In 1970 I interviewed the late Chic Young, creator of Blondie, when he had been writing and drawing that strip daily and Sunday-for forty years, or 14,500 strips. It was the most popular of all comic strips, reaching 60 million readers in every corner of the world and in many languages, and I asked him the secret of its durability.
"It's durable because it's simple, " he said. "It's built on four things that everybody does: sleeping, eating, raising a family and making money." The comic twists on these four themes are as various in the strip as they are in life. Dagwood's efforts to get money from his boss, Mr. Dithers, have their perpetual counterweight in Blondie's efforts to spend it. "I try to keep Dagwood in a world that people are used to, " Young said. "He never does anything as special as playing golf, and the people who come to the door are just the people that an average family has to deal with."
- William Zinsser (On Writing Well)
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| Blondie, 2014-11-08. |
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| Blondie, 2014-11-10. |
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| Blondie, 2015-04-08. |
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| Blondie, 2015-04-12. |
OK, so technically he's not actually playing real golf in any of these strips, but...
Those strips were all made after 1970 by a different writer.
ReplyDeleteI know, I was commenting on how the strip's changed.
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