That outfit almost makes the calendar redundant, doesn't it? "Well, there's no
Laff-A-Lympics around, so, going by that young lady's mode of dress, it must be the Sixties!"*
Anyway, sorry for the illness-caused outage, and thank you for your kind wishes yesteday. Hopefully things will be back to normal here shortly. Or whatever passes for normal.
* Or the 2000s in the hipster part of town.
Sorry, gang. The End of Civilization, previously planned for today, has been postponed.
I hope everyone has a nice Thanksgiving, where applicable. Otherwise, have a good Thursday.
...that the Laff-A-Lympics will be remembered as one of history's cultural touchstones:
from Laff-A-Lympics #11 (January 1979)
by Mark Evanier, Tony Strobl, Roman Arambula & Scott Shaw
In the comments for
yesterday's post, both
Tim and
John comment on the "intense" adventure-oriented nature of the Richie Rich comic I presented. I've always thought this kind of Richie Rich comic, as common as it was, seemed a bit...peculiar, myself, contrasting the exceedingly cartoony nature of Richie with drama, action, and intrigue. Archie
did it, too on occasion. I suppose ultimately it's no more ridiculous than, say, Uncle Scrooge McDuck going on world-spanning and sometimes life-threatening adventures (though there are, I imagine, several reasons why Scrooge's adventures feel less out of character than they do for Richie or Archie...perhaps a topic for another day).
I've presented these panels before, about five years ago, but this remains my favorite cognitively dissonant bit from one of the "adventure" Richie Rich comics...in this case
Richie Rich Diamonds #56, where Richie is stranded in a foreign country and faces off against...um, the Vietcong, maybe?
Here's another Harvey book I came across with a similarly out-of-character presentation:
Okay, not so much in the cover image but in the promises made in the blurbs: "shiver with fear..shake with laughter." C'mon, it's Casper...how much shivering in fear are we seriously expecting, here? (And the "shake with laughter" part...well, your mileage will vary, I guess.)
That's about as scary as it gets. But it's not as if we were realistically expecting "OH MY GOD! It's Baby Huey...but where's his
head!? AAAAIIIIEEEE!!!" I'd totally read that, of course, but alas, our actual Harvey scares are more gentle and friendly in nature.
Seriously, you think you'd want to double-check the latch on your case if you're going to pull a stunt like this:
Richie Rich Gems #1 (September 1974)
