There's a lot of slapstick, a lot of airhead flapper humor, and no shortage of punch lines that can still elicit a smile or a guffaw nearly four score years later.
On the plus side, the stories really are pretty darn funny. However, the same can be said of many humor strips, and if you put this book aside occasionally and come back to it fresh a week or two later, the repetitiveness is far less noticeable. Evidently Young, knowing how few papers were running the feature, and that he was being picked up and canceled with regularity, had a tendency to dog it a little in the originality of his stories. In my opinion, a very mildly qualified 'yes'! On the down side, these early years of Blondie are rather repetitive - Dagwood is blocked over and over from marrying Blondie in plot lines that can become monotonous in their similarity. After facing all the stumbling blocks to the publication, including simply finding all these ridiculously rare strips, the obvious question is whether it was all worth it. Not being on the inside, I don't know what kept these strips out of sight all those years.īut finally Dean Mullaney and IDW have issued the complete story (well, sans Sundays, which oddly follow a different continuity and are therefore sort of beside the point). Or perhaps they were holding out for a lucrative publishing deal. Rumor had it that the Young estate bore some ill-will to the publication of these early strips, though it seems hard to imagine why.
Yet never during all these years have we seen more than just a fleeting taste of those years, a week's worth of strips reprinted here or there.
We've all heard that Dagwood came from an ultra-rich family, of his infamous hunger strike to win Blondie, and of him turning his back on the Bumstead millions in favor of an air-headed flapper named Blondie Boopadoop. And the mythology of those early years, years in which the strip ran in very few papers, has long been whispered about not only among serious comics fans but by casual readers as well. Chic Young's Blondie, which became staggeringly popular after a rough patch at the start, has long been one of the world's favorite newspaper strips. This is one of those reprint books that has been overdue for, oh, about fifty years or so. 2010, IDW Publishing, edited by Dean Mullaney
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