Results tagged “Commercial art”

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."