Newspaper funny pages skin#

His bald, big-eared mug was used to promote any number of products – and why wouldn’t he be? Who wouldn’t buy something with that charmer festooned upon it?

Newspaper funny pages skin#

(In this case, his shirt reads “Yez kin see it’s my deal – if I win one more pot Liz gits a new seal skin sack an dat goes”. In addition to hanging out with various offensive racial caricatures and writing his every thought on his shirt, he was one of the earliest stars of newspaper comics. That gentleman in the middle? That’s the Yellow Kid, though he didn’t get that name until Hogan’s Alley made him famous. Not all of them are in the public domain. So print these out and give them to some kid, will you?* But there is something remarkable about having an entire sheet of cartoons delivered to your house every day of your childhood – something that a majority of kids born this decade will probably never experience. Kids today can grab a laptop and get online for entertainment (if they even do anything else). This is by no means a comprehensive, academic study – just a taste of what was created in the first half of the 20th Century, before you were likely to have been paying attention. We’ve culled (primarily from the copy of The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics I bought on Alibris a few years back) a selection of classic comics, with commentary about the cartoon, the newspaper and the time period, hoping to give a sense of the world in which these remarkable and often artistic pieces appeared. We come here not to praise the new cartoon, however, but to eulogize its predecessor. But the Internet may also be the cartoon’s salvation – from Dilbert (likely the first and last major cartoon to jump from the Internet to newsprint) to XKCD to Penny Arcade to Cyanide and Happiness, cartoons are flourishing online. Their entertainment value had already been supplanted before the Internet eviscerated their delivery mechanism. Most of my knowledge of the impeachment of Richard Nixon and the Cultural Revolution is filtered through the pen of Garry Trudeau.Īs newspapers continue to meet the fate of the Rochester Times-Union, which was folded into the D&C in 1997, the fate of newspaper comics is uncertain, but guessable. These, frankly, baffled me – expecting some sort of humor and instead being treated to dry quips about Duke dropping acid (whatever that meant) on the Great Wall. Likewise at my house, my parents had a collection of Doonesbury from the mid- to late ’70s. Whenever we had library time, there was a dash for that area, to be the lucky kid who got to paw through the same tired Nermal jokes for the 20th time. Our school library in fourth and fifth grades had a secret stash, in a far corner, of Garfield books. Then there are those collections of cartoons bound into books. It’s hard to imagine the world that opened up for a kid in the nineteen-teens, opening the Sunday paper and seeing, for example, a full, color page of Little Nemo in Slumberland. Before television, before radio, people explored fantasy, crime, humor and romance on newsprint. My eyes were opened I renewed that book at the library every month for a year.Ĭartoons have been in newspapers since the late 1800s. I believed that, I should say, up until my sister brought home from the library a massive tome called The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics for a school report. (With the exception of Family Circus.) While my parents read their sections, I read mine.īeing a kid, I assumed that the contents of the comics page were static and everlasting that my parents in their youth had enjoyed the subtle Christianity of B.C. The cartoons were almost never funny, and rarely even amusing. Joes two five-minute stretches to peruse the funny pages. Here you’ll find more than 50 old names like Hopalong Cassidy, Flash Gordon, Blondie, Li’l Abner, Curly Kayo, Nancy, Brick Bradford, Etta Kett, Grandma, Barney Google, Mandrake the Magician, Tillie the Toiler, The Lone Ranger, Moon Mullins, Myrtle, The Heart of Juliet Jones and a few more.I took it for granted that everyday I’d work into my schedule of goofing around and melting G.I. They were syndicated and ran in newspapers nationwide, so the whole country could follow along with the adventures of superheroes, silly folks, detectives, cowboys and everyday folks in humorous circumstances.

You - or your parents or grandparents - might remember some of these popular comic strips from the funny pages back in the ’50s.