Hello All,
We are hurtling forward at the speed of a Lin-sonic bank shot toward the finals of our March Madness of vintage comics. The winner of last week’s battle between DENNIS THE MENACE and HI & LOIS is…drumroll please…HI & LOIS with 60 percent of the votes!
This week’s contenders are THIMBLE THEATRE and JUDGE PARKER, two of our landslide winners in previous rounds of VINTAGE MADNESS. THIMBLE THEATRE is, of course, the home of Popeye the Sailorman. JUDGE PARKER has been the comics’ stalwart defender of justice for many decades (60 years come this November), and as we were discussing in a previous post, one of the few continuities still running today.
The final round (I promise) will be next week. Keep voting and sending me your kudos and brickbats, too. The more participation, the better.
In closing, I want to share two cartoons to mark the 40th anniversary of FUNKY WINKERBEAN’S debut. Tom Batiuk’s strip, in those early years, was right on the mark for high schoolers, yours truly included.
First Funky Winkerbean Funnies
The daily debut of 27 March 1972 and Sunday of 3 April 1972.
It was just hip enough for cool-conscious teenagers and innocent enough for family-minded newspaper editors. It had a lot of true-to-life humor, instead of some other similar themed strips around at the time like PONYTAIL or ETTA KETT, that were still lost in a world gone by, with jalopies, crew cuts and malt shops. Batiuk’s Westview High had incompetent teachers, unmotivated students, and incomprehensible rules. In other words, it was MY school, and everyone could relate to it, making it the favorite. Happy Birthday, Funky!
Yours truly,
The Archivist
Funky and Livinia were almost identical! Sort of like the animated “Watership Down” where you couldn’t tell one rabbit from another.
The archivist teasers us with yet another reminder of what DailyInk COULD be offering in its Vintage collection: Funky Winkerbean from the beginning. How awesome would that be?!!
It’s a kick to see how an artist evolves, as I discovered when I did design and production on NBM’s WASH TUBBS & CAPTAIN EASY series. The first book in the series is odd, as the young Roy Crane seemed unable to get a handle on how to write or draw or create characters. (All the early strips were gag-a-day.)
Who does the color on the Sunday FUNKYs?
There’s a strange glitch where individual words are being anagrammatically rearranged in several messages.
I’ve never seen anything like this before.
Of course, it’s impossible to come up with the perfect competition in any arena. But this Vintage Madness thing suffers from the fact that strips still being published have an overwhelming advantage over those that haven’t run for many years. If you do this again, it oufght to be active versus active, extinct versus extinct.
Hey! How about archival Steve Roper strips?
Tastefully yours,
Tom Fitzmorris
Gotta love Windows. They purposefully left out the ciaibplaty to burn ISO’s. Anyway, I prefer . It’s a small, well, plug-in, I guess. Download an ISO, insert a blank disc to your burner, and right click on the ISO. isorecorder adds a menu option to the right-click interface.