80 Wonderful Years of Crashing into the Postman

It's anniversary time, folks! I want to wish a happy 80th birthday to Blondie!



NO NO NO NO NO. Start again.



It's anniversary time, folks! I want to wish a happy 80th birthday to Blondie!



That's right...eighty years ago today, August 8, 1930, the comic strip Blondie, created by Chic Young, debuted! That's eight decades of giant sandwiches, sleeping on the couch, getting beaten up by Mr. Dithers, and being interrupted in the bathtub! But all that came a little later: Blondie originally started as a comedy/romance strip in which rich boy Dagwood Bumstead woos chorus girl Blondie Boopadoop, under his father's threat of being disinherited if he goes through with the wedding.



They do, he does, and that wedding guest is wrong...they're off on the road to decades of laughs and adventure.



Over the years, in addition to the daily and Sunday strip (now written by Chic Young's son Dean and drawn by Dean Marshall), Blondie, Dagwood, Baby Dumpling aka Alexander, Cookie, and faithful dog Daisy have been featured not only in the comic but as toys, books, dolls, sandwich restaurants, movies...



...television...



...cartoons...



...and even advertisements!



And of course...comic books. Here's some covers from only a few of the Blondie-related comic books:

If you're a fan of the strip, you'll like the comic books as well: comedy with good art (by the talented Paul Fung Jr.), funny scripts, sharp timing and longer plots. But the situations hapless Mister B gets into aren't completely unfamiliar:



There are of course the familiar giant sandwiches:



...and mishaps so...wide...that you wouldn't see them in the daily comic strip:



Here's one of my favorites—the final three pages of a story in which Dagwood and neighbor Herb Woodley belabor each other with increasingly Rube Goldbergian mayhem. Looks like comic artist Paul Fung's having a ball with this story, and so am I:





Charlton's Blondie #200 (October 1972) celebrated the 40th (more or less) wedding anniversary of Mister and Missus B., with modern-day reminiscence and flashbacks to the couple's most memorable moments.



The framing sequences are drawn in the comic's modern style:



...while Paul Fung deftly imitates the look of the strip from yesteryear in the flashbacks.



Happy 80th, Blondie and Dagwood! And may you have many, many more. The world definitely needs more of this: