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.

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!

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.

How Dennis the Menace celebrated the Bicentennial

Few comic strips in 1976 took the Bicentennial as seriously (or as humorously) as "Dennis the Menace."

Hank Ketcham and his talented crew of cartoonists started their Bicentennial celebrations a week early, on June 27, 1976, with this strip where Dennis and Joey play Revolution:

That followed with several days in which the cast traveled back in time to 1776 and witnessed a few key events during the Revolutionary War. (Excuse the bad scans. Microfiche isn't always the best resource for recapturing old artwork. It took me looking through several different papers just to locate these.)

The whole cast then came together again on Sunday, July 4, for a Yankee Doodle parade, which even mean ol' Mister Wilson couldn't criticize:

That's pretty much all of the Bicentennial in the "Dennis the Menace" comic strip, but there's more Dennis to come. During the 1970s Dennis was also the star of several different comic books, and Bicentennial themes abounded in those issues. Expect a look at them in the weeks ahead.

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.

A Bicentennial Obscurity: "200 Years Ago Today"

My journey to uncover the comic books and comic strips of the Bicentennial has taken me down some odd paths since the last time I posted here. Each bit of research unveils something new, something interesting, and something that required a lot more exploration.

Here's one such oddity. For a couple of years, ranging through most of 1975 and 1976, the Field Syndicate distributed a tiny comics panel called "200 Years Ago Today: A Bicentennial Calendar" to newspapers around the country. This single-panel cartoon contained a fairly simple drawing and a few words of text about what happened on that date two centuries earlier, often to comedic effect. Each panel was the width of a newspaper column, allowing editors to place it wherever they wanted, pretty much as filler, often on the editorial pages, but just as often scattered in random locations throughout the paper.

I've found a few dozen examples of this strip, dating as early as June1975 and running as late as October 1976. Oddly enough, I have yet to find the cartoon for July 4, 1976, even in any of the papers that ran it.

There are no credits on any of these strips, but Allan Holtz, who runs the excellent website Stripper's Guide, tells me "the art is almost certainly by Ben Templeton." Templeton not only created one of my all-time favorite comic strips. "Motley's Crew," he also co-created another Bicentennial comic strip called "Yankee Doodles." Holtz wrote about "Yankee Doodles" here, and I'll be digging into it in the coming months. "I guess Ben was getting some extra use out of all his period drawings by signing on to a second feature," Holtz told me.

I haven't been able to track down contact information for Templeton to verify any of this, but I did reach out to King Features Syndicate, which absorbed the Field syndicate a few decades ago. The reply, from director of publicity Claudia Smith, revealed little: "I checked with our Archivist and, unfortunately, we are not able to help very much. When we absorbed NAS in the 1980s, not all the old Field features were included, and no files were saved." They couldn't even verify who owned the copyright on "200 Years Ago Today."

It seems unlikely that this material will ever enjoy a decent reprint effort, so here are many of the examples of this Bicentennial obscurity that I have been able to find so far. Enjoy!

How Dick Tracy Celebrated the Bicentennial

Let's step away from comic books this week and take our first dip into the world of Bicentennial comic strips.

A lot of daily and weekly comics touched upon the Bicentennial during July of 1976 -- some to better effect than others. A few ran Bicentennial gags all week. Others concentrated their efforts to the full-color Sunday page (or the previous Saturday if they didn't have Sunday strips). Most of these mentions came from daily gag strips, which probably had it easier than it the last few adventure strips, which would have had to shoehorn a Bicentennial mention into an ongoing narrative.

Dick Tracy managed to avoid that conundrum on Sunday, July 4. There's no mention of the Bicentennial in the main story, but creator Chester Gould used his popular "Crimestoppers Textbook" feature (which always ran as the last panel on the Sunday strip) to get timely. I won't bother showing you the whole strip, but here are the last few panels:

Wait, let me make that "Crimestoppers" panel a bit easier on your eyes and neck:

These are some pretty bad black-and-white scans from an online newspaper archive, but you get the picture.

I don't think this strip has ever been reprinted. IDW has been running a "Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy" series for several years now, but that series won't probably won't hit 1976 until around the end of this decade. Until then, online archives and comics clippings from eBay will probably have to do.

More Bicentennial comics next week!

More Bicentennial Comics Revealed!

My initial research into Bicentennial comics was pretty thorough, but I know that quite a few titles were likely to appear. And so they have. A few folks have kindly pointed out some additions, while other issues revealed themselves through the advanced search functions at mycomicshop.com and the Grand Comics Database. Will there be more? Oh, I'm quite sure that there will, but for now, here are the latest additions to my list:

One of several underground comix covering American history that year.

These three Archie's T.V. Laugh-Out issues join one other that was already on my list. Oddly enough, issue 41 doesn't appear to have any Bicentennial content. That might bear investigation.

This came out in 1977 but covered the editorial cartoons published in 1976. I look forward to reading this. I'm sure it will reveal a lot about what was going on in this country that year.

One more for my crossover underground comix collection.

From what I can tell, this series reprinted current comic strips. I look forward into tracking this down to see what's inside.

Will Eisner!

Is this a Bicentennial issue or is Sabrina just wearing a red-white-and-blue bikini top? Only further research will tell.

I never even heard of this title. 

It's going to take me quite a while to track down all of these books and issues, but that's half the fun of this whole project! If you know of any more that I'm missing, please feel free to let me know!