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I wonder which Santa Claus Nancy gave the string to. It seems unlikely that she would be able to walk all the way to the North Pole and give it to the one who lives there. That would have to be an extremely long string. Then again, maybe she did. It is a comic strip, after all.

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Dooley's World was a comic strip that ran from 1972 to 1978, and centered around a young boy named Dooley and his living toys. Every year on Christmas Eve, the strip would have the same joke, with the characters trying to recite the poem "'Twas The Night Before Christmas" only for Max the mouse to be unable to complete it. Had the strip run for a few more years, Max may have finally been able to do it, but unfortunately it didn't last as long as it should have.

Dooley's World was created by Roger Bradfield, who spent most of his career as an illustrator, with Dooley's World being his only venture into comic strips. He is probably best known for creating the original look of the Keebler Elves, and for doing many illustrations for the front of cereal boxes. His style was minimal but fun, and while a joy to look at it definitely belongs to another time.

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High Pressure Pete is a lesser known creation by George Swanson, who signed his work and is credited as "Swan." Swanson is better known for his earlier strip Salesman Sam. How Pete came about is very similar to how Gene Ahern's Room and Board did (see an earlier post for more info on that strip): King Features Syndicate wanted Swanson to do Salesman Sam for them, though they couldn't use that title or the characters. Therefore, Charles Small continued to do Salesman Sam at the Newspaper Enterprise Association, and Swanson moved to King Features and created High Pressure Pete, which had the same characters with different names and the same overall theme. It lasted for about 10 years, and ended around the same time Salesman Sam did.

In this strip, Pete is the one on the far left in the first panel, and the fuming one on the far right is his boss, Hank Hookem. I imagine Hank is upset because the gift implies that he has no hair. It seems well-meaning, though, as it's probably meant to help him grow some of it back. As someone who has lost quite a bit of hair myself, I would be very appreciative of such a gift, or at least the thought behind it.

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This one's a little different, as it's basically just Al Capp giving holiday greetings to a bunch of people, along with a drawing of himself in a Santa Claus outfit. It's probably a bit hard to read, so I've transcribed it for you below:

"To the vets in the vets' hospitals - and to the fine Red Cross gals who take me out to see you - to Father David Dunnigan - Rabbi Isadore Davidson - Levi Jackson - Harold Russell - Walter Winchell - to the man who marinates the herring at Toots Shor's - Joe Dineed, and his amazing 'Purple Shamrock' - John Mason Brown - John Crosby - Arthur Godfrey- Nancy O. - Secretary of Labor Tobin - Miltons Caniff and Berle - Lee and Connie Falk - Rabbi Philip Bernstein - the Saroyans - Jack Goodman - Tex and Jinx - Leila and Kip Hadley - Chic Young - Rube Goldberg - Bob Ruark - Henry Morgan - Colby College - Faye Emerson - Reg Beauchamp - Helen Hayes and Charlie McArthur - Oona and Charlie Chaplin - Drew Pearson - Billy Reed and his Little Club - Joe Lopez of the Copa - Secretary John Snyder - Verne Clark - Bridgeport Univ. - Thompson and Jacque of the Montreal Standard, one of the top newspaper teams in the world - Gregg Sherwood - E.M. Kahn jr. - Al Hershfeld - Dolly Hass - Sid Caesar - Henny Youngman - Joe E. Lewis - Pat Williams - Alex Raymond - Warde Greene - John Wayne - Glorya and Leopold Stokowski - Louis Sobol, the kindliest of all the kolumnists - Big Joe, and may he grow Bigger - Miss Sarah Lewis of New Haven - Billy Daniels - Bob Trout- Fred Friendly - John Cameron Swayze - Davidson Taylor - Leonard and Sylvia Lyons - James and Pamela Mason - Bob and Mignon McLaughlin - Vaugn Monroe - Bob Allen - Harold Stassen - Jack Lait - 'Twenty One' - Turhan Bey - Larry Winship - Lou Cowan - Arnold Horwitt and Lee Rogow - Charlie and Peg Ross - Ben Hecht - Jimmy Cannon - Bob Hall - John Ringling North - George Jessel - Frank Knight - Virgnia Gilmore - Salvador Dali - Rod MacLeish - Frank Sinatra - Doug Edwards - Louis Gardner - Joey Gold, who can get 'em when no one else can - R. Van Buren - Jack Barry - Barry Gray - T.S. Matthews - Christine Lynn - Eleanor Tatum - Ed and Pegeen Fitzgerald - Jean Sulzberger - Dick Williams - Joe Purtell - Betty Crocker - Betty Betz - Kenny Delmar - Carl Hodge - John McLain - Walter Ross - Harriet Van Horne - Morris Ernst - Elinor Marcus - Mort Millman - Bob Emery, and the Small Fry Club - Nick Kenny - Kenneth Banghart - Pat Coffin - Maxwell Coplan - Gordon Johnson - Ruth Cosgrove - to the Yale Record and the Princeton Tiger (thanks for your awards) - Irwin and Marian Shaw - to the talented cartooning Fishers, Bud, Dudley, and Jo, that is - Lyman Bryson - the Atlantic Monthly - Fred Garrigus - Charlie Post - Al Foster - Ralph Foster - Roy Larsen - Smitty Davis - Ann and John Groth - and to all you confused by loyal Li'l Abner readers -"

