Blondie Current Events

New Blondie Book Hits the Shelves

noreply@blogger.com (ICE) — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 20:19:00 +0000

Blondie: The Bumstead Family History

Full-Color Illustrated, Hardcover

For more than 75 years Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead have been one of America's favorite couples. Through war and peace, through boom and bust, through sexual revolution and social upheaval, Blondie has become the most widely read comic strip in syndication-in 35 languages and in 47 countries.

It's all here in this definitive book for the Blondie fan: Blondie and Dagwood, their children Alexander and Cookie, their neighbors Herb and Tootsie Woodley, the family dog Daisy, Dagwood's boss Mr. Dithers, the mailman Mr. Beasley, and the neighborhood kid Elmo Tuttle. The book includes early history; Dagwood at work, Blondie's starting her catering business, favorite cartoon strips, and the story of Chic and Dean Young, the creators of Blondie.

Blondie appears in over 2,000 newspapers in the U.S. and is consistently among the five most popular newspaper comics in readership polls.
This is the definitive Blondie book, full-color and illustrated.
An original Blondie book has not appeared in more than 25 years.

Buy Online @

Comics Queen

noreply@blogger.com (ICE) — Sun, 28 May 2006 15:43:00 +0000

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

Blondie's 75 Year Aniversary

noreply@blogger.com (ICE) — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 02:36:00 +0000

(AP) Hard to believe it's been almost 75 years since ditzy flapper Blondie Boopadoop fell for bumbling Dagwood Bumstead in a love match made in the funny papers.

In those days, Dagwood was a rich playboy whose snooty parents greatly disapproved of the union. When he and Blondie married in 1933, the J. Boling Bumsteads disinherited their son, relegating him to a modest suburban life of raising kids, carpooling, battling blowhard boss Mr. Dithers and making really big sandwiches.

Now one of the most famous married couples in the world in one of the most widely read strips in comics history, Blondie and Dagwood are celebrating the milestone anniversary this summer in a running story line featuring cameos by their comics-page cohorts, whose creators also will pay tribute to "Blondie" by inviting the happy couple into their own panels.

Garfield, Beetle Bailey, Hagar the Horrible, baby Marvin, Dennis the Menace, Dilbert, the kid from "Zits" and others - a virtual who's who of the funnies - will drop in and out as the Bumsteads plan a huge party for an unspecified wedding anniversary to be celebrated in the Sunday comics Sept. 4. President Bush and wife Laura are also set to make an appearance.

Introduced by cartoonist Murat "Chic" Young on Sept. 8, 1930, "Blondie" is now written seven days a week by his son, Dean, who took over when his father died in 1973, and artist Denis Lebrun. Reaching about 250 million readers in more than 2,000 newspapers in 55 countries, "Blondie" ranks among the top five most popular strips in newspaper comics surveys year in and year out.

"It's survival of the funniest - it's like Darwinian evolution on the comics page," says "Hagar the Horrible" cartoonist Chris Browne. "It's such a funny strip. Humor really comes out of honesty, and there's a lot of honesty and lot of stuff we recognize in 'Blondie."'

The Bumsteads have been depicted on a U.S. postage stamp, featured in a Library of Congress exhibit and inspired movies and a TV series. An overstuffed sandwich is known in pop culture lexicon - as well as in Webster's dictionary - as a "Dagwood." "Blondie" is an American institution, translated into more than 30 languages.

"God bless my daddy," the jovial Young says in an interview in his Clearwater Beach studio. "He was the genius who created this wonderful menagerie of characters. A monkey could do my job with the characters I have to work with. He left me this cast of characters and this dominant gene."

Dean Young, 65, has shepherded the Bumsteads through myriad modern day travails and family upheavals, including Blondie going off to work in her own successful catering business, a plot twist that made international headlines in 1991.

Twice in 75 years, though, it looked as if "Blondie" could go the way of "Terry and Pirates" and "Krazy Kat" into comics oblivion. The first time, during the Depression when hard-luck Americans tired of the flapper comics predominate in the day, Chic
Young solved the problem by having Blondie and Dagwood marry and transition to a life of domesticity.

The second rough patch came in 1973 when Chic Young died of emphysema at age 73. Some 600 newspapers dropped the strip on that basis, despite Dean Young taking over after working alongside his dad for a decade. He rescued "Blondie" that time by modernizing the characters' situations and the Bumsteads' marriage, eventually getting back the papers he lost and adding 700 more.

Cartoon characters have been known to cameo in each other' strips from time to time, but nothing like what's happening in this summer's tribute. Browne notes that Hagar the Viking will have to travel 1,000 years through time to show up at the Bumstead's gala.
Garfield, of course, will be looking forward to the food.

"It's a way we get to pay homage to 'Blondie' and to Dean for their status," says "Garfield" cartoonist Jim Davis. "It also gives a nod to the comics as a community. These characters could all be neighbors. They look a little different, but we all look a little different, too."

Young attributes the strip's longevity to the quality of the art and the gags, but also to Blondie and Dagwood's strong bond over the years.

"You need to have lovable characters for people to like you," he says. "And I think a lot of that has to do with the love that Dagwood and Blondie have for each other in the comic strip. Look at all the dysfunction that's going on everywhere, and here's a man
and wife - they love each other and they've loved each other all these years.

"The passion continues undiminished. And hopefully it's funny, too."