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Those of you with long memories or are simply stalking me may remember when I wondered, when it came for this series of Bloom County strips to be reprinted in the current Complete Bloom County hardcovers from IDW, if the original versions of the strips would make the cut, or the edited-to-satisfy-busybodies versions would prevail.
I am pleased to say that the original “Dreck” appears in Volume 4 of the Complete Bloom Country in all its glory:
Unfortunately, there is a minor technical glitch with one of the non-Dreck Sunday strips in the book…which, it turns out, is the strip they used on the back cover. Here is the detail from the panel which omits part of the gag song title “Let’s Roll Over Lionel Ritchie With A Tank” –
When I first saw this, I thought briefly that maybe, just maybe, a lawyer suggested against running that title on the cover, resulting in some…odd editing. But the same glitch appears on the strip inside, and the running-over-Ritchie gag is used again in another strip. So, who knows…just a minor screw-up, it looks like, hopefully fixed in future reprintings. But don’t let that stop you from enjoying this latest volume in this excellent and oh-so-welcome series. And besides, all the
true Bloom County fans pretty much know that Lionel Ritchie gag by heart anyway.
• • •
In other news…yes, I know what happens at the end of this week’s
Brightest Day #23. I’ll talk about it later this week, or maybe early next, after everyone’s had a chance to read it. I should note that sending me links to that one comics news site about it, either via email or through my comments, won’t do much good, since any messages containing links to that site are automatically spam-filtered. I do appreciate that you all thought of me when hearing the news, though, so thank you.
Also, in Write More Good news, here’s what Neil Gaiman had to say about it. And in case you were wondering: Fake AP Stylebook: The True Story. And if that’s not enough: here I am enjoying the fruits of my labor (Twitpic version if you can’t access the Facebook page).
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic strip, 8-12-1992, by Dan Berger & M. Kelleher,
as reprinted in Comics Revue #80
Not quite at
Morrison’s Animal Man / “I can see you!” levels of “we’re all just characters in funnybooks” awareness, but still a somewhat amusing and unexpected (if certainly not
intentionally critical) bit of self-commentary on the “final battle” cliché.
…when this happened:
I remember reading this particular sequence when it was new, and even as a kid it struck me as a bit odd. Yes, in a strip where Schroeder knocks out Beethoven on his toy piano and Snoopy keeps a van Gogh (later, after the fire, an Andrew Wyeth) painting in his doghouse, it’s Helicopter Snoopy that most greatly impacted my willing suspension of disbelief. “How…how does that even work?” young Mike wonders. “Does his entire scalp spin around? Does each ear spin freely in its ‘socket?’ How is Woodstock piloting him, exactly?”
I worried about weird things as a kid.
Here’s the full strip that panel is from, embedded here courtesy the official site:
As you may have gathered, I’m currently reading the recently-released
Complete Peanuts 1977-1978 hardcover from Fantagraphics, which included the above strip. Now, the sequence of strips from later in the book that this next image comes from is
not a story I recall, because I’m pretty sure I would have remembered this character design of the fellow on the left:
That’s a little odd looking for a Schulz design, though perhaps that’s more attributable to the unfamiliar strangeness of any kid character in
Peanuts that isn’t part of the regular cast. That fella probably isn’t any more bizarre than, say, Pig-Pen. But mostly I’m just pointing him out because it took me a moment to parse out the character’s face…I had a hard time visualizing that it was his ear on the left there, and his nose on the right. It just looked like a cylindrical blob resting between the turtleneck and the hat. (
Link to the full strip.)
Now this panel is awesome:
Yeah, it’s an easy gag, but it’s a perfect gag for the circumstance. And, it’s in the
first panel of the strip. I’m sure it would have served just fine as the closing punchline in a strip that wasn’t
Peanuts. (
Link to full strip.)
For some good Peanuts commentary, may I recommend Roasted Peanuts, a weblog devoted to discussing the strips.
Big Chief Wahoo #7 (Winter 1943/44?)
Man, early comic books were always sticking it to our Native American friends. Though, given how comics also treated Blacks and Asians, I suppose no one should be terribly surprised. At least in this instance Big Chief Wahoo was the star of the strip, but was still saddled with stereotypical Indian dialogue (“ugh” and “how” and “-um”s).
Lots more information on this remarkably non-politically correct character can be found at the excellent Toonopedia. This comic book is actually a collection of reprints of a comic strip, and as much as I like old strips, I am woefully uninformed regarding them. Therefore, it comes as a surprise to learn in that Toonopedia article that the Big Chief Wahoo strip, which was originally The Great Gusto, eventually became Steve Roper and Mike Nomad!
And, just for the heck of it, here are some Big Chief Wahoo gum packages.
