How Archie Comics Celebrated the Bicentennial (part 2)

Some comic books started their Bicentennial stories a bit early. Here's one of the earliest I've found, issue 36 of the awkwardly titled Archie's TV Laugh-Out. Officially dated December 1975 (which means it probably shipped to newsstands a few months before that), you'd never know this is a Bicentennial comic from the cover, which makes fun of 1974's "The Towering Inferno":

But opening the cover reveals nothing towering, burning or remotely inferno-like. Instead we get a great five-page story called "Bicentennial Banter," in which we find Archie and the gang preparing for their roles in a Bicentennial costume pageant.

Of course, Archie and Reggie have to spend the beginning of the story making fun of Jughead and arguing over who will play George Washington (Reggie wins because his dad bought the costumes). After that rather standard Archie-style interplay, though, things gets really interesting. Betty, Veronica and the other female "gang" members show up and ask about the pageant's roles for women. Archie, incredulous, asks, "Female parts? What female parts?"

Reggie quickly offers up Betsey Ross as an answer, but that's not enough (and way too easy). In response, the women spend the next page quickly listing several important women from the Revolutionary War, as well as the essential roles all women took on during the era. Check it out below:

Click to view full-size

Kids reading this back in 1975 probably had to run to the encyclopedia to find out more about these women. For me, reading this story in 2016 sent me instantly to the Google machine to look up names like Sally St. Clair and Lydia Darragh (whose name is actually misspelled in the comic). Wow. What a great little history lesson this five-page comic turns out to be. As far as I'm concerned, it's a minor classic. Archie Comics itself must agree -- they reprinted the tale in the book Archie Americana: Best of the Seventies.

I'd love to find out who wrote and drew this story. As with everything Archie published back then, it lacks creator credits. Even the Grand Comics Database (an essential reference) hasn't catalogued the writer or artist yet. That's a shame. If anyone out there knows, please chime in.

The rest of this issue doesn't have any Bicentennial content, but it's all pretty good. There's a nice mix of stories and one-page gags about Sabrina, Archie, Mr. Lodge, and a few other Archie characters. The highlight is probably a Josie story about littering -- a nice tie-in to the "keep American beautiful" campaign that was still in full swing in the mid-seventies.

I'll return to Archie's TV Laugh-Out in the near future, as the title actually contained a huge number of Bicentennial stories throughout 1976, more (as far as I can tell) than any comic except Captain America. Who knew TV laughing was so patriotic?

How Blondie & Dagwood Celebrated the Bicentennial

Blondie -- a comic strip that's not all that far away from celebrating its own centennial -- made a big deal out of the Bicentennial in 1976.

Over the course of several days, writer Dean Young and artist Jim Raymond put ole' Dagwood through his paces as he and neighbor Herb try to put up a flagpole in time for the July 4th celebration.

Of course, things didn't go so well.

Here are a couple of strips from the sequence (note how some newspapers were still crediting the feature to creator Chic Young, who died in 1973), ending with the big Fourth of July blowout.

How the heck did Dagwood manage to avoid crippling himself all of these years? Does he have some sort of Wolverine-esque healing factor? Is that the key to the strip's longevity?

Unfortunately, these scans really show the weakness of newspaper archives in capturing artwork of any kind, but especially for daily and Sunday comic strips. I'll keep my eye out for better reproductions in the future, but for now, let's salute the Bicentennial and Dagwood Bumstead's nigh-immortality.

How Broom Hilda celebrated the Bicentennial

I always loved the Broom Hilda comic strip. Oh, sure, like any daily strip it can be a bit repetitive, but Russell Myers has a great line and draws some of the best trees and landscapes (not to mention monsters) in the business.

I don't recall Broom Hilda getting all that topical very often, so I'm actually a bit surprised by this strip from Sunday, July 4, 1976. At first glance it just appears to be the cast wishing readers a happy Bicentennial (all while standing in front of a wind-flapped American flag), but there's some cynicism in the few words that we have: "Folks, until a better place comes along, let's be very kind to our wonderful United States of America!"

I think ties in pretty well to the times. The more I read about 1976, the more I realize it wasn't the happiest year. Bicentennial celebrations sometimes tried to brush that under the rug or wrap it in the flag, but others acknowledged it. Some took a totally cynical turn, while others pointed it out and said "let's try to move on." This seems to be a classic example of the last of those three models.


Some interesting context: The Broom Hilda strip was only a few years old by this point, but it must have taken off incredibly quickly. The year 1976 saw no less than four Broom Hilda books published. Three more followed in 1977. That's pretty incredible. I remember having a few of the Scholastic volumes when I was a kid, but I don't recall them carrying the Sunday strips, so I wonder if this Bicentennial strip was ever reprinted in 76, 77, or later.


Interestingly, there does not to be any current Broom Hilda reprint program. That's a shame. In preparation for writing this Bicentennial Comics entry, I took some time to revisit Broom Hilda strips both new and old. They can be a lot of fun. I think a "best of" book would be quite welcome on my shelves. Hint, hint.

UPDATE:

Here's another scan of this strip from a different newspaper. Note how the first paper chopped up the panels and ran them in a way that totally messed with the way the flag flows (quite beautifully) through the four panels in the version below. This kind of thing must really drive strip cartoonists crazy.

How Bugs Bunny celebrated the Bicentennial (part 1)

Bugs Bunny may be gray and white in the cartoons but he had a red, white and blue streak around the time of the Bicentennial.


Of course, you can't see any of those colors in this black-and-white microfiche copy of the "Bugs Bunny" comic strip that ran on Sunday, July 4, 1976, but them's the breaks. What you do see, however, is a pretty good strip by artist Ralph Heimdahl and writer Al Stoffel in which (typical of many other strips that month) the classic Warner Brothers characters dream themselves into a key point in American history:

Heimdahl drew the Bugs Bunny comic strip for about 30 years, making him one of the longest-running rabbit artists. The strip doesn't seem to really run true to the characters from animation, but it's still some darned fine cartooning that (as far as I can tell) has never been collected in book form. 

By the way Warner Brothers -- like a lot of other companies -- merchandised the heck out of their characters throughout the Bicentennial year. I've seen Bugs Bunny Bicentennial pins, hats, patches and even a belt buckle. I'm sure I've just scratched the surface as far as all of that's concerned. Expect a deeper post about that in the months ahead.

How crossword puzzles celebrated the Bicentennial

My research into the comics of the Bicentennial has taken a few odd turns lately. You can expect to read more about them soon. Until then, though, here's something else that popped up while I was looking for something else: an amazing full-page Bicentennial-themed crossword from the Lakeland Ledger that ran on July 4, 1976:

 

Can't quite make out the detail in that? Well, neither can I (and I haven't been able to get a great scan of the entire page), but here's a slice that shows off some of the clues:

This may not be comics exactly, but I like how the puzzle took the theme of the day, really ran with it, and turned it into something visual.

This probably appeared in a lot of papers around the time of the Bicentennial, and I'm sure there were other puzzles that used 1776 as its theme throughout the year. I may try to dig more of those up. For now, though, this is a nice piece of history that I imagine few have seen since it first appeared nearly 30 years ago.