Back in February we took note of the fact that 2024 is a milestone-anniversary year for many seminal newspaper comic strips. Of course, we had to save some coverage for later in the year! So now, six months later, we can extend the happiest of 90th birthdays to these four distinguished series, each of which launched in 1934:
Bowing in March of that year, Will Gould made a splash with his hard-hitting undercover-detective strip, Red Barry. We packed the inaugural strips — 1934 and ’35 dailies, plus full-color Sundays through June 1936 — into a single 2016 volume:
What comics fans may forget is that before turning to adventure strips, Gould was a sports cartoonist and reporter who generated a wide range of syndicated features like this one:
Red ran a little over four years, but it remains a “sleeper” favorite for many comic strip aficionados, and certainly Will Gould was one of the industry’s more colorful figures.
Debuting that same month, and enjoying a much longer lifespan than Red Barry — twenty-one-and-a-third years, in fact — was Don Winslow of the Navy. The title character had already appeared in prose novels by naval reservist Frank V. Martinek, who decided transporting true-blue Don into the comic strip medium would serve as an excellent recruitment tool to attract potential new sailors into the service. Navy Lieutenant Leon Beroth handled the finished-art chores, working off Martinek’s scripts and layouts by Carl Hammond. With spies and high seas derring-do as a recurring series feature, and with the title character and his buddies maintaining a strict adherence to what Martinek described as “the ideals, traditions, and motives of the Navy,” Don Winslow attracted several eager subscribing newspapers, which ballyhooed the strip’s arrival with promotional ads such as this one:
The Scorpion would remain Don Winslow’s arch-enemy throughout the series’ history; eventually his equally-evil daughter, Madame Mask, was introduced to stir up additional trouble. While it should be no surprise that the World War II years represent Don‘s peak of popularity, we’ve selected a strip from the December holiday period of its first year to share with you here:
Those two appetizers were followed by a pair of hearty main courses as 1934 continued to unfold. Still smoldering from his days assisting Ham (Joe Palooka) Fisher, which fanned a mutual hatred that spurred one of the most visible and virulent celebrity feuds in history, Al Capp brought readers the first installment of Li’l Abner on August 13th. The comics pages were never the same.
The hillbilly hijinks of Abner Yokum and his Dogpatch family and friends quickly evolved past simple girl-chases-boy and city-mouse/country-mouse tales. As Capp grew bolder, more pointedly satirical, and more outrageously funny, one flamboyant continuity followed another and Li’l Abner became the strip everybody was talking about. It changed the popular culture by introducing the Sadie Hawkins Dance — it introduced a fistful of words and phrases into the daily lexicon, such as the “double whammy” — and it paraded a cavalcade of vivid characters as Capp realized his desire to merge the increasingly-popular adventure story-strip with the humorous approach that originally gave “the funnies” their nickname. Yet in 1934, Abner‘s origins were considerably more humble, and Capp’s skills far less refined, as this promotional advertisement indicates:
As has been well documented (in the appropriate LOAC volumes, and elsewhere), one of Al Capp’s best friends during his pre-Abner days at the Associated Press was a fellow young cartoonist named Milton Caniff. Caniff left the AP and his Dickie Dare comic strip in order to join the Tribune News Syndicate in order to produce a new feature that would bloom into arguably the greatest adventure comic strip the history of the medium. We’re talking, of course, about Terry and the Pirates.
Caniff developed his sprawling cast, mixing and matching them in stories that grew in sophistication and melodrama as Terry unfolded. The Death of Raven Sherman storyline shocked millions of readers and made a lifelong impression on talents as impressive as longtime Marvel Comics Art Director John Romita Sr. (who pointed to Raven’s death as the benchmark as he and his fellow creators planned the equally-stunning death of Spider-Man’s long-time girlfriend, Gwen Stacy). We thought we’d show you some reader reactions to Raven’s passing, as captured in the letters to the editor section of the October 20, 1941 edition of the New York Daily News:
We also wanted to spotlight one of our very favorite dailies from Caniff’s groundbreaking Terry run, the somber Christmas Day 1942 strip in which American flyboy Flip Corkin finds a lonely grave high in the China hills. He never knew who occupied this grave, but readers knew — and Caniff knew that readers would know:
Bottom line, then — 2024 is a birthday year to remember for comic strip lovers, a year to celebrate both the breadth and range of the art form and the many talented cartoonists who entertained millions and who continue to entertain us today, almost a century later.
