It’s tough to get an American Thanksgiving holiday to appear much later on the calendar than it does this year, on November 28th. It does happen every so often, though, and in fact it happened exactly seventy-three years ago, in 1946. Since it’s been a while since we did one of our “fantasy comics pages” in this space, we thought it might be good to show you a cross-section of what readers were seeing in their post-War newspapers.
We’ve done a fifty-fifty split between strips that mention the holiday and those that don’t. In the latter category, Bringing Up Father is no-so-subtly plugging the motion picture version of the strip that had debuted just three days previously, starring Joe Yule as the every-put-upon Jiggs and Renie Riano as rolling-pin-wielding Maggie. Blondie features the Bumstead kids, with Dagwood getting the final word, while Ernie Bushmiller puts Nancy and Aunt Fritzie through their familiar paces, and what else can one say about the day’s installment of Terry and the Pirates but, “Oh, that Burma …!”
For strips that chose to acknowledge “Turkey Day,” Buck Rogers yearns for some good old fashioned bird and fixin’s. Orphan Annie proves she’s “Daddy’s” girl, Invisible Scarlet O’Neil shows us pugs down on their luck (how invisible was Scarlet? She was nowhere to be seen on Thanksgiving Day!), and my absolute favorite entry on this fantasy page is Mutt & Jeff, with Bud Fisher spreading holiday cheer and dropping Mae West’s name in the bargain. Miss West’s career was pretty quiet by 1946 (her brilliant My Little Chickadee, co-starring W.C. Fields, was already six years old at this point), but she was lovely, she was intelligent, and her mention here shows she was still very much a household name. Many of her films still hold up remarkably well, and in her heyday she dominates the screen whenever she’s in front of the camera — I highly recommend finding, viewing, and enjoying the work of Mae West.
My Leonard Maltin impression completed, I offer you this fantasy comics page from Thanksgiving Day, 1946, plus happy holiday wishes for all our American readers, from everyone at The Library of American Comics!
This month, Kurtis talks with Paul Tumey about his new book, Screwball: The Cartoonists Who Made the Funnies Funny! Paul is an expert on platinum and golden age humor comics, in particular a genre that he has labeled “screwball”! The discussion includes talk about well-known cartoonists such as Opper and Herriman as well as forgotten cartoonists like Clare Dwiggins and Gene Ahern.
