Blondie

It has been a goodly amount of time since we have discussed writers and the favored comic strips and comic books of their tender young lives. We have held back, mainly, because of the fears and anxieties of our sensitive publisher, who finds that talk of such low matters is inappropriate when trying to ensnare readers of a certain lofty caliber and gender. To which we reply, "Huh?" In any case, we must share the fact that the novelist Ashley Warlick, as a young lady, enjoyed reading BLONDIE. She found the title character fetchingly designed and drawn. She was fascinated by the classiness of such a beautiful woman who seemed able to laugh off the foibles (Ms. Warlick used another word, indeed a saucy and unprintable one, in place of "foibles") of a husband such as Dagwood. I was able to inform Ms. Warlick, thanks to my obsessive reading and rereading, as a teenager, of the 1977 edition of THE SMITHSONIAN COLLECTION OF NEWSPAPER COMICS, that Blondie had started out in the late twenties or early thirties of the last century as a kind of showgirl or flapper, and that Dagwood had been, early on, a rich young beau whose family disowned him over his love of Blondie. Ms. Warlick appeared to absorb this news with relish! We were able to confirm the facts of Blondie's early life, upon returning home, via the always valuable Toonopedia of Mr. Don Markstein.