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[Comics]
Sam’s Strip: The Comic About Comics
Thu, Mar 26, 2009 (midnight)
How on earth did Sam’s Strip, created by Mort Walker and his then-Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois partner Jerry Dumas, fail to set the funny pages on fire back in 1961, so much so that the creators themselves decided to pull the plug 20 months later? The answer—provided through this complete collection of 500 strips—is that the time just wasn’t right. Well, it’s certainly right now.
The Details
- Sam’s Strip: The Comic About Comics
- By Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas
- Fantagraphics Books, $23
- Sam’s Strip: The Comic About Comics
The premise was simple: Sam was a comic-strip character who owned and operated his own four-panel comic strip as if it was a business. The gags revolved around Sam and his assistant trying to think of a way to compete with other strips, berating artist Dumas, raiding the prop closet and, most memorably, interacting with other strip stars from the past and present. If it seemed like too much of an inside joke in the early ’60s, well, there are a lot more people on the inside now that we’re in a golden age of strip reprints.
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