Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Unplanned Classic: Kids in the Komix

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Mike Peterson Published: August 22, 2011 1 minute 4 comments

I was trying to thin out the boxes of stuff in my closet this weekend and came across this example of "Freckles and His Friends" from the 1920s, probably 1923 or 24. Back in the 1990s, I produced a weekly historical piece for the Press-Republican of Plattsburgh, NY, that involved going back through all the papers from 25, 50, 75 and 100 years ago, and this would have been in the 75 years ago category.

It tickled me then and it tickles me now, because there's some bite in the gag and I suspect that Merrill Blosser really liked kids. I don't think the various creators of the Katzenjammer Kids ever paused over the fairness of whipping a boy for misbehaving, but the image of a mother chucking rocks at her kid cracks me up and I think Blosser does a nice job here of putting whippings into some perspective.

"Freckles" got older and is better remembered as an Archie-style teenage strip, which is where it more or less froze in time, and you can find quite a few examples, including a fairly long sequence of strips from 1945 at a fan site here.

The 1945 iteration was how I saw Freckles in the 50-years-ago papers of that period, along with Alley Oop, Out Our Way, Our Boarding House and Red Ryder, with Priscilla's Pop coming in right towards the end of my tenure, having started in 1947.

Out Our Way remains one of my favorites of all times, and Our Boarding House was always good for a chuckle, while Oop was a good deal more dynamic and interesting in the hands of its original creator.  As for Red Ryder, it must surely have earned its legendary status among kids of the era from the radio show, the movie serials and the apparently relentless marketing, rather than simply from the comic strip because the comic strip itself was pretty rudimentary stuff.

Priscilla's Pop was no great shakes, either, but I happened to have printed one out from September 15, 1948, that seems timely at the moment:

First panel: Well, Priscilla, have you learned anything in school yet?"

Second panel: "I've learned the difference between kindergarten and first grade."   "Splendid! Tell me about it!"

Third panel: "Kindergarten was the bait. First grade is the trap."

And a note of interest for comic nerds: Note that these strips were both formatted to run in the square stacked layout as given here, with bounding boxes, but that the Freckles archive linked above shows Freck in the horizontal strip layout during the same period. While offering a single panel in both formats is new (pioneered by Non Sequitur but followed by several others), the syndicates have, contrary to some comics lore, long offered three- and four-panel strips in both formats.

And, no, I didn't end up throwing out a whole lot of junk this weekend, but I did come across some cool stuff I'd forgotten I had, which is worse because now it's out of the boxes and cluttering up my living space.