The Good Old Days (updated)

This uproariously anachronistic comic strip is an example of the didacticism kids were subjected to back in the 1950s. I found it on the reverse of a 1950 DICK TRACY Sunday in my comic-strip collection. (It's the 1.8.50 episode where Tracy runs off from the middle of his honeymoon to chase a crook. Bride Tess: "I should have known being married to Dick Tracy would be like this. I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN!" Can't disagree there.) The strip is about a pair of 20th-century kids plunked down in the land of the Bible to learn lessons in morality and obedience.



Now watch it go crazy in the second half!



Nice to know that teachers complained about one kid's "attitude" endangering the whole group 2000 years ago. (Yet another World War II legacy.) And note that Christianity comes down to obeying the ones in charge. All religions seem to tend in that direction, don't they?

BTW, wasn't Peter called Simon when he was younger? Every Sunday school teaches that!

Update: I finally figured out how to post the images right side up without cutting off any of the strip!

"Aren't you rather fond of him?" "I'm rather fond of rabbits, but they need to be kept down"--THE LADY VANISHES

GIL THORP's Sunday companion

One of the odder comic strips I've been following on The Comics Curmudgeon is GIL THORP. It's a remarkably goofy daily strip about the eponymous high-school coach, who resembles the post-plastic surgery Mickey Rourke and teaches life lessons as well as athletics to various impressionable teenagers who go through bizarre adventures. The supporting cast includes Thorp's family; assistant coaches like Kaz, who once bodyguarded a Carole King-like singer over a summer tour and had to figure out who was sending her poison-pen letters, and Clambake, an aged Negro sage who told aspiring pitchers inspiring stories about training legends which turned out to be made up; Marty Moon, the snide, goateed sportscaster who often gets made a fool of and has drinking and gambling problems to deal with. And of course there's the kids, like the guy who saved someone's life but let another kid take the credit because he was enough of a hero already; the guy who lost a leg in a chainsaw accident; the new kid trying to live down his manslaughter trial that resulted from careless wrestling; the guy who bopped himself on the back of the head with a thick branch and said he'd been mugged. The current story involves Andrew Gregory, an attitude-challenged hotshot basketball shooter who nicknamed himself "the A-Train." All this is accompanied by some of the most bizarre visual compositions in the current comic-strip scene.

It may or may not interest some of the current fans to know that GIL THORP was once a better strip, as regards both writing and artwork. That was back when it was drawn by its original artist, Jack Berrill. (I actually read it for a while in my college days, when I started looking at a wide range of newspapers in the university library and often checked out the funnies pages.) All of this is an indirect way of answering the question two or three people must be wondering: Why isn't there a GIL THORP Sunday? The answer is that while it's always been dailies and nothing but, back in the late '60s through the mid-'70s Berrill actually drew a teenage Sunday strip for the same syndicate: TEEN-WISE! (That exclamation point was part of the title, which usually suggests a writer trying too hard. Another example is Upton Sinclair's OIL!, the book THERE WILL BE BLOOD is based on.)

Anyhow, TEEN-WISE! is a Sunday strip showing adolescents in challenging everyday situations, to teach them good sense. (Teen--wise, geddit?) It featured an annoying little owl giving the moral at the end. This was an old-fashioned concept for the time, and it's good for a few cynical laughs today.




Yeah, right. In the real world, of course, it's the well-informed teenagers who feel like misfits. (Take it from me.)

Gil Thorp himself had a cameo in a few episodes.



Another thing you could do is move to another school, get onto that school's team, play dirty against your old school and beat the pants off them. (Of course, if the new school's team takes you, chances are they aren't as good.) Or else you could avoid being a jock to begin with.

Happily, we get some multi-episode high school soap opera stories.



What do you think will be the outcome here?



But there are also dangerous situations. (Nice girls don't hitchhike!)



And there's the 13-year-old girl who lies about her age to get an 18-year-old boyfriend. (It helps to be tall.)



He fobbed her off on his friend Roman.

Somewhere in my immense comic-strip collection, on the reverse of some superior strip, I have a couple of TEEN-WISE episodes about The Marijuana Menace, in which a couple of users decide to retaliate against a girl who's threatening to squeal on them by giving her a beating. (Still think it's harmless?)

