It's our yearly Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar! This year, the theme is A Comic Strip Christmas! Each day will spotlight a notable comic strip, and at least three Christmas-themed comics from that strip. Today's comic is Blondie.
Every day until Christmas Eve, you can click on the current day's Advent Calendar post and it will show the Advent Calendar with the door for that given day opened, and you can see what the "treat" for that day will be! You can click here to see the previous Advent Calendar entries.
The drawing for this year's Advent Calendar, of Santa Claus giving out presents to comic strip kids (although instead of a present for Charlie Brown, his dog, Snoopy, gets a present instead), is by Nick Perks.
Day 15 is now opened (once opened, the door will feature an image from the featured comic strip)...
WHAT IS BLONDIE?
During this month, I've detailed a few different comic strips that started one way, and then went in a COMPLETELY different direction, from Wash Tubbs being replaced in his own comic strip by his bodyguard, Captain Easy, to Fritzi Ritz losing her comic strip to her own niece, Nancy to Thimble Theatre being taken over completely by what appeared to be a one-off sailor character named Popeye. Compared to those instances, the evolution of the Blondie comic strip doesn't seem like such a big deal, but Blondie almost amazes me more because the two basic leads of the series have remained the same through its 82-year-run, and yet the strip is COMPLETELY different than what it was when it launched in 1930.
In the aforementioned Nancy spotlight, I noted that the 1920s were big on comic strips starring flappers, as people really got a kick out of the concept of young women essentially doing whatever they could to flaunt authority (just, you know, in rather safe methods for the rest of society as a whole, like cutting their hair short, partying a lot, drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes and having casual sex). After the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the start of the Great Depression, however, people were less interested in seeing flapper stories, and yet, that's exactly what Chic Young decided to try out with a new syndicated series called Blondie.
Blondie followed the adventures of a flapper named Blondie Boopadoop. Young's theory was that if people were too depressed with sad economic news (and most of the other flapper comics had taken on a melodramatic feel), he would go 180 degrees the OTHER way, and have Blondie be an over-the-top comedic character (to the get the sense of the sort of stuff Young was doing, note that an earlier strip he did was called Dumb Dora). Balancing her in the series was her loving rich playboy boyfriend, Dagwood Bumstead. Dagwood was the straight man sucked into Blondie's absurd dilemmas (as Young parodied the melodramas of other strips).
Eventually, Young figured that he had hit a limit of soap opera-type stories to parody, so he had Blondie and Dagwood get married. His parents disowned him over the marriage to a "low class" woman like Blondie, and so the pair had to adjust to their new status in life, and just live a normal suburban life together. This, then, led to a total reconfiguration of the strip in terms of their personalities. Now that she was married, Blondie became, essentially, the head of the household, the calm voice of reason, while Dagwood was now the comic relief of the strip, prone to over-the-top situations at work and at home. Perhaps the most famous example of this over-the-top type of humor is Dagwood's famous giant stacked sandwiches that he would eat.
The strip mostly followed Dagwood's life, including his tense working relationship with his overbearing boss, Mr. Dithers, and his postman nemesis, Mr. Beasley, who Dagwood routinely collides with as he rushes to work. The Bumsteads had two children, Alexander and Cookie, and they were allowed to grow to teen years by the 1950s, but they're stuck at that age since then. So what was one a parody of flapper melodramas has long become a gentle gag-a-day look at suburban life (at least Blondie has always remained a stunning knockout in the strip). Chic Young wrote and drew the strip until he passed away in 1973. His son, Dean Young, took over, and still writes the strip to this day. He had worked with many artists over the years, with John Marshall being the current artist.
HOW HAS BLONDIE CELEBRATED CHRISTMAS?
Just to give you a sense of how different comic strips are nowadays as opposed to the past, look at this strip from Dagwood and Blondie's first Christmas together as a married couple in 1933. See how detailed and BIG the strip is?
Click here to enlarge the comic strip.
Now check out a modern strip, with Blondie asking Dagwood to fill-in for a Christmas tree in her designing eye...
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As noted, Dagwood's love of food is a recurring gag in the series, and in this strip, we see him turning his food desires into Christmas carols...
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I mentioned Mister Dithers, and we can see them in action here, as Dithers tries to answer "Elf on the Shelf," with a Dithers on...I dunno man...I write about comics, I don't come up with rhymes!
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As you can see, the humor is just gentle, basic stuff. You're not going to see much sharp jokes in a typical Blondie comic strip. It's more just based around the fact that we've known these characters for so long that they're sort of part of our families now. An example of how we know the strip so well is this clever (and rare) metafictional joke where there have been so many strips with Dagwood carrying a comical amount of boxes (typically from Blondie shopping) and his hair is drawn so weirdly, that his weird hair is the only way you can tell it is him behind the boxes! A weird joke, but a fun one!
Click here to enlarge the comic strip.
