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Here we have Corky doing his Christmas shopping a year after the the comic I posted yesterday, and it looks like he has learned a thing or two from his past experience. This time, he didn't spend all of his money on candy and soda, but just enough that he didn't have enough to give to the Salvation Army Santa. Maybe in another year or two he'll learn how to budget everything properly.

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It's often hard to find information about topper strips (see my post from a couple days ago about Josie), but it's made a bit easier when the character in the topper is also a character in the main strip. Corky is the son of the main characters of the strip it's a topper for, Gasoline Alley, and regularly appeared in that strip as well as his own. In this way the topper became an extension of the main strip, rather than just an accessory for it. This didn't happen often with toppers, but Ernie Bushmiller also did it with Phil Fumble, and E.C. Segar did it with the various Thimble Theater characters that appeared in its toppers. There were probably others, but on the whole it wasn't really done, as the topper was seen as fairly disposable due to the fact that newspapers could just drop it if they wanted to save space.

I've written about Corky before, but Frank King's Gasoline Alley and its characters are always a great source for holiday cheer. Here we see Corky sp…

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Charles Addams is of course best known for his series of New Yorker cartoons, The Addams Family, but for a short while he also did a newspaper comic panel known as Out Of This World. It wasn't really that different from what people had come to expect from Addams, and had the same macabre humor as his magazine cartoons, although there are also some fantasy and science fiction elements mixed in. The panel unfortunately only ran from 1955-1957.

Here we have what appears to be a robot doing his Christmas shopping and looking to buy something for his... uh... father, I guess. There are many theories from various people about how we will know when an artificial intelligence is really sentient and thinks for itself, and isn't just parroting its programming. I think wanting to buy its creator a gift for an important holiday might qualify. Sure, the scientist could have just programmed the robot to go to the store and buy him a gift, but I like to think it was actually the…

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Dixie Dugan by J.P. McEvoy and J.H. Striebel is an interesting case of a comic strip adaptation transcending its source material. It was based on a novel by McEvoy that was serialized in Liberty Magazine in the late 20's about a Hollywood showgirl named Dixie, aptly titled "Show Girl." It had previously been adapted into a George Gershwin musical as well as two movies, all of which focused on the Hollywood aspect of Dixie's life. In 1929 Striebel, who had done the illustrations for Liberty Magazine when the novel was first serialized, was tasked by McEvoy with doing the artwork for the comic strip adaptation that McEvoy was writing. The comic strip began as a pretty straight adaptation of the novel, but as the Depression wore on the travails of a Hollywood showgirl who wanted to be a star were not quite as interesting to most people. Dixie's Hollywood career ended and she was more focused on finding any work she could to support her family. The strip took on a life…

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Josie by Carl Ed was one of the toppers for Ed's comic strip Harold Teen, and appeared either on top or underneath it during the latter half of the 1930s. Although Harold Teen is a strip about high school teenagers, as its name suggests, Josie focuses more on younger children and their escapades. There is much to be found on the Internet about Harold, but not so much about Josie or her friends, unfortunately.

Here we see Butch trying to extort money out of Monty by "selling" him some snowballs that he's made. As with most comic strip bullies, Butch is not very smart, and doesn't realize that strong arming someone into purchasing a weapon generally incentivizes the buyer to use it against you. Butch should work on his salesmanship skills and in the future try to convince Monty to buy them due to their superior craftsmanship and use of artisanal snow.