Results tagged “Comics”

While I was looking through that 1961 issue of the Ottawa Citizen, I noticed this:

It seemed unusual, graphically, for 1961, and I'd never heard of it. "Nibbles" was by Mal Hancock, who was a very familiar magazine cartoonist and illustrator. I remember a panel he did for a long time called "Fenwick," and he did other comics, but "Nibbles" was and is a mystery to me.

Hancock was later a regular in National Review, but "Nibbles" was a footnote. By 1963, it was gone, replaced in the Citizen by "Smidgens":

That one was by Bob Cordray and lasted from 1961 through 1974. I don't remember it, either.

Anybody remember this one?

"Freddy" ran in a lot of papers from 1955 through 1980. Freddie was the dirty kid in this sample, Freddy MacReady, to be precise. I used to read it every day when I was very young, although I didn't like the way the characters looked and really didn't get the premise other than that it was a kid and his friends. The girl, I believe, was named Charlene. He had a little brother named Ernest in a black cap. That was pretty much the whole deal. You don't see much recollection of it anymore.

I don't know why the paper in this case labeled it "Freddie," with an "ie." Artist "Rupe" was a pen name for Bob Baldwin.

I used to read this one, too:

There's a lot more on the Internet about "Louie," by Harry Hanan, a British cartoonist transplanted to the U.S. in 1948. In fact, Allan Holtz at Stripper's Guide has this article from 1952 commemorating the fifth anniversary of the strip's debut. It was a pantomime strip, featuring a hapless little mustachioed chap, his battleaxe wife, and his being beaten down by life. The strip ran from 1947 through 1976. Oh, and from the Bridgeport Herald on July 31, 1949:

More comics coming....

I'm a fan of comic strips, and I've read a lot of them over the years, including some really, really obscure ones. But even I didn't remember "Biddie and Bert":

This appeared in the January 1, 1963 St. Petersburg Times, and a more perfect confluence between market, time, and comic would be hard to imagine. In 1963, St Pete still had the image of being a massive retirement community, and "Biddie and Bert" were, obviously, retirees. Bert, here, is returning from his shuffleboard game, and, yes, the image of St. Pete was of old codgers playing shuffleboard in the humid Gulf Coast afternoons while waiting to die. Bert, apparently, was trying to hasten his own demise by eating to excess, hence the fat joke his wife is lobbing at him in this strip.

"Biddie and Bert" was by a cartoonist named Bob Donovan, and was syndicated by the old Hall Syndicate in 1962-65. I've seen it in several old papers, including the Milwaukee Journal and the Lodi News-Sentinel. You would think that a comic strip about retirees would be huge, because, well, who's reading newspapers, anyway? And, ultimately, the success of strips like the current "Pickles" would bear that out, but "Biddie and Bert" didn't last too long. It was, naturally, an endless parade of old-people jokes, idleness jokes, fat-lazy-husband jokes... but what humor strip WASN'T like that in 1963?

Bob Donovan, by the way, had another job at the time; he was Fred Lasswell's long-time assistant on "Barney Google and Snuffy Smith," and also did a lot of comic book work and commercial art, including a McGruff the Crime Dog premium giveaway and "Summer Fun With The California Summer Fruits." Oh, and he drew this. He passed away in 2002 at 80; here's his obituary in the St. Petersburg Times. Strangely, it doesn't mention "Biddie and Bert."