Sunday Funnies

Back in the early sixties, Mort Walker (creator of Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois) launched a new strip with Jerry Dumas called Sam's Strip. The hook was that this new strip was a "metacomic" before that term was much in use-- that is, it commented on the nature of its own medium. This included guest appearances by characters from other classic and current strips, and lots of jokes about dingbats (look it up) and cartoon conventions of long standing. The sample posted above is the sequence published during International Comics Week (I don't believe there was ever a color Sunday version of the strip). If you click on it, you might have some fun trying to identify all the other characters who popped up during this celebration (click on the image to make it a bit bigger). If you like this little taste, you might be interested to know that a book reprinting the complete run of the strip came out last year.