Comics Queen

She’s really just an old lady pushing 100. But Blondie is still Scranton’s darling

Now in her 76th year of publication, Blondie was voted the top comic strip among the 36 daily and Sunday comics carried in The Times-Tribune and Sunday Times.

It’s an on-going affair. Blondie came in second in a 1991 vote of Times readers, just behind Peanuts. But our love for the Prohibition-era flapper flowered, and she beat Peanuts this time by a 10 percent margin, gaining 365 votes to 323.

Times-Tribune readers were asked to vote for their five favorite comics and for their five least-favorite comics. Blondie amassed the most votes among the 909 who cast ballots for their five favorite strips, but she also tied with Peanuts for fewest negative votes. Only 24 readers out of the 896 who cast negative ballots included her among their five least favorites.

Alas, poor old Mary Worth did not fare so well. She was dead last among favorites, getting only 11 votes. On the ballot for least-favorite comic, she ranked third with 289 votes from readers casting negative ballots. In a combined ranking of favorite and least-favorite comics, she was 36th of 36, suggesting it’s time to retire. Goodbye, Mary.

Hello, Blondie!

Blondie was an unmarried flapper in her early 20s when she debuted in Chic Young’s comic strip in 1930, and she has hardly aged.

“Yeah, Blondie is probably pushing 100, but doesn’t she look great?” says Dean Young, son of the creator and the driving force behind the modern Blondie. “No plastic surgery, no nothing,” he told The Times-Tribune from his home in Clearwater, Fla., where he drafts the story lines for the strips that are now drawn by head artist Jim Marshall of Binghamton, N.Y.

Blond ambition

Blondie is the world’s most popular comic, appearing in more than 2,300 newspapers in 55 countries and in 35 languages. An estimated 280 million people read Blondie every day.

A Blondie radio show in the 1930s starred Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake, who went on to make 28 Blondie movies between 1938 and 1950. Blondie also was a TV series in 1957 and again in 1968.

Blondie began as Blondie Boopadoop, “this gorgeous flapper who had a ton of boyfriends ... one of whom was Dagwood Bumstead,” Dean Young recounted in a 75th-anniversary commemorative. “Dagwood, in those days, was the bumbling, playboy son of billionaire railroad tycoon J. Bolling Bumstead.”

Blondie and Dagwood fell in love and were married on the comic pages on Feb. 17, 1933.

The marriage, which, of course, has endured, did not sit well with J. Bolling Bumstead, whose upper-crust sensibilities were offended by a working-class girl like Blondie, a lowly secretary. Dagwood went on a hunger strike until J. Bolling rancorously acknowledged the relationship. But the tycoon never approved of the marriage.

Dagwood was disinherited. Once an earnest, if inept, polo-playing playboy, Dagwood had to get a job — in the middle of the Depression yet. Hello, Mr. Dithers. That’s Julius Caesar Dithers, tyrannical boss of the J.C. Dithers Construction Co., who for almost three-quarters of a century has been threatening to fire Dagwood for chronic tardiness, sleeping on the job and various other workplace transgressions.

Living on love

Blondie and Dagwood settled down to a modest lifestyle that included son Alexander, daughter Cookie and Daisy the dog. “They became concerned with real life,” Dean Young recounted, “Making ends meet, raising a family, eating, and sleeping. And these four same topics are the primary ingredients of the strip to this very day.”

Though the themes of the comic strip have not changed, Blondie and Dagwood have kept up with the times. Dean Young says Blondie has changed her hairstyle several times (though the transition from the tightly permed curls of the 1930s to today’s wavy curls doesn’t look all that different), and she continues to enjoy a Barbie-like figure.

“Blondie has maintained her enviable waistline by running back and forth from the kitchen to the dining room with food to satisfy Dagwood’s insatiable appetite,” Dean Young quips.

Meantime, Dagwood’s enormous cowlicks remain totally out of control. “Would Jay Leno have plastic surgery done on his chin?” Dean Young playfully asks. “Nope! When something makes you that unique, it’s a good idea to stay that way.”

In 1991, Blondie and her neighbor Tootsie Woodley started a catering business — appropriate, given Dagwood’s appetite for foot-high sandwiches. Dean Young concedes that Dagwood probably is eating into Blondie’s profits from the catering business. Possibly to help things out he announced May 10 that he was starting a “Dagwood’s Sandwich Shoppes” chain of restaurants specializing in huge sandwiches. The first Dagwood’s will be in Clearwater.

Now 66, Dean Young was years from the delivery room when Blondie Boopadoop walked onto the comic pages on Sept. 8, 1930. But Dean Young was destined to be the Bumsteads’ guardian and champion. He worked with his father on the comic strip for almost 10 years and took over as the creative force behind the strip when Chic Young died in 1973. “My dad was a genius,” Dean Young says. “He dropped off this fabulous menagerie of characters. How could I go wrong?”

Times-Tribune readers apparently agree.


©The Times-Tribune 2006
05/28/2006
BY LAWRENCE K. BEAUPRE
TIMES-TRIBUNE MANAGING EDITOR