"I can allus tell a man who's married a good housekeeper from the way he brightens up when I speak kindly to him"

Comics are my life!

Well, not quite but I've found some great websites concerned with the comics medium.

One is The Comics Curmudgeon, in which Josh does for contemporary comic strips what Mr. Cranky does for movies, ie he never likes anything. He's popularized such catchphrases as "More zippers, mule!" (said to Margo Magee when she was going undercover in a sweatshop in APARTMENT 3-G) and "Work it like a claw and call me Randy" (a line from the ineffable JUDGE PARKER). It's at http://www.joshreads.com

A similar site is http://qomicsforqueers.blogspot.com which reads endless gay subtext into strips like BEETLE BAILEY. (I enjoy it, and I'm straight!) Unfortunately, it hasn't been active for over a month.

Another site is Mister Kitty, who has an ongoing "Stupid Comics" series discussing, well, stupid comics. I can't resist posting a scan from "Gorilla My Dreams," a page devoted to the gorilla theme in comics. You can see the whole thing at http://misterkitty.org/extras/stupidcovers/stupidcomics106.html



Mr K comments: "I know this has been seen around the internet for a while now, but it bears repeating, because this is pretty much what most people think of when they hear the phrase 'stupid comic.' Let's just forget about the fact that it's a talking gorilla for a moment-- he's using a gun to take books out of the public library. DUDE IT'S FREE ALL YOU NEED IS A CARD. For that matter, he could just read the books in the library and never check them out at all. Oh, well! Just further proof that gorillas are dumb!"

Another question I would add: If he's this big gorilla, why does he need a gun? Why can't he just overpower the librarian? He's a shame to gorillas everywhere! It's also interesting to learn that you can conquer the world with the help of boy's adventures like ROBINSON CRUSOE and TREASURE ISLAND. You'd think books like DECLINE OF THE WEST or NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR or MEIN KAMPF would be more useful.

Just recently I discovered http://www.comics.org, a site full of cover scans from a VERY wide range of comic books. Looking there, I found covers I remembered from my childhood, from series like TWEETY AND SYLVESTER and THE THREE STOOGES and JERRY LEWIS. My parents weren't keen on the superhero genre, but I do recall reading this one from the JIMMY OLSEN series. (I also remember one where Jimmy had to live in a slum for an investigative report. They were trying to be Relevant then.)



The cover depicts a story in which Jimmy Olsen went undercover as a hippie for another investigative report. In this story there were some bad men posing as hippies who wanted to kill Superman (who'da thunk it?), and decided to make Jimmy their tool. They introduced him to this magic incense or something that put him into a dream he could manipulate, to pretend to get even with people he was mad at. For example, he was POed that Perry White wouldn't advance him a raise, so he got to manipulate his own dream so that he went to the Daily Planet and decked his boss, leaving Clark and Lois appalled. Except what he didn't realize was that his dreams were REAL! (Jimmy isn't too bright.)

So next the bad guys made Jimmy think Superman was mad at him, which he wasn't really. (It has to do with the protest suggested on the cover, but it's too convoluted even for this description.) Then they got him to "dream" he was killing the Man of Steel with hippie beads made of kryptonite, with vibrations from his super-watch removing their protective coating. Except that at the last moment Jimmy wised up and figured out it was real, because of the paint stains on his knees, and saved Superman by putting the beads in a tank of leaded gasoline.

The other story in the comic had Jimmy inheriting these kachina powers from an old Hopi Indian, which meant that with the touch of his finger he could bring pictures to life. So he managed to foil crooks by animating the kings on playing cards and the Jolly Green Giant. (One group of these crooks was robbing a library--did they get the idea from a gorilla?) But then some other crooks got ahold of a stamp with a picture of Lex Luthor holding a piece of kryptonite...

Did you ever notice that Jimmy's super-watch, as well as Lois Lane's ring or whatever it was she used to call Superman, were always getting broken or swiped at just the times when they had most use for his help?

Chief: "Until your mission is a success, Max, she'll [Agent 99] learn to live without you." Maxwell Smart: "Yes, but what if my mission is a failure?" Chief: "Then we'll all learn to live without you"--GET SMART