A Berry Bicentennial

If you look back at the news, you realize that the year of the American Bicentennial was a jam-packed 12 months. The actual July 4th celebration was no different, something cartoonist Jim Berry "celebrated" in his daily panel on Saturday, July 3, 1976:

He returned to the Bicentennial the following day for this full-size edition of his "Berry's World" panel, which, again, was jam-packed, this time with artistic representations of the icons of the year:

"Berry's World" was always one of my favorites. Berry passed away last year, but hopefully "Berry's World" won't be forgotten any time soon. It definitely deserves a "best-of" collection.

Bicentennial Teeth

We're dealing with a family dental emergency this week, so instead of the usual in-depth Bicentennial Comics entry here's an editorial cartoon about Jimmy Carter's teeth:

Okay, this isn't about President Carter's teeth, it just uses his well-known smile to comment on the Bicentennial anniversary in a fairly innocuous and celebratory manner. This cartoon, by Bruce Danby, ran on July 1, 1976, in the Bangor Daily News -- where Danby is still employed all these years later! The U.S. doesn't have many staff editorial cartoonists left these days, so it's great to see that he's still at it.

More next week, teeth willing!

How Sabrina the Teenage Witch Celebrated the Bicentennial

Well here's a disappointing entry into our Bicentennial Comics catalog. Archie Comics did a lot of great Revolutionary War-themed comics in 1976, so I had high hopes when I found out about Sabrina the Teen-age Witch # 34, cover dated September of that year but actually published in July. I didn't have a description of the issue, but it looked like it might fit in with so many other Archie comics of the era. After all, the cover has a pretty vague patriotic theme, with Sabrina wearing a cute little red-white-and-blue halter top:

Unfortunately, that's it as far as Bicentennial content goes! This issue contains several stories -- each of which is actually quite a bit of fun -- but not a mention of anything timely.

Well, I take that back. There's one more Bicentennial mention in this issue, but it's not from any of the stories. It's actually just from an ad on the back cover:

Oh well. Every Bicentennial comic that I unearth can't be a gem. Better luck next time!

How an Astrology Comic Strip Celebrated the Bicentennial

What did the Bicentennial hold for the future? An astrology comic strip promised some answers:

Click to see larger

I can't find much information on the "This Week in Astrology" comic strip (or comic feature, to be more accurate, since there's no real storytelling here). What I do know is that Bernice Bede Osol was one of the most popular astrologers of her day, at one point reaching readers in an astonishing 500 newspapers a week. She had a long career, too, retiring just two years ago after 4 decades in the star-charting business. The vast majority of her contributions were in the form of newspaper columns, not comics. And despite her longevity, I have yet to find a single thing about her as a person online.

So how did she do on her projections? Foreign investors taking big chunks of the U.S.? Check. Power brokers in the election? Check. Trimmed government programs? Check. Political figures fading away? Probably not a check. America continuing to be a beacon of hope? I guess that one depends on your point of view.

"This Week in Astrology" seems to be a mostly forgotten comics feature. In fact, there are only two other references to this strip online, as far as I can tell. I think that makes this a particularly fun entry into the Bicentennial Comics catalog. Now if I could just figure out who drew the darned thing.

What other weird, forgotten items will turn up next in my Bicentennial Comics quest? Come on back next time to find out!

How Batman Celebrated the Bicentennial (Part 2)

Some of the comic books of 1976 used the Bicentennial as a major plot point. Others used it as what you might consider "local color" for to make stories more relevant to the time. Our latest Bicentennial Comics entry -- Batman # 278 -- definitely comes from this second camp.

Holy cow, that's a grisly cover. What the heck is Batman doing surrounded by all of these broken-necked dolls? What's going to happen when we open the issue?

I shouldn't have asked! Yikes! That's a pretty macabre splash page for 1976 -- a purple-clad puppet master strangling the heck out of the Caped Crusader. Seriously, what is this all about?

Well, the opening pages of the actual story don't provide too much of a clue quite yet. We see Batman stop a hijacked truck, aided and abetted not by Robin, his usual partner, but by a mutton-chopped New Scotland Yard inspector in a castoff Sherlock Holmes outfit. Of course, the inspector knows Judo and helps take down the perpetrator...

