Wayback Whensday Comic Strips
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Featuring Hägar the Horrible, Dick Tracy, Prince Valiant, The Amazing Spider-Man, Caspar Milquetoast, and Milt Gross; with a special appearance by Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
Hägar the Horrible debuts
above: A rare look at the Sunday color debut of Dik Browne’s Hägar the Horrible courtesy of Larry Levine.
Dick Tracy Deaths
Rare on the comics page is showing someone being murdered, though less rare in the Dick Tracy comic strip. However these days the killing are more mundane than in the days of original cartoonist Chester Gould.
Retribution was Chester Gould and Dick Tracy’s model for justice from the beginning. The strip started in 1931 literally as a revenge narrative. Standing over the murdered body of his fiancé Tess Trueheart’s father, civilian Tracy swears vengeance on the killers. He quickly joins the police force, but the themes of retribution and conviction by poetic justice remained a hallmark of the strip across four and a half decade run. From the beginning Chester Gould unapologetically crossed the lines of good taste.
Steve Smith at Panels and Prose looks back on Justice dealing with Dick Tracy’s Rogues Gallery.
Gary Gianni’s Last Year of Prince Valiant
I guess because Gary Gianni has illustrated some Edgar Rice Burroughs stories they are uploading black and white pages featuring the last year of Gianni’s Prince Valiant pages – March 27, 2011 to March 25, 2012. At this point they have the March 27 to October 9, 2011 pages up.
Of course subscribers to Comics Kingdom can read the same Sundays in color and in tabloid (vertical) format. Special note: this sequence guest stars Laurel and Hardy making a fine mess of things.
The Amazing Spider-Man’s Brand New(spaper) Day
As Graeme McMillan at The Popverse explains when Marvel Comics decided to end the marriage of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson the event carried over into The Amazing Spider-Man newspaper comic strip.
Splitting the couple after two decades was such a dramatic fix that it didn’t just impact Spider-Man comics — the retcon also took effect in the Spider-Man newspaper strip written by none other than Stan Lee himself, taking effect in the January 1, 2009 strip.
The biggest surprise was to come just five months later, when the May 24, 2009 strip revealed that the strip had abandoned the retcon.
The creative team of the strip — officially Stan Lee and Larry Leiber, although Alex Saviuk inked Leiber’s work uncredited and Lee was believed to have worked with uncredited ghost-writers throughout its run, also — never officially addressed the reason for restoring the Spider-Marriage…
The Last Milt Gross Book? Banana Oil!
Paul C. Tumey has a special fondness for Milt Gross. So it was his loving hand that put together a collection of Milt Gross’ comic pages from Judge magazine. Richard Pound reviews The Art of Milt Gross for The Comics Journal.
Various publishers have cherry-picked his career over the past two decades, with new collections of his work popping up every few years. Fantagraphics reissued his 1930 wordless masterpiece He Done Her Wrong in 2005, Yoe Books followed up with The Complete Milt Gross Comic Books and Life Story in 2009, while New York University Press published a collection of his illustrated books, Is Diss a System?, in 2010. IDW resurrected the ultra-rare Milt Gross’ New York in 2015, and finally, in 2020, Peter Maresca’s Sunday Press compiled Gross Exaggerations, a monumental collection of his best newspaper strips that, for a while, seemed like it might be the last word on all things Gross.
And yet, while each of these has added a new piece to the jigsaw, the big picture has remained frustratingly incomplete. Which is precisely why this fascinating book comes as such a welcome surprise. The first of a multi-volume series dedicated to unearthing Gross’s “lost work,” it’s an impeccably researched and well-presented collection, bringing together every strip he produced for the weekly satirical magazine Judge between 1923 and ‘24.
The Art of Milt Gross is available now.
Origins of a Timid Soul
That’s right – When H. T. Webster first created The Timid Soul on October 30, 1923 he was not named Caspar Milquetoast. First time I find that infamous moniker used is nearly three years later on May 17, 1926.
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