Word: comic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Nichols at work again. Here Author Murray Schisgal spoofs the couch-prone and their litter-perfect recitations of the Freudian catechism. The combined talents of the director and Actors Alan Arkin, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson are eruptively comic...
That was Sparky's last spectacular mishap. In 1950, after many rejections by other syndicates, Li'I Folks was accepted by Manhattan's United Feature Syndicate as a comic strip. Over Sparky's protest, the syndicate renamed it Peanuts. "I wanted to keep Li'I Folks. I wanted a strip with dignity and significance. 'Peanuts' made it sound too insignificant...
...Yellow Kid, considered by many to be the first bona-fide comic strip, contributed the phrase "yellow journalism" to the language. Wearing a bright yellow nightgown on which words were scrawled (forerunners of later balloons), the jug-eared little tough got away with sadism that is no longer permitted. He bashed his pals over the head with a golf club, pummeled a little Negro boy while a goat nibbled his woolly hair. Other kids followed: the Katzenjammers ("Mit dose kidds, society iss nix"), Buster Brown, Little Nemo, and the long-gone Kinder Kids, a strip exquisitely drawn by the cubist...
...public had wearied of yellow journalism, and the comics calmed down. There was less jaw breaking, more jawing, though the humor was still basic. Mutt, originally a horseplayer, was soon joined by Jeff, and the pair still quietly swindle each other today. Abie the Agent, an ethnic comic character, often cracked jokes in Yiddish and was not above haranguing a waiter: "It ain't the principle either; it's the ten cents." In Bringing Up Father, Irish-born Jiggs plans desperate stratagems to escape his starched collar and shrewish wife for the solid comforts of Dinty Moore...
Thwarted Love. In the 1930s, the once funny comics grew ever more solemn. Dick Tracy introduced blood and bullets that had long been taboo, plus an assortment of grotesquely drawn but weirdly fascinating hoods: Prune Face, Fly Face, No Face. In Terry and the Pirates, Milton Caniff soon replaced the pirates with the Japanese-Terry was the first comic strip to go to war. Later Caniff gave up the youthful Terry for the more mature Steve Canyon, a seat-of-the-pants pilot who fights the battles of the Air Force so effectively that Caniff was once denounced...