There are some interesting names in there if you take the time to actually read them. The most interesting to me is his mention of "the talented cartooning Fishers", meaning Bud Fisher, creator of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, Dudley Fisher, creator of Right Around Home, and probably Jo Fischer, who spells his name a bit differently, creator of From 9 to 5. I'm guessing he's conspicuously omitting Ham Fisher, creator of Joe Palooka, with whom Capp had been feuding since the 1930s. That's a story for a different time.

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These are the last two days of Hal Fosters The Christmas Story series. It's interesting to note that while this series originally ran only once in 1948, it was also re-released in 1996. The size that newspapers printed comic strips at that time had drastically decreased from how large they were printed in 1948, so I don't imagine it looked nearly as good as it did originally. It would be neat to be able to run another Hal Foster series, however, since Foster had died 14 years earlier.

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Here are the third and fourth days of the Hal Foster short-run series The Christmas Story. You'll notice that Foster takes a few liberties with the story when writing the captions, but I guess I'd expect that from a man who regularly wrote a comic strip that was an embellishment of Arthurian legend. Still, showing Mary being happy and singing while traveling miles through sleet and snow is a bit of a stretch. I don't really mind it that much, though, because I mostly just pay attention to the amazing artwork. It's definitely hang on the wall material.

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These are the first two pages of a short-run Christmas series commissioned by King Feature Syndicate in 1948. It's been a common tradition over the years for syndicates to order these kinds of Christmas series, though it's become less common more recently. The themes of these series vary, and while some of them are of the Santa Claus, elves, and reindeer variety, there were many that took the religious approach. This series was done by Hal Foster, who was a devout Christian himself and therefore quite comfortable with the material. It's unusual, though, as it was a large format with only one illustration each day and a caption which told the story as contained in the Bible. It's definitely the best format for Foster's beautiful and striking images, though.

Hal Foster is best known for creating the Prince Valiant comic strip, though he never sought out a career in cartooning. He was originally an illustrator, and doing quite well at it. He was asked to draw some illustrations for the Tarzan comics, and caught the eye of William Randolph Hearst, who wanted him to do a comic strip for his King Features Syndicate. Foster came up with Prince Valiant, and began writing and drawing it in 1937, at the age of 44. The strip still runs as of this writing, and has been done by a succession of writers and artists. In my opinion, though, the art has never been as good as Foster's. He had an amazingly clean and crisp style that is a joy to look at, and this Christmas Story series is another great example of his work.

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Nancy demonstrates an impulse that I think we've all had at one time or another. Some actors seem to always play a certain type of person, and we come to expect that of most of them, so it's a bit jarring at times when we see one playing against type. I've certainly had that experience before. It would definitely be difficult if you recognized the person playing Santa Claus as someone who had not been so kind and jolly in a different role. It seems like the Santa outfit would only be a disguise and a way to sneak into and rob the toy store.

Interestingly, this is a joke that Bushmiller had used previously, in a strip that was published 12 years earlier:

He just updated it to be used with Santa Claus. It still works, though, in my opinion, and it isn't a very surprising thing to see. Cartoonists who have been doing their comic strips for quite a while do tend to reuse many jokes they had used before. In fact, legacy cartoonists drawing a comic strip created by someone else will often dig back into the creator's archives to resurrect an old joke for a new audience. They obviously hope that people won't notice, and most people don't.

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Here's Major Hoople again, doing as he does and telling young Alvin a number of obviously untrue stories of his life. I guess it must get pretty boring around the boarding house, because Major Hoople has to invent stories to keep everyone entertained. Either that, or he makes up the stories in order to hide the real truth of his criminal past. Who was Major Hoople, really? What has he done? Who is he running from? We'll never hear it from his own mouth, I guess.

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Our Boarding House, created by Gene Ahern, centered around the residents of a boarding house belonging to Martha Hoople. Here, we see her husband Major Amos B. Hoople attempting to procure some holiday money with as little work as possible. As someone with no money for the holidays myself, I quite understand his predicament. It's probably a bit too late to try to get a job as a guy in a Santa Claus suit now, though.

Major Hoople was fond of telling outlandish stories to all who would listen, so I hope he listens to the kids who speak to him instead of talking their ears off. Interestingly, just as many people these days refer to the Peanuts comic strip as "Charlie Brown," Major Hoople was so popular in his day that most people just called the strip after him. The strip was popular enough that a rival newspaper syndicate paid Ahern to create a comic strip called Room and Board with nearly identical characters, but with different names. Oddly, it wasn't as popular as the original.