Alley Oop Sundays, Vol. 2

Foozy, Alley Oop and King Guz.

“…Monstrous Queen Umpateedle reduces all the men in the strip to stunned silence…”

by John Adcock

EIGHTY YEARS AGO the Alley Oop Sundays began, on September 9, 1934. This second volume of Sundays is another beautiful full-color collection from the archives of the Kingdom of Moo. The core characters — Alley Oop, King Guz and Foozy who speaks in rhyme — all have explosive tempers which create differing alliances that drive the plots. The monstrous Queen Umpateedle, wife of Guz, can be explosive too and reduces all the men in the strip to stunned silence.

HIGHLIGHTS. The present volume’s highlights include an outdoor boxing match broadcast through the hills on primitive amplified megaphones, the addition of a new animal character named Terry the pterodactyl, aerial warfare, the creation of a Moovian zoo, a traveling circus made possible by the discovery of the wheel, war with the kingdom of Lem, a bruising game of football and the promotion of Oop as top cop of Moo.

New animal characters

INSPIRATION. By winter of 1938 Vincent T. Hamlin was feeling the stress of working seven days a week on the comic strip. Worse, “regardless of the vastness of my Moovian people’s jungle world” his inspiration was drying up. Hamlin’s wife Dorothy, according to his autobiography The Man Who Walked with Dinosaurs, suggested incorporating time-travel into the strip. Hamlin convinced his syndicate to give it a try and Alley Oop and Oola were materialized into the twentieth century on April 8, 1939.

NEA claimed that “the operation was a success,” the majority of letters and telegrams from readers were in favor.

The reaction of readers varied in form from the shortest telegram, “I can’t stand it much longer. For gosh sakes get Alley Oop back to Moo,” to a two page letter from a prominent New York doctor who psychoanalyzed Hamlin and discovered a “dissatisfied” complex that had caused Hamlin to make the change.

ENDING ABSURDITY. Kitchen Sink published three reprints of Alley Oop time-traveling daily strips in the 1990s. Following that a rumor circulated that time-travel serials appeared only in the daily strips, the Sunday’s apparently all took place in the jungles of Moo. This volume will put that absurdity to rest. The collection ends with the first five time-travelling Sundays dated April 2, April 9, April 16, April 23 and April 30, 1939. Next up, based on Homer’s epic the Iliad, Alley Oop, Oola and Foozy travel to ancient Greece and participate in The Siege of Troy…

Moo – Foozy’s poem of color, green, blue and red

            Alley Oop; By V.T. Hamlin;  
            The Complete Sundays; Volume Two; 1937-1939,
            hardbound, 128 pages.

A Russ Cochran/Dark Horse Book.

Alley Oop Sundays, Vol. 1

Caveman Alley Oop and Dinnie.

“…I shudder to think that without the efforts of Bill Blackbeard and other collectors we wouldn’t have this book…”

by John Adcock

IN THE YEAR 1958 it was said Vincent T. Hamlin’s comic strip Alley Oop appeared in 881 daily and newspapers in the United States and Canada alone. It’s one of the few comic strips from that period which is still running — you can read today’s cartoon HERE. Hamlin wrote and drew it from December 5, 1932, until 1971. From 1950 his assistant was Dave Graue. Hamlin’s wife Dorothy and children helped with the gags.

BEFORE TIME TRAVEL. This attractive Dark Horse reprint was produced from printed Sundays collected at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum in Columbus, Ohio. The frontal material is short, two pages of Introduction by Russ Cochran and a reproduction of the black and white dailies picturing the first meeting of Alley Oop and Dinnie. These Alley Oop Sundays all take place in the jungle Kingdom of Moo — the time-traveling tales, which gave the strip more scope for storytelling, were in the future.

Alley Oop & Foozy Co. – Traders.

HEADBASHING. When the story begins, the Kingdom of Moo is in the grips of a depression which leads Oop and his speaking-in-rhyme buddy Foozy to no end of schemes aimed at filling their pocketbooks. Cash in Moo takes the form of axes, not surprising since male, female and dinosaur heads are bashed on almost every page of this collection. Even the children of Moo participate in the mayhem.

BULGING KNOBS. Hamlin’s frequent use of the trope involving the bulging knob on the head spurting a constellation of angry stars must have pleased his world-weary depression audience. Hamlin created wonderful characters and dialogue and filled his panels with sound effects. He was a great admirer of Lt. Dick Calkins’ Buck Rogers. His drawings of women — except for Queen Umpateedle — seemed borrowed from Roy Crane’s Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy strips.

