‘Blondie’ changes with times but stays ageless
Hold them side by side.
The “Blondie” comic strip created by Chic Young for Sept. 8, 1930, is told in four frames. A well-dressed playboy, Dagwood Bumstead, with a wiry body and dark, plastered hair, introduces a pert, curly-haired woman to his short, roundish father, a blustering railroad tycoon.
At first, Blondie Boopadoop was a “flapper” with a vague behavioral resemblance to Betty Boop – also first released in 1930. The early Dagwood was a
callow, love-smitten son of rich, judgmental parents.
Exactly 93 years later, the “Blondie” comic strip put together for Sept. 8, 2023, by Dean Young – Chic Young’s son – and John Marshall of Binghamton, New York, unfolds in three frames.
Set in an old-fashioned barber shop, it reveals Dagwood, his hair style and manner virtually unchanged over the course of decades, talking college football with the barber, Mike Morelli.
The joke comes when Dagwood disses the barber’s alma mater as the clippers snip away at his signature antenna-like hair.
“Dad and I had the same creative sensibility for funny stuff.” said Dean Young, who started helping out his father, Chic Young, in the 1960s, then took over writing the strip when his father died in 1973. “I actually went to college and became an advertising executive in Miami. I flew airplanes for promotions. Once, when I stayed with my parents, Dad asked, ‘Do you want to work them, or do you want to come and work for me?’ Turned out to be a perfect fit.”
“Blondie” is the third-longest-running newspaper comic strip that is still ongoing, after “Gasoline Alley” (1918present) and “Barney Google and Snuffy Smith” (1919-present). None has run as long as “The Katzenjammer Kids,” which lasted 109 years between 1897 and 2006.
Some things stay the same
And yet, like many long-running strips, visually, it often looks as if time has stopped for “Blondie.”
A few things have changed materially: Dagwood and Blondie use modern electronic devices and they refer to aspects of the digital world, for instance.
“I did a strip last week on artificial intelligence,” Dean Young said. “It was funny. I liked it. I do lots of strips about what’s going on in the world today. I want to keep it new and keep it relevant.”
In that vein, Young, whose waterside studio is 7 miles from his home in the Tampa Bay area, has bolstered his readership through blondie.com and social media.
“But my favorite is the newspaper,” he said. “We are in global papers in 35 languages with 280 million readers.”
Despite the updated outlook, in the world of “Blondie,” hair styles, apparel and furniture seem to have frozen sometime in the 1940s or ’50s.
Blondie is no longer a clownishly ditzy flapper.
That changed during the Depression, when she became the family’s domestic rock to Dagwood’s goofy, sandwich-devouring dad and office worker. The couple married Feb. 17, 1933, and thenceforth pursued middle-class lifestyles after the elder Bumsteads disinherited him.
Although Blondie worked briefly for the Bumstead family early on while engaged to Dagwood, in 1991, she started her own business.
“As for keeping with the times, ‘Blondie’ – like other strips – has always moved along at comic-warp speed, which is sort of like reverse doggie years,” wrote Diane Mason in Tampa Bay Magazine when Blondie took this monumental step. “Seven real years equals one comic year . ... Young’s philosophy all along has been to avoid any material that is controversial. He says he’s not a sociologist, nor is he making a grand political statement.”
Roles updated for the Bumsteads
In fact, Dean Young gradually opened up Blondie’s world beyond the domestic sphere.
“I like to deal mainly with domestic situations, and I primarily stick with
eating, sleeping, raising children and making money,” Dean Young told Jud Hurd for “Cartoonist Profiles” in 1986. “I don’t want Blondie just to be stuck at home with gags involving her to be limited to that setting alone. I want Blondie to be a complete woman, and I want readers to respect her not only for her ability to maintain a home, but also for her own mind and her own person.”
Blondie and Dagwood’s children, Alexander, born in 1934, and Cookie, who followed in 1941, were allowed to reach their teens. Their personalities and physical appearance have evolved at a glacial pace since the 1950s.
“I have them growing up somewhat,” Dean Young said. “Now they’re in high school, and going to college. They do things that teenagers do.”
The expressive family dog, Daisy, remains the same, but did eventually produce puppies.
Although the strip’s overall look remains almost as Chic Young left it, a series of artists – Jim Raymond, Alex Raymond, Mike Gersher, Stan Drake, Denis Lebrun, Jeff Parker, and Marshall – have drawn it.
“I do the gags and I know how to do a little ‘rough,’” said Dean Young, referring to rough drafts of the cartoons. “John gets the roughs and he interprets them and puts them into his own form, which is beautiful.”
Like other successful comic strips, “Blondie” spawned a pop-culture industry of its own. A series of more than two dozen B movies, starring Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake as the married couple, ran from 1938 to 1950. Books spilled out regularly, from “Blondie and Dagwood’s Snapshot Clue” (1943) to “Blondie’s Cookbook” (1996), along with comic strip collections from 1968 to 2012. Radio and TV shows ran periodically from 1939 to 1969.
Among the supporting characters, Mr. Dithers, Dagwood’s boss, and Lou, owner of Lou’s Diner, present strong counterweights to the Bumstead domestic sphere. The familiar running gags – besides the architectural sandwiches, the frequent naps, the slapstick humor, the card-playing, the quarrels and the one-liners – provide a comforting sameness for the reader.
“This is something that most people think of when they think of comic strips,” Lebrun, who drew “Blondie” from 1997 to 2005, told The Washington Post in 1999. “This is America’s family in the comics.”