This is a character named Inspector Clive Kittridge -- making his first and last appearance -- who's in Gotham to... I don't know. It's never made entirely clear. I guess he's visiting to learn new crime-fighting techniques from a masked vigilante. Go figure. Anyway, who am I to judge? Commissioner Gordon seems totally into the whole thing, so it must be on the up and up.

(I have to pause here to mention how clumsily this character is introduced. Batman simply calls him "Inspector" on first mention. We don't learn his last name until someone mentions it in the next scene, where other people are talking about him, as you'll see above. His first name isn't even mentioned until half-way through the book, when Alfred the Butler drops the name "Clive" in a thought balloon. Weird, awkward storytelling.)

Anyway, soon after this opening scene Batman and Inspector Clive encounter a red-headed man in a trench-coat who literally just jumps in front of them and starts blubbering like an idiot. Batman -- believe it or not -- asks if he's a fan and wants his autograph. (This is definitely before the grim-and-gritty Batman of the Eighties). Instead, the guy just runs away. Batman surmises that whatever the guy really wanted, he couldn't get it out of his mouth.

Yeah, that's going to become a problem later on.

You see, a couple of pages later the purple-hooded guy from the splash page shows up, and he's strangling a ventriloquist's dummy. Batman punches this "madman" (kind of judgemental for a dummy-strangler) in the face -- revealing the red-headed stranger under the hood.

Mystery solved, right? Well, nope, the madman gets away after... throwing a stool. Yeah, not Batman's finest hour.

Don't worry, though, the plot thickens on the next page when Batman and the Inspector -- who have just nicknamed our dummy-strangler "The Wringer" -- get into the Batmobile and almost immediately nearly run down a cute little girl in a Shirley Temple-style dress and curls. They swerve just in time, saving her from being squished to death, only to have old Purple Robe jump out of the darkness, grab her, and toss her through the air to her doom.

Whoops.

Well, again, don't worry. It turns out she's another doll, only a more life-like one this time. There's a chase, and a fight, and the Wringer once again gets away.

The action take a break here, as the Inspector and Bruce Wayne visit the Gotham Bicentennial Expo, which Bruce mentions is full of animatronic recreations of the Founding Fathers and related Bicentennial figures...

...including Patrick Henry, whom the Wringer suddenly shows up to gruesomely strangle!

I won't bore you too much with the rest of the story. It turns out that the Wringer wasn't really a murderer. He was just a murderer in the making, and he was strangling increasingly lifelike dolls so someone would stop him before he actually fulfilled his desire of putting his hands around a real person's neck. That's why he showed up blubbering in the first place, hoping to reveal his penchant for strangulation, but he just couldn't get the words out at the time. Batman figures all of this out and also deduces the would-be killer's real name through some detective work that doesn't exactly put him in the intellectual realm of Sherlock Holmes. I mean, seriously, here's Batman's dialogue in the great reveal moment: "The dummy was made of Douglas fir, so I theorized his first name might well be Douglas!"

That's not exactly Great Detective thinking, folks.

I kid, but this isn't exactly a bad comic book. It's a nice, bloodless crime story that uses the Bicentennial as a timely part of the plot. It's hardly a classic, but it's a decent little read courtesy of artist Ernie Chan and writer David V. Reed, who also scripted the Bicentennial-themed Batman 273 a few months earlier.

All told, Batman 278 is a fun piece of comics history that has never been reprinted. I'm glad to have unearthed it, but somehow I doubt I'll ever bother to read it again.

Next up: who knows? I've got a few dozen more Bicentennial-themed comics piled up, waiting to be explored. Come back next time for another dip back into 1976!

Remembering the Buy-Centennial

There was a dark side to the American Bicentennial: American capitalism.

The over-commercialization of the Bicentennial started long before 1976. As early as September 1974 people were already starting to call it the "Buy-centennial," with many products designed to part a fool from his money with maximum efficiency. Commemorative cars? Check. Special coins? Check. Red, white and blue lawn chairs? Check. Useless parchment certificates proclaiming your patriotism? Check.

Literally, send a check and all of this could have been yours.

The commerce was everywhere. SeaWorld renamed one of its killer whales "Yankee Doodle." Companies marketed toilet seats with eagles underneath the lids. George Washington and other Revolutionary icons were painted onto just about any piece of crap you could imagine.

