Here’s the next installment in our December feature, showcasing the ways the winter holiday season was marked on American newspaper comics pages during the latter 20th Century. Having gone back in time eighty years in Part One, to 1944, then advancing in ten year increments for Parts Two and Three, we’re now ready to spotlight strips from “only” fifty years ago, taken from December 25, 1974.
That tumultuous year was marked by Richard M. Nixon resigning from the office of the President. He was succeeded by Gerald R. Ford (who had been appointed as Vice President following the resignation of VP Spiro Agnew a year earlier, on corruption charges). While the shock waves from the Nixon presidency still reverberated at year-end — Ford’s subsequent pardoning of Nixon remained controversial — there was comfort in knowing the Constitutional framework had functioned as designed, though the result was a President who was not elected by popular ballot.
Other factors were at play during the period: the U.S. economy was still battling high inflation (Ford’s W.I.N. program — Whip Inflation Now — was the butt of many jokes), American involvement in the Vietnam conflict was slowly winding down, and the sporting world was still talking about the October boxing match, staged in Zaire, in which Muhammad Ali “rope-a-doped” his way to the heavyweight title, unseating power-punching George Foreman.
It was a year where the number of notable passings contributed to a feeling of Societal Change. By December 25th of ’74 news maker Charles Lindbergh and news anchor Chet Huntley had left us, the entertainment world lost musician Duke Ellington, baseball Hall of Famer Dizzy Dean, actress Agnes Moorehead, and impresario Ed Sullivan; funnyman Jack Benny died on the 26th, at age eighty. Even comics were not immune to The Reaper’s scythe — Batman co-creator Bill Finger passed away during the first month of 1974.
The winds of Change blew at reduced velocity on the nation’s comics pages. Peanuts celebrated its 25th anniversary in October of the year, the same month Hi and Lois marked their 20th. Gasoline Alley continued in Dick Moores’s capable hands, with only longtime aficionados of the series remembering its original creator, Frank King, who had passed away in 1969. Li’l Abner had fewer than three years left to run, though at this time no one (including Al Capp) knew the specifics of the end game to come. Steve Canyon continued his globe-trotting ways, though he played to increasingly-small audiences as newspaper editors abandoned adventure strips in favor of gag-a-days or “soap opera” series, such as Alex Kotzy’s Apartment 3-G (itself already thirteen years old). Change came only slowly to newspaper comics, making them a haven of the pleasant calmness reflected in these holiday strips.
What do holiday strips from forty years ago look like? Join us back in this space by December 21st to see our selections from 1984 …
