Tossed Sunday Strip Salad
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Origins Issues
The story of how Kit Walker became The Original Phantom continues into its 12th Sunday, while the story of how Ming became The Merciless continues in the daily and Sunday Flash Gordon. And King Features/Comics Kingdom celebrates the 80 anniversary of the Mark Trail comic strip.
We’re proud to mark this 80th anniversary. And we thought the best way to do that was to go back to the beginning — literally — and walk through what this strip has been, era by era, and why it still matters today.
Since they didn’t (haven’t yet) present the first strip we did above. And below is the first Sunday page which would very quickly morph into the nature page we know and love but was a little different at the beginning:
Unfortunately Comics Kingdom doesn’t give us the first 25 years of Mark Trail, only going back to 1972.
As seen above Irwin’s nephew Nerwin is a troll, purple, and in the woodlands so about today’s Broom-Hilda:
From trolls to humans.
It is not often we see humans in Deflocked. I like the style the receptionist is drawn in. It reminds me of some other cartoon style that I can’t put my finger on (maybe earlier Corriveau?).
Something I do recognize.
Mr. McClellan is me my entire life. Pitch me a baseball and I have a decent, not great, shot at hitting it, but throwing it up to hit line drives to the kids? Pfft.
Rina Piccolo notes with some irony that her comic strip idea would not stand the test of time:
Can I share with you my dumbest thought? I wrote the idea about 6 weeks before publishing date, and there was a moment where I thought, “Wait—will this still be relevant by the time it runs?” — ha ha ha, yeah, right. Of course it’ll still be relevant! Did I really pause to consider that America’s current administration would suddenly turn less chaotic in only 6 weeks?
Courtesy of Robb Armstrong and JumpStart:
feature image is the title image from today’s Doonesbury.
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