History of Beetle Bailey

Beetle Bailey 2013-05-04

If you're familiar with Beetle Bailey you'll know the character Otto, the humanoid dog. He wears clothes, walks around on his hind legs, has quite distinct hands and feet and rarely does anything particularly doggish. But it wasn't always so. Otto was first introduced as a completely ordinary dog belonging to Sgt Snorkel.

Beetle Bailey 1956-10-09

I'm not sure when he mutated into his present form, but as that recent strip above shows, it apparently wasn't just him, it affected other dogs too. But as you may know, Beetle Bailey is actually brother to Lois Flagston of Hi and Lois, and dogs in that strip are perfectly normal, so it's not every dog in the world, but clearly it's widespread enough that no one around Camp Swampy bats an eye at dogs like Otto (or his admirer) wandering around.

History of Mandrake

Daily Ink, the site where I get a lot of the comics I read, runs a few "classic" strips — some early versions of current strips, others now defunct. One of the classic strips is Mandrake the Magician from back in the days when it was still written by Lee Falk.

Recently it's been running a story from 1940 in which Mandrake sets out to find the source of the mysterious "flame pearls", but it's really just an excuse to have him travel around to different locations to have a bunch of different unconnected adventures.