COMICS: Have you ever thought about what you’re looking at on The Era’s comic page?
We were curious about “who” was the oldest on the page, and we would have guessed Charlie Brown and friends in Peanuts, created by Charles M. Schultz.
We’d be wrong.
Did you know Blondie started in 1930? The comic strip was introduced by Chic Young, and is about Blondie Boopadoop, who started off as a carefree flapper girl who spent her days in dance halls along with her boyfriend, Dagwood Bumstead, heir to an industrial fortune. In 1933, Blondie and Dagwood married, and he was disowned by his family. The two became a middle-class suburban family and the rest is history.
Peanuts came 20 years later, along with the lazy soldier Beetle Bailey. Beetle’s family — his sister, Lois, and her husband, Hiram “Hi” Flagston, along with their kids Chip, Dot, Ditto and Trixie — got a strip of their own in 1954.
Both strips were created by Mort Walker, while Hi and Lois was illustrated by Dik Browne, who was the creator in 1973 of Viking raider Hägar the Horrible.
Next came the lasagna-loving cat with an attitude, Garfield, created by Jim Davis. It became syndicated in 1978, just a year before the Patterson family’s lives were chronicled in Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse. We never realized that strip was set outside of the U.S. — in the town of Milborough, a fictional suburb of Toronto, Ontario.
The other strips on the comic page are more modern, Tundra since 1991 and Lola since 1999.
Another favorite is The Lockhorns, chronicling the everyday ups and downs of a long-married couple. The strip began on Sept. 9, 1968, by creator Bill Hoest.
