing all the fun out of L'il Abner.)

Juxtaposition of a Half Century Ago — Call them "Love Isn't."
But there was plenty of romance elsewhere. I thought I knew the strip, but I have no idea who either of these Friends of Freckles are.


(May have stumbled over a history arc in Snuffy, there, as little Tater prepares to make his entrance.)

(We didn't have saggy jeans. We had long hair.)

Another Juxtaposition: Non-fiction golf tips and a golfing storyline:

Political cartoons were a bit scarce and very generic, probably because it was a Monday and the topical stuff had run over the weekend:

This one was pretty topical but, oddly enough, was one of those little one-column filler cartoons. How history would have changed if LBJ had taken his advice:

The mystery of Jim Berry:

I've noticed this before, but Berry's World, while it varied from sharply topical to quite evergreen, was apparently sent out in batches with no particular day attached to anything. On this particular date, I came across four completely different "Berry's World" panels.

There were a number of filler cartoons that were fairly generic and unremarkable and often ran in the classifieds, but Berry's World was a first-line feature that usually appeared on the editorial page and, while not the lead cartoon on the page, had a solid anchored spot.

I've seen mix-ups where a strip ran a day off schedule, but I've never seen this kind of "whenever" approach for a major feature.

Here are the four I found:

Now, for your moment of zen, the Number One song that week:

And a story to go with it, though from about a month earlier ("The Letter" had hit the Top 40 in August):

We arrived on campus before anyone else, for freshman orientation, and some guy across the quad got into the habit of putting his speakers in the window and cranking up this song a half dozen times or so. 

A few days after we arrived, the football team got back and began doing two-a-day workouts. The second day they were back, Mr. Disk Jockey to The World began his regular playing of "The Letter."

It got about thirty seconds into the song when we all heard the sound of a needle scratching violently across the grooves. 

And there was much joy.