With the Spooky Season hard upon us, we thought you might enjoy a Hallowe’en-themed fantasy comics page. We opted to go back seventy-four years, to October 31, 1949. The adventure and soap opera strips of the day were too busy unfolding their ongoing stories to pause and mark the holiday — with, as you’ll see, the exception of The Adventures of Patsy, which found a way to weave a holiday feel into the narrative — but several gag-a-day strips got into the (heh-heh-heh) spirit, including stalwarts such as The Berrys and Priscilla’s Pop, as well as lesser-known strips like Honey and Hank, by Bernard Segal (signing his work as “Seeg”).
We also had our ghostly funnybones tickled by some of the single-panel features devoted to Hallowe’en that year. Ching Chow offered up food for thought wrapped in a seasonal visual, while James R. Williams’s Out Our Way delves into some schoolboy mischief, and Fontaine Fox’s October 31st installment of Toonerville Folks made us laugh out loud.
Here’s hoping this fantasy comics page puts a smile on your face, and that the gremlins and goblins have no tricks up their sleeves for you! Click each image for an isolated view …
