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They'll Do It Every Time was a single panel strip that ran for 80 years(!) and was created by Jimmy Hatlo. Readers were known to submit ideas for many of the gags, such as this one, which involved the inability to get a usable photo for a holiday card. These days it's not as much of a problem, what with digital cameras and all, but in the days when you had to bring your film somewhere to get developed, and you had to wait to find out how terrible your photos were, it was much more of a frustration. Still, I don't think anyone would really notice if you cut the photos in half and taped the good halves together and tossed the bad ones.

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This strip probably won't make much sense to anyone who doesn't know what a milkman is or how milk delivery used to work. For those who don't get it, take this as a learning opportunity and look it up. I know, you shouldn't have to do research just to get a joke, but think of it this way: if you do the research now, you'll get all the other milkman jokes I'll post on this blog in the future.

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Here's Herman again, and he's finally gotten up the courage to actually ski down the slope. His unfortunate accident here may have been what he was afraid of in the strip I posted yesterday. It also makes me wonder if the Valley Lodge tailor shop put certain obstacles on the slope on purpose to drive business to them.

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As it's now December again, I'm reviving my blog to bring you another month full of great Christmas and winter-related comic strips!

I decided to ease into the season with a winter-themed Herman comic strip. Herman was a strip created by Clyde Lamb, not to be confused with the other comic strip named Herman by Jim Unger, which is completely unrelated. Here we see Herman doing what I would most definitely do were I ever to find myself at the top of a ski jump: realize that the ski lift is far more entertaining and far less frightening and taking it down (and maybe taking it up and down one more time just for fun).

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Nothing much to say about this one. Just merry Christmas, everyone.

(also the hatching and cross-hatching in this is beautiful, just look at it)

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Here's another Will-Yum, having a horrible time the day before Christmas. It reminds me of when I was a kid, trying to figure out what was in my presents by size and weight, and never being able to. One year, there was one under the tree from my dad, which was relatively small but very heavy. I thought about it for days, unable to think of anything that it could be. It turned out there was actually a brick inside (yes, an actual brick), which I never would have guessed. I think it's one of few presents I've received that have rendered me speechless, due to my laughing so hard.

Of course, this was because the actual present wouldn't fit under the tree, as it was a giant framed poster, but I still like telling people that my dad once got me a brick for Christmas.

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I've covered The Gumps previously at Christmas (here and here), and showed Andy Gump's incredible generosity at this time of here. This one, however, goes as far as to quantify just how generous he is. I like the fact that when he discovers he has more money than he thought he did, he realizes he has more to give away.

If only there were more people like Andy in the world.

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Will-yum was a relatively obscure comic strip even in its own day. It ran for 13 years, but was never in a very large number of newspapers. The character of Will-yum first appeared in a number of creator Dave Gerard's magazine cartoons, and was eventally turned into a syndicated strip by the National News Syndicate. It unfortunately wasn't unique enough to survive among the many strips featuring young boys getting into trouble.

In this strip, we have a common device cartoonists use when they run out of ideas: put themselves into their strips to converse with their characters. I think every cartoonist has done it at some point, and some do it so often they count as a recurring character. It's even the whole idea behind the Brenda Starr movie (which is so goofy and self-aware and I love it).

It seems to work here, though. I think the joke could've worked if Will-yum had been speaking to about any adult, but it may not have been as interesting to look at that way. I'm always up for great looking, deceptively simple artwork as well. It's a shame this strip never reached a very wide audience.

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Toppers are notorious for only being a footnote related to the comic strip that they sit atop. That's no exception here. Little Brother ran as a topper to H.J. Tuthill's The Bungle Family, and that's the extent of the information available on it on the internet. I include it here because I don't find The Bungle Family to be that interesting, but I really like this joke.

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The Ripples, also known as Our Neighbors, The Ripples was the Sunday version of George Clark's comic panel The Neighbors. It was a slice of life strip similar to Out Our Way, in which the idea was to depict scenes from life without necessarily having a joke. They might be funny, but didn't necessarily have to be; the point was more that they were relatable or nostalgic.

Here we have young Butch having a Little Nemo moment with Santa, which looks fun at first, but quickly becomes so boring that he falls asleep in his own dream. Santa needs his help, for some reason. I guess he's supposed to watch the reindeer while Santa goes in the house, which he fails to do. It's a really fun strip to look at either way, as the artwork is superb.