More Comic Strips You Have Never Read

Well, naturally you’ve read Barney Google and Snuffy Smith by John Rose, but odds are against you having read Billy DeBeck’s Bunky topper strip to Barney Google unless, like me, you were enjoying it in the 1930s.

John and Sarah bring Bunky back after a long funny papers absence to be Li’l Sparky‘s jockey in this week’s comics. What you may not know is that Bunky is an experienced jockey as shown in a 1935 sequence.

As a matter of fact it is not the first time Bunky has ridden Sparky, though in 1933 it was Grandpa Sparky.

For more about Bunky: Nemo, the Classic Comics Library #3 presents background and a 1929 sequence.

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Know what I miss on the comics pages? A western themed comic strip.

I recently came across Buffalo Gals by Bob Rohan, which reminded me that I miss Latigo and Tumbleweeds.

In this interview Bob describes his comic strip:

Buffalo Gals is a change from today’s “political correct” cartoons. It takes place in the old west before any of that nonsense was brought to light and allowed. It is not editorial in its humour. It is meant to give someone a laugh in their stress-filled day. No hidden messages in the gags

Not mentioned is the occasional risqué gags.

Buffalo Gals appears regularly in The Tombstone Epitaph and in Waves Magazine of Galveston, and also in the monthly chili recipe “newspaper” The Goat Gap Gazette.

A gallery of Buffalo Gals can be read by scrolling through Bob’s Facebook page.

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Speaking of Westerns, back in The Silver Age of Comic Books there was a cult favorite Western called Bat Lash. It was drawn by Nick Cardy who spent the 1960s on DC Comics covers and insides on a wide variety of genres. But it is not Old West Action rather Jungle Adventures where we find Cardy today, or yesterday since it is the Tarzan reruns that have reached the Nick Cardy months.

Monday’s Tarzan at GoComics starts a new adventure that originally appeared on May 22, 1950. Cardy had been drawing the strip since February 13, 1950 as a ghost artist, finishing up the old story. With this new story Cardy finally started signing the strip. Unfortunately that would only last for two months, until July 22, 1950, when Bob Lubbers took on the art chores for Tarzan. So the Cardy signed strips ought to go until January 11, 2025 in this current GoComics run.

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Swami Salami is a comic I hadn’t heard of until The Times Union profiled cartoonist Michael Esposito.

In 1966, Happy Traum invited Esposito upstate to rehearse for an album he was planning to record with his brother Artie. The quaint village full of gurus and personalities left such an imprint on him that he bought a $60 plot in the Artists Cemetery as a pledge to live out his life there.

The idea for Swami Salami came to him unexpectedly one day in the 1970s.

“He just got to America, and he came here to be at an ashram,” he said about the character. “I guess he came to Woodstock by mistake or something and he met all of these would-be gurus.”

From 1985 to 2020, Swami Salami was a weekly fixture in the Woodstock Times. The cartoons were first compiled in a smaller book several years ago, but this most recent publication has a much more extensive collection.

The Swami Salami book is available here.

3 thoughts on “More Comic Strips You Have Never Read

  1. Bodacious thanks for mentioning our Bunky visit in Barney Google And Snuffy Smith, D.D.! I truly appreciate it! Bunky will be here the rest of this week! I thought he would be a perfect jockey for Li’l Sparky!

  2. I was a diehard Marvel fanatic in the ’60s who laughed at most of DC’s offerings. Things started to change for both companies toward the end of that decade with DC introducing Neal Adams’ Deadman and Berni Wrightson’s Swamp Thing. But my fave was Nick Cardy’s Bat Lash.

    In fact, I invented an alternative reality where Robert Redford discovered the Bat Lash comic book and made a series of movies based on the character. Of course, even in this non-real reality, he found enough time to team up with Paul Newman on a couple of projects …

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