The Tribe of Wild Women.

REPRO. The restoration on this volume is not as good as its Dark Horse companion volume Gasoline Alley. Mostly because this time the available material was clipped from original comic supplements from the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library. Quality reproduction varied from State to State depending on the workmanship of a variety of presses and their operators. A few of these strips have unsightly smears running throughout the pages.

DOROTHY. The colorist was not the best either. Hamlin’s wife Dorothy helped with coloring proofs. Some of the colors were too dark, particularly a deeply saturated red ochre used mostly on rocks. It stands out like a sore thumb against the milder colors and often draws the eye away from the main focus points of the drawings.

BACK NUMBERS. Those quibbles aside we are lucky to have the complete Sundays in print. The daily strip, appearing in my small town (pop. 13,000) newspaper, the Trail Daily Times, was one of the first strips to grab my adolescent attention. Sometime in the early 60s I visited the newspaper office and happily spent much of the summer reading Alley Oop in back numbers in huge bound volumes. The first day the editor of the newspaper himself answered all my questions and personally lugged each volume out, one by one, to my eager hands. A tenderfoot when it came to comics, my samples drawn with a ballpoint pen, I wondered how they drew those sharp black lines. That generous man introduced me to Indian ink and told me that I could purchase it at the corner camera shop. He showed me his paper’s press room and printing mattes and warned me I would have to move to New York or Chicago if I wanted to pursue a career as a comic strip artist. The thrill that comes once in a lifetime!

BOUND VOLUMES. I assume those bound volumes of the Daily Times were eventually trashed and their contents transferred poorly to microfilm. I shudder to think that without the efforts of Bill Blackbeard and other collectors we wouldn’t have this book, we would not even have a complete history of the comic strip. This volume, with comics as fresh and funny as the day they were created, should please adventurous readers old and new. Volume Two is already in print.

See a preview HERE.

    Alley Oop; By V.T. Hamlin;  
    The Complete Sundays; Volume One; 1934-1936,
    hardbound, 128 pages. 
 

A Russ Cochran/Dark Horse Book.

Condo's Favorites

In APRIL 1969 Alley Oop artist V. T. Hamlin and assistant Dave Graue paid tribute to Armando D. Condo in a continuity that began as an investigation of a haunted house and ended with Condo’s characters Osgar and Adolf and Everett True returned to 1911 and their own comic strip via Professor Wonmug’s time machine. Any reader not in their fifties or sixties at the time must have been bewildered until the ‘history’ was explained.

Hamlin was wrong in his dates however -- all of Condo’s characters, Osgar, Adolf and Everett True were created and ran in alternating cartoons in 1904. Osgar and Adolf originated as a single panel with “Lyrics by Fred Schaefer and Music by Condo” and in time became a multi-panel strip. That may have been the point of the December 6 1911 strip below where Osgar and Adolf recruit Everett True to pound on base imitators Mutt and Jeff who had their beginnings on November 15 1907 when A. Mutt was introduced to the sports-page of the San Francisco Chronicle.

V. T. Hamlin (1900-1993)

Alley Oop has always been a special strip to me. It was one of two (three if you count L’il Abner, which I do) adventure strips that appeared in my hometown B. C. newspaper, the Trail Daily Times. The other was Buz Sawyer which had a lot in common stylewise with V. T. Hamlin’s art. Oop’s girlfriend, Oola, was drawn in the Roy Crane style of drawing women, although Oola always had a more masculine appearance about the face. I read Alley Oop almost without interruption from 1956 to 1969, bowled over by the excellence of art and story.

Hamlin must have studied the competition well since he used ideas from every newspaper comic genre then in use. He borrowed elements from Tarzan, Prince Valiant, Wash Tubbs, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. Alley Oop’s exciting adventures in the Land of Moo caught the public’s fancy from the first. Dinny had been conceived as the original star of the strip (Hamlin got many of his ideas for Dinny’s facial expressions from Betty, a pet black Russian Muscovy duck ) but Oop, Oola, King Guzzle, Foozy and the Grand Wizer soon took precedence in the strip.

Hamlin shocked editors and readers alike when, through the “Time Machine” he catapulted Alley Oop from prehistoric times to the Twentieth Century. The invention of the “Time Machine” allowed Hamlin to deposit Oop in any time frame he chose. In years to come Oop adventured with the knights of King Arthur, met Cleopatra, skirmished with American Indians, and rocketed off to the moon.

Hamlin was born in Perry, Iowa in 1900 and began drawing at an early age. After high school he enlisted in the army, and went overseas in 1917