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 Hi and Lois.
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 8 is now opened (once opened, the door will feature an image from the featured comic strip)...
WHAT IS HI AND LOIS?
In the late 1940s, after returning from service in World War II, Mort Walker started submitting one-off gag panels to the Saturday Evening Post featuring a sort of slacker college student (or whatever people in 1948 called slackers back then). His editor, John Bailey, liked the pieces enough that he suggested that Walker try to do a multi-panel daily comic strip featuring the college character, now dubbed Spider. The "real" money back then was in multi-panel strips, but the Saturday Evening Post did not ultimately pick up the Spider comic strip. Walker then began to pitch it to other syndicates, and eventually, King Features Syndicate bought the strip (I don't actually know how many syndicates he pitched it to. For all I know, King was the first one he tried). However, the syndicate had another feature that had a recurring character called "Spider," so it asked Walker to come up with a new name.
Out went "Spider" and in came "Beetle," paired with the last name of his Saturday Evening Post editor, and so Beetle Bailey was born. Initially, Beetle Bailey was a college student when the strip debuted in 1950, but in 1951, Beetle dropped out of school and enlisted in the army and he's been there ever since. In any event, in those early strips, we also met Beetle's sister, Lois, and her husband, Hi (High and Low, get it?). Beetle Bailey was popular enough that Walker enlisted artist Dik Browne to launch a spinoff series spotlighting Hi and Lois, and that strip launched in 1954.
Hi and Lois is about the everyday amusements that go on in a suburban family, with sales manager Hi (short for Hiram) and Lois (who eventually became a real estate agent, but she was "just" a housewife for decades) and their four children, oldest son, Chip (who is very similar in style to Beetle Bailey), middle child twins, Dot and Ditto, and Trixie, the baby of the family.
Over the course of the first decade or so of the strip, Chip and the twins have all aged, with Chip going from eight years old to being a high school student, and the twins going from four year olds to, like, I dunno, nine? Maybe ten? Amusingly enough, though, Trixie has remained a baby throughout it all. Dik Browne passed away in 1989 and his son, Robert "Chance" Browne, took over art duties on the strip. Mort Walker died in 2018, and his sons Greg and Brian Walker currently write the strip (they took over writing the strip years before Walker passed away).
HOW HAS HI AND LOIS CELEBRATED CHRISTMAS?
As you might have gathered by now, a number of comic strips have treated their Sunday strip differently from their daily strip, but GENERALLY speaking, that is more of an issue for action strips than it is for gag strips. Most strips use distinct continuity for the Sunday strip (since some comics only appear in newspapers AS Sunday strips, and not dailies), but they generally also keep the approach the same. In other words, if your daily strip stars Characters X, Y and Z, the Sunday strip will also star Characters, Y and Z. Walker and Browne, on the other hand, mixed things up a bit, and the Sunday strips tended to specifically spotlight Trixie more than the other characters, as her cute baby approach was really well received by audiences.
Our first Christmas strip is from 1966, and it is a classic one where we see how babies like Trixie almost enjoy unwrapping presents more than they enjoy playing with the actual presents themselves!
Adorable.
Click here to enlarge the image.
Brian Walker often does commentary about Hi and Lois comics on the King Features website, and here's what he had to say about this 1999 Christmas strip...
This Hi and Lois Sunday page from 1999 was inspired by my own inability to remember the lyrics to familiar Christmas carols. The competition between the twins is a fertile source for gag ideas. Dot is smart and precious and Ditto is mischievous and rebellious. They are opposite personalities in so many ways but sometimes they work together. The winter scene in the drop panel at the top of the page is a particularly outstanding example of Chance Browne’s artistry. The snow covered Flagston family home looks cozy and warm inside and the church steeple and bare tree limbs in the background help to establish the cold nighttime setting. Chance can work magic with pencil, pen and ink.
Click here to enlarge the image.
Finally, we round things out with another Trixie-centric strip, this time from.2007..
Very cute.
Click here to enlarge the image.
It's definitely interesting to see how gentle the Sunday strips are. The dailies tend to have a BIT more bit to them, like this one from the early 1990s (early in Chance Browne's tenure on the strip) making a pretty sharp joke about the rise in Christmas gift deliveries...
