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Howard Post is best known for his work on various Harvey Comics publications, most notably Casper the Friendly Ghost, as well as a couple series at DC Comics. His only syndicated feature, The Dropouts, lasted from 1968 to 1971, and was an interesting spin on an old cartoon premise. The two main leads get shipwrecked and stranded on an island, but it's hardly deserted. There is a whole society of people living there, who are called "natives" but who you could easily assume were also shipwrecked and just made the best of it.

Here we see one of the "natives," named Chugalug, celebrating the holidays. While Alf and Sandy aren't incorrect that the time for celebrating the new year has come, traditionally today would only be the seventh day of Christmas, and it doesn't end until the first week of January. Based on this, we can only surmise that either the natives of this island are very traditional Catholics, or that Chugalug is just living up to his name and drank too much alcohol.

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It's about time to wind down the Christmas season, and wind down the year, but of course people like to leave their Christmas decorations up for as long as possible. Sometimes they even leave them up all the way to the following Christmas. The best way to keep a live tree from drooping is to take a good slice off the bottom of the trunk before putting it in the water, add water regularly, and mix in whatever they call that Christmas tree food that all the stores seem to have these days. That's what I've heard at least. Horticulturists can feel free to correct me if they wish.

One thing that I haven't heard of, though, is using hairspray. I imagine that would hurt the tree more than help it. The needles and branches might not droop, but I don't think they would be alive any longer. Also, if Father has resorted to using hairspray, I don't think he's been taking proper care of the tree in the first place. Maybe he should let Penny be in charge of that next year.

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Unlike the last Flibbertys comic I posted, this time it's spelled correctly on the page. Similar to that comic, however, is the fact that the parents, at least the dad, seems to be acting much like the kids do after he opens his present. I think it would have been great if someone had also given him a pair of skis to go with his golf clubs. Is ski golfing a thing? It seems like someone must have tried it once.

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As you can probably gather from the dialogue in this strip, Big Sister and the boys found a lost puppy at Christmas and decided to keep him, but Father thinks it's best to return him to his owners. The idea that the puppy was actually a gift from Santa may make sense to a kid, but I'm not sure how the logistics would work. Santa having a bunch of toys and candy and whatnot in his giant, magic bag is fine, but I'm sure it would get weird as soon as he started stuffing live animals in there. It's a magic bag, sure, but I just don't think they would be comfortable. And would he have to feed them along the way? There are too many questions. So, for those who have kids, if you get them a pet for Christmas, avoid the questions and don't tell them it came from Santa (and realize that what you've actually done is buy yourself a pet for Christmas).

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Earlier this month I posted an Off The Record Sunday, noting that it was still a mystery to me why the Lambiek Comiclopedia listed the creator of the strip as Carl Kuhn, when I could find nothing about him drawing or writing the strip or even being a cartoonist.

The plot has thickened.

On December 23, Lambiek updated their page on Ed Reed, which is where it says Carl Kuhn created the strip, to say that Kuhn passed the strip to Reed in 1940. This is impossible, given that the strip I posted earlier in the month is from 1938 and has Reed's name on it. Since posting that strip, I had wanted to go back and find out for myself who really did start it, so I took today's strip as an opportunity to find out once and for all.

Allan Holtz in American Newspaper Comics lists the start date as November 19, 1934. So, I went to Newspapers.com, searched for Off the Record by Carl Kuhn on that date, and found nothing. I did the same search for Ed Reed, and found out two things: One, Ed Reed is credited for Off The Record on November 19 and Carl Kuhn is nowhere to be found, and two, Allan Holtz is wrong about the start date, because I found Off The Record running as far back as October 29 of that year. This means that both Holtz and Lambiek are wrong, and I still have no idea who this Carl Kuhn is. I guess I'd better contact Lambiek with my findings and see what they say.

Anyway, here's a Christmas comic strip that I thought was mildly funny.

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A reminder to always write your gags and draw your comics far ahead of deadline so you don't end up working on Christmas.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

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Here's another pre-Family Circus era Billy on Bil Keane's first syndicated comic strip, Channel Chuckles. I know the theme of the strip is television, but I think this one is kind of a stretch. Stockings are hung over the fireplace so that Santa will see them when he emerges from going down the chimney, so I'm not sure how he would miss them if they were hung in their proper place. Plus, while Santa is delivering all the toys, does he stop to watch TV as he eats his cookies with milk? If he's going to get to all the children around the world, I'm not sure how he has time for that. Elf magic allows for it, I guess.

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The Flibbertys (misspelled here as "The Fibbertys") was a comic strip created by Ray Helle in September 1954, and which ran until 1972. It concerned a family named the Flibbertys, consisting of mother and father Fran and Stan, children Wendy, Butch, and Sis, their dog Geddown, and their cat Preston. Geddown and Preston had dialogue balloons, but it didn't mean they could "talk." Any dialogue they had could only be understood by other animals, and not any of the human characters. Unlike a character like Snoopy or Garfield, these were not thought bubbles, but actual dialogue balloons, so it makes you imagine that they are actually speaking, just in a different language perhaps.

I find it interesting that in this strip the parents are looking for where the kids hid the presents, when usually it's the other way around. I think Butch has the right idea, too. You should set booby traps in your hiding places, especially if you can't find anywhere good and all of the places that are available are the really obvious ones.

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This Funny World was an interesting strip. There was no consistent cartoonist, because it essentially reprinted single panel gag comics from various popular magazines. Due to it being copyrighted to Collier's Magazine, Allan Holtz surmises that rather than being reprints, the panels were potentially rejected magazine submissions. It's possible, but seeing as how it outlived Collier's, running from 1945 all the way to 1985, I'm skeptical of that explanation. It's an interesting idea for a newspaper comic nonetheless.

Not much to say about this one. It certainly looks like it could be in a magazine. I like the smug look the man has as he walks away. I wonder where he got a poster of that size.

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Gasoline Alley has been featured several times on this blog before, but it just continues to be a wonderful source of Christmas themed strips, so I keep going back to it. While it was created by Frank King in 1918, after King's death in 1969 it was carried on by a succession of different cartoonists and continues to this day. In fact, in just three more years, when it reaches its 110th year of publication, it will surpass The Katzenjammer Kids as the longest running newspaper comic.

Here we have an example of one of the later Frank King strips, and one that I can certainly relate to. I love making hand-made Christmas cards for my family, and in the past have actually considered doing either a wood block or linoleum block print for them. It would certainly make reproducing them multiple times for all my siblings easier. I may consider it again for next year. I did quite a lot of printmaking in college, so I'm familiar with the process that Skeezix shows off to Nina here. The only part that he forgot, of course, is that you have to carve the letters into the block backwards, so that they read forwards when you stamp it onto the paper. You have to retrain your brain a bit in order to make the letters wrong so they will be right later. I certainly made that mistake when I was first starting out. In fact, my senior art project included some woodblocks, and I even made that mistake on one of those pieces as well. There was someone yelling "AAAAAAAA!" and I put the exclamation point on the wrong side of the exclamation. I hope no one noticed.