Sunday, March 7, 2010

Sunday Funnies

Tiger by Bud Blake was a really fine kid strip that ran for years and years (maybe it still does, though I haven't seen it in quite some time). It was kind of a throwback to the great kid strips of the thirties like Reg'lar Fellers and Skippy (though perhaps more suburban in setting).

The main characters were Tiger, with the baseball cap generally hiding his eyes; Punkinhead, Tiger's annoying little brother; Hugo, Tiger's chubby best friend; and Stripe the dog.

If not exactly a classic, Tiger was always good for a laugh, and Blake's style was very fluid and conducive to depicting children in motion. I'm not sure that kids are ever shown today as so unselfconscious as they were in this strip , which in some ways reminds me of the old Our Gang movie comedies too. Maybe that speaks to a broader loss of innocence in relation to childhood across the culture, which would be a truly sad thing if true.

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