Smile-a-day.
As I hurried home from school, the evening paper awaited me.
I can’t remember all the comics, but here’s a small list: Rick O’Shea, Kerry Drake (and his brother), Dick Tracy, Peanuts, Nancy, Lil Abner (and the graceful Fearless Fosdick). Mark Trail, Amy, Trudy, Beetle Bailey, Popeye, and The Phantom. They served to shepherd a child from ‘kid-toons’ to more mature toons that adults could appreciate. My aunts in the coal regions got Dondi on their Sunday funnies, but that seemed way too intense for me.
I remember Dick Tracy the most, for some bizarre reason. For some time, the comic was a soap opera. People don’t remember that era……..don’t forget, it was an animated cartoon as well.
Tracy’s buddy, the rich capitalist Diet Smith, had pioneered travel back and forth to the moon. The moon’s inhabitants looked just like us, except for little antennae on the sides of their heads. Tracy’s son, Junior fell hard for a moon-person whose father was a lunar big shot. She resembled a cross between Gwen Stacy and Marilyn Monroe. Hubba-Hubba. So, moon people were able to do the horizontal bop, and she wound up in the family way. The kid was born halfway between the planets.
There were some sort of restrictions on what the moon people could do on earth, ’cause they had some weird power of controlling electricity, kind of like Spidey’s Electro. She was able to thwart an attempt to nab her child later using her powers. I’m glossing over a lot of this, but the toon was fast becoming a soap opera like Brenda Starr, so they wisely killed Moon Maid off, like Michael Corleone’s first wife.
Looking back, it’s kind of easy to see how comics gradually nudged the hormones of us young American males. Many of these comics, from Brenda Starr to Moon Maid, to the girlfriends/wives of Kerry Drake and Lil Abner, had bodies that would have not been out of place on a glossy magazine cover, or on a TV spot aimed for men (like the saving cream “Take it off–Take it all off’ ad).
Next time: Let’s look at Disney’s cross-functional promotions across media: genius!