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.