There were even awards to celebrate the "most tasteless exploitation" of the Bicentennial, with "winners" such as "Paul Revere" ice cream and red-white-and-blue funeral caskets. I'm sure that last one was some sort of violation of the Flag Code.

And it wasn't just these Bicentennial-themed products. Almost every retailer also got into the act, with special "Spirit of 76" sales starting in January and running rampant as Independence Day approached. 

What does all of this have to do with comics? Well, a) a few cartoonists made fun of this (sometimes in comic books, which we'll get to later in this blog); and b) quite a few cartoonists got hired to draw some of the awful ads hawking the buy-centennial, sometimes directly, sometimes through clip art sent to retailers all over the country. So in terms of this blog, it all totally applies.

Here's one good editorial cartoon about the Buy-Centennial, followed by just a fraction of the really awful ads that I've uncovered so far during my research:

An editorial and cartoon from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune dated September 22, 1974. The cartoon is simply signed "Smith," but I hope to unearth his whole name.

A lot of stories ran prices like this during the Bicentennial.

Existing mascots often found themselves wearing tri-corner hats and waving flags.

Not a cartoon, but this exact same clip art of sexy Uncle Sam shows up in newspapers all over the country.

Here's that same model in an ad for "Buy-sale-tennial Specials." Sheesh.

The British are coming...to watch HBO!

Follow the troops to Beth's Kitchen. Man, this one's offensive.

Ouch. That's some awful artwork.

This one is actually kind of cute.

Not the greatest drawing, but...

...it sure got used a lot. For a lot of different things. All over the country.

Another mascot embraces the day.

A sexy minuteman, er, maid, sells cars. This photo was used by companies all over the nation. Because sex.

Our founding fathers' best quotes turned into ads for various companies. This same spread shows up in regional papers all over the country selling different stuff for each town.

200th birthday, save $200. This clip art of a town crier show up all over the place. I love the awful paste-up job on the text here.

Another mascot dons the hat and picks up a flag.

So many companies did this. "America is 200, and we're 50, so it's exactly the same thing!"

Is pointing a gun at your customers ever a good idea?

Local businesses often ran photos or caricatures of their salespeople in their ads, but rarely like this.

I don't even know what this mascot is supposed to be.

What's funny about all of this is that a lot of the people who set out to exploit the Bicentennial actually ended up losing their shirts. Come July 5, 1976, whatever Bicentennial-branded products they didn't sell became instantly worthless. One guy in Utah bought 7,200 Bicentennial chains and medallions. By the end of 1976 he had about 7,120 left that he couldn't even give away. Our nation's landfills must all have a layer of red, white and blue crap from around this time for any hardy archeologists willing to dig deep and explore.

Of course, none of this is much different from the aisles of made-in-China crap we see in every store every year come July 4th. Right now I can go to my local grocery store, drug store or Wal-Mart to buy poorly made flag t-shirts, flag plastic plates, patriotic disposable forks, cups with bald eagles on the side, and maybe -- if you look hard enough -- an actual flag or two buried amidst the cheap junk we used to "celebrate" Independence Day. That's another reason why I'm doing this blog -- because not much has changed since 1976. And it probably never will.

PS -- I have quite a few more of these bad ads, so expect a sequel to this post in the near future!

Bicentennial Believe it or Not!

I always loved the Ripley's Believe it or Not comic strip growing up, an admiration that grew even stronger when the TV show hosted by Jack Palance premiered in 1982. That show set the stage for a lot of my personal interests through the years, so I still look back at it fondly (although I'm sure I would cringe if I tried to re-watch any of those episodes today).

How does all of this tie into the Bicentennial? Well, the Ripley's comic strip contained all sorts of Revolutionary War-type facts throughout 1976. The strip (drawn at the time by Paul and Walter Frehm) didn't take a very sensational approach to any of this material, but neither did it get as reverential as many other strips of the day.

Here are a couple of sample entries. I'll dig up more of these in the future, but for now these represent the tone pretty well:

January 1, 1976

July 4, 1976

July 5, 1976

Side note: I remember taking my very first cartooning class in 1985 or so from an artist named Frank Mack, whom, I recall, said he once worked on the Ripley's strip, either as the main artist or an assistant. There's precious little about Mr. Mack online or in any of the newspaper archives to which I have access. If anyone has any information to share about him, I would be eager to hear it.