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This one's a follow-on from yesterday. It seems as though Papa didn't really learn anything from his previous experience, and takes the opportunity to play a joke on Junior. I think Junior has the correct reaction in the end, though.
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Here we have the Sol Hess classic, The Nebbs. It has always been quite common for syndicates and cartoonists to create strips that rip off other, more popular ones. That's how we got Flash Gordon, which ripped off Buck Rogers, and it's how we got The Nebbs, which was a near complete copy of Sidney Smith's The Gumps. It's much less common for the rip off strip to become as popular as the strip being ripped off, but that was the case with Flash Gordon, and was also the case with The Nebbs.
I like this particular strip, because although it isn't necessarily funny, it's still an interesting slice of life. From the beginning, since it's Christmas, you can probably guess what the boy's actually doing, but I guess the mystery is how Mr. Nebb will react. Hopefully he's learned something from this experience.
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I posted a couple Gasoline Alley Christmas strips a couple years ago, but I can never get enough of them. Plus, the strip is nearing its 100th birthday, and amazingly is still running in newspapers, though the current run is a shadow of the strip's former glory.
Here we have a fascinating journey to the North Pole, to meet a Santa Claus who looks quite unlike what most people these days are used to seeing. He employs not only elves to make toys for boys, but also fairies to make toys for girls. Jack Frost apparently lives there as well. It's an interesting strip in many ways, and the art is superb.
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I included the topper for this one, not necessarily because it has anything to do with Christmas (though maybe the radio was a gift), but because it includes an exterior panel with a hobo walking in the snow, which makes it winter themed, I guess.
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Here's a Salemsan Sam from C.D. Small, complete with another Roughin' Reddy topper. I enjoy the gag in this one, but also the interesting imagery in the second to last panel, with the speech balloons emanating out of the telephone wires. Such an image may not make sense to some younger readers.
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Roughin’ Reddy was a “topper” strip created by C. D. Small, which, as toppers were, was printed above the main strip he drew at the time, Salesman Sam. Small took over for the strip’s original creator, George Swanson, when Swanson was hired by another syndicate. Small not only took over, but emulated Swanson’s art style so completely that their work is nearly indistinguishable. It’s amazing, then, that Small was able to create a companion topper that matched the same style.
I would have included the Salesman Sam strip that accompanies this, but it doesn’t have anything to do with Christmas, so I left it out.
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I enjoy living in a state where there is no snow to shovel. I'm not a fan of snow, at all. I'd much rather be singing Christmas carols, like Mutt and Jeff do here, though I'm not sure how one would "make some dough" doing it. Perhaps caroling was a bit different in 1942.
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The Christmas comic strip tradition continues, beginning with Mutt and Jeff, originally created by Bud Fisher. Jeff seems to have a different idea of what "out in the woods" means than I do. It seems to be more along the lines of "out in a snowy field near a few buildings." Perhaps they decided that avoiding private property owners would be easier than possibly having to avoid bears.
While I've previously written about political cartoons coining political words, like Gerrymander and McCarthyism, it isn't the only kind of word that political cartoons have been known to originate. Oddly enough, not only have political cartoonists gone on to create children's toys, but in the case of the teddy bear, a cartoonist was the inspiration for a toy craze that continues to this day.
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As we've seen with the Gerrymander, it seems that words coined in relation to politics have incredible staying power, especially when describing things that politicians continue to do. Associating an image with a word, as is done with political cartoons, also helps to cement it in people's minds. It also helps a great deal if the word refers to a particular well-known person. Such is the case with another political buzzword, McCarthyism.
While for some the word only brings to mind a particular time and place, it's still used by many today to describe certain undesirable political tactics. It generally refers to a political attack or character assassination of a political rival by means of wild, unsubstantiated claims about them. The man who lent his name to the word was Republican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who in the 1950s claimed to have an extensive list of people in the US government who were communist infiltrators. This led to large scale investigations of his claim, which never bore any fruit, and McCarthy never revealed any of the names he claimed were on his list. This ultimately led to his being officially condemned by a large majority of the Senate.
The man who coined the word, and who was one of McCarthy's most vocal critics, was political cartoonist Herbert Block, who generally signed his name "Herblock." The word first appeared in one of Block's cartoons as a label for a large bucket of tar sitting atop several smaller buckets, which the Republican elephant is being coerced into standing on. Block had been critical of McCarthy previously, and would continue to be so afterwards, but this was the only time that he would ever use the word, at least in a cartoon.
This is because, interestingly, Herblock himself never saw anything special about it. He downplayed the status of the cartoon and the word by saying there was "nothing particularly ingenious" about it, and that he "had no thought of creating a new term," but that there was simply no better word to describe what was going on. Still, the word quickly became popular and widely used to describe not only McCarthy but also those who supported him. McCarthy personally condemned Block for the cartoon, and even accused the State Department, the department that he insisted contained the highest number of Communist infiltrators, of paying Block, and called him a "man who is actively committed to oppose attempts to drive Communists out of government." It was true that Block created a pamphlet of cartoons for the State Department, but they were all anti-Communist, and neither he nor the Washington Post ever received compensation for it.
McCarthy and his supporters tried to take back the word, and used it to refer to those with a particular brand of patriotism. McCarthy even used it in the title of his autobiography. These days, however, it's mostly used in a negative sense, which may be another part of its staying power: people don't tend to forget a good insult.
For more information:
Herbert Block at Comiclopedia
McCarthyism at Tawdry Knickers
Herblock's History, biographical information on Block and images of many of his cartoons at the Library of Congress