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Herman (still by Clyde Lamb and not by Jim Unger) is a comic strip I haven't revisited in a while, so here's another one. To be clear, I have nothing against Jim Unger's Herman, but I just find Lamb's Herman to be more interesting and funny. Plus, Jim Unger doesn't have nearly as wild of a life story as Clyde Lamb does. To make a long story short, Lamb started his art career while in prison for the third time. The first time, he was arrested for armed robbery but was able to escape. The second time, he was arrested for armed robbery again and his wife tried to help him escape and was caught, but he was able to successfully escape at a later time. He was arrested and put in prison for the third time due to his previous prison escapes. He learned art and began to draw cartoons during his third prison sentence, and after he was released in 1947 he started drawing the comic strip Herman, which debuted in newspapers in 1949. He was never imprisoned again after that, thankfully. Herman ran until Lamb's death in 1966.

Today's wintery strip is nothing nearly as exciting as all that. It's just a shrewd apple salesman finding ways to make money while still keeping warm. A baked apple does sound like it would be a nice treat on a cold day.

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The Old Home Town seems to be a cross between a hillbilly strip like Li'l Abner or Snuffy Smith and a nostalgic single panel comic like Out Our Way. The cartoonist, Lee Wright Stanley, was from Kansas and was familiar with the rural folk of that region, and wrote what he knew. The strip ran from 1923 to 1966, and apparently coined a number of catchphrases that were popular during that period, though they didn't have much staying power because I haven't heard any of them in my lifetime. An article from 1939 states that the strip popularized such phrases as “Hold ‘er Newt, she’s arearin’,” “Git fer home, Bruno,” “Just ez I thought,” “Effen it’s news to you –,” and “What’s the fuss?”. Some of them just seem like normal phrases anyone could have come up with, so this may require further research.

As for this particular panel... All I have to say is, can't he at least hold it in front of a fire for a bit before putting it on? Putting it on right off the line sounds like hypothermia waiting to happen.

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Even though it was one of the lesser known Disney comic strips, Scamp ran for an impressive 33 years, from 1955 to 1988, with the Sunday strip running almost as long, from 1956 to 1988. The character first appeared at the very end of the movie Lady and the Tramp, as the child of the titular characters. It didn't take long before he was appearing in a Dell Comics comic book series, and a few months later a newspaper strip, both of which debuted the same year as the movie. It wasn't until 2001 that Scamp would get his own direct-to-video movie, though given the track record of Disney direct-to-video, I imagine the comics were of a higher quality.

Here, we see Scamp's friend Cheeps complaining about the cold, though if a bird is cold even in its nest then it probably wasn't built properly in the first place. Though, from my understanding, that's the gimmick behind Cheeps; he's very bad at making nests. Maybe this year Scamp can lend some of his fur to Cheeps to line his nest with so he won't be so cold.

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Much like Snoopy, while in some ways I was quite prepared for December, such as getting all of my Christmas cards made and sent out, in other ways I was woefully unprepared, such as having comic strips related to the month of December ready to post on my blog. So, today's comes a little late. But rest assured, while the blog may be relatively dormant for the majority of the year (something which, every January, I resolve and ultimately fail to remedy), I will still post winter and Christmas themed comic strips for the month of December. My newspapers.com subscription will not go to waste.