CSotD: Yer old gray-haired mum
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I thought I'd use this Mother's Day as a chance to look at a pair of nostalgic comic strip families, to supplement the coverage of contemporary mothers in today's funny pages.
JR Williams "Out Our Way" launched with the nostalgia pre-loaded in the 20s, since he was purposely pitching to the grownups and basing much — but by no means all — of his humor of their childhood rather than contemporary times.
These cartoons, by the way, are dated from the early 1950s, but are from a "Re-Drawn by Request" collection, so may actually date from just about any time before that. And, BTW, Williams sometimes requested these re-runs himself, but he had a pretty good eye for the good stuff.
Motherhood seemed a constant battle against chaos, and he had a whole line of cartoons based on that idea, which he called "Why Mothers Get Gray."
In that world, little boys were constantly coming up with great schemes to solve problems, even if the problems were never quite as great as the schemes.
Somehow, mothers just didn't appreciate genius, even when it was directed towards making her life easier.
Gosh, you'd think they'd appreciate that kind of help, but mothers are just always finding fault. Who can explain it? Even when you do the chore you were told to do, they aren't satisfied.
Picky, picky, picky.
Nor are the kids the only reason mothers get gray:
The family in "Out Our Way" did a little bit of changing with the times — there were TV jokes in the 50s, for example — but they didn't grow and age.
That was not the case with "Freckles and his Friends," which launched in 1915, about seven years before "Out of Way." At that stage, Freckles was a very small boy:
You'll note that the strip doesn't mind giving Mom a little shot here. Freckles was a good kid, but he and his folks went back and forth on various things and his mother, while not the constant font of patience and wisdom of the mother in "Out Our Way," was far from the silly flibberty-gibbet of some strips. Both she and the mother in Williams' strip could balance a checkbook and run a family budget.
Meanwhile, Freckles and his eponymous friends grew, if not in real time, pretty steadily, and became adolescents with not only a sense of adventure but a talent for getting into scrapes. There was a little bit of Tom Swift or the Hardy Boys in these middle years.
Okay, it's Nutty's mom, not Freckles', who shows a little hip wisdom in this 1935 strip, but that calm, together approach was also Mrs. McGoosey's way.
A decade later, the Freckles gang was in full teen blossom, with teen adventures similar to those of Archie Andrews, who debuted in 1941, not, apparently as an attempt to match Freckles but to coattail on the popularity of Andy Hardy. The trio of Freckles, Archie and Andy are not terribly dissimilar.
Notice two things here: One is that, while Freckles has grown into a mature teenager, his little brother doesn't appear to have aged at the same pace.
More relevant to the day, however, is the observation that, 32 years after she first appeared, Mother McGoosey looks about that much younger, having become more fashionable and attractive than in her earlier incarnation.
If you haven't seen enough Mom-and-family cartoons, Liza Donnelly has created a slide-show collection of her work on the topic for the occasion, which you can find here. Here's a sample, and then here's some more, with a nice short essay about her own mom:
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