Sunday Funnies

Here's something a little different: instead of celebrating a particular strip this week, I'm posting three complete daily comics pages from the Los Angeles Times circa 1959 (the year I was born).

If you click on the images, you ought to open a large enough version of the page to navigate around and read the various strips. Some of the highlights include Ferd'nand (a classic pantomime strip), Abbie an' Slats (drawn by the brilliant Raeburn Van Buren), Rick O'Shay (maybe the best western strip of all time by Stan Lynde), Frank King's Gasoline Alley, as well as several soap operas like Mary Worth.

You can tell that, back then, the strip artists had a bit more room (this was a true broadsheet paper), and filled in their panels with a lot more detail than we're used to seeing today. When I was growing up, most of these strips were still around, and I remember reading many of them over the years in the Buffalo papers. I wish I could find a comparable full Sunday color section to post; I'll keep looking.