Word: comically
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...editors of Lord Beaverbrook's London Daily Express, the six-month trial run of Steve Canyon had been quite a trial. Steve had been a problem to the 3,870,000 readers of the Express, too. Milton Caniff's comic-strip airline operator was a likable enough chap, but how was one to understand him without a pony? Even to inveterate followers of the U.S. cinema, such terms as "leg it," "front boy," "Hood" and "gee" were hard to translate. Express editors, who have had to doctor much of the Canyon dialogue for British readers, were nonplussed...
Because of such problems, the Express also decided that Canyon and his jive talking crew had to go; Steve & Co. vanished from the Express without so much as a waggle of their wings. Steve's passing gave a clue to the differences between U.S. and British comic-strip tastes. Blondie is a fixture, in the Daily Graphic. Said an editor: "It never gets beyond the trifling happenings that go on in everyone's life all over the world." Donald Duck, Mandrake the Magician and King of the Royal Mounted have been accepted because they are easily understood...
...strip has ever matched the pulling power of British Cartoonist Norman Pett's Jane (see cut), the uninhibited comic-stripper who got her start during the war by entrancing British troops, as a sort of Miss Lace without lace or much of anything else. Jane manages to get down to bra and panties at least once a week in London's tabloid Daily Mirror. Fleet Street agrees that she is the only strip that actually boosts a paper's sales. Yet Jane flopped in the U.S. last year: "I'm afraid," said a British syndicate salesman...
...under these comic collegiate clothes the hearts of even the careerists and the drunkards beat with romance, and could be stirred to a passion of loyalty at a hint that our college . . . was not the best in the world." His chapters on New Haven in the early 1900s explore the functions of the college, where, by his estimate, little education was given or gained, and the plight of the faculty which "never, so far as we know, got drunk, swore, fornicated, swindled, never did anything except lie, play politics and be mean...
Million-Dollar Baby. Gimbels reported that Baby Sparkle Plenty, a doll version of one of Chester Gould's comic-strip improbables, was smashing all sales records. Sales reached 15,100 (at $6 per head) in the first ten days, were expected to exceed $1,000,000 in retail value by Christmas. "Simply phenomenal," said the doll's proud parent, the Ideal Novelty & Toy Co., Inc. "It appears that sales of this one doll in the five remaining months of the year will exceed the output of the entire doll industry for any year in the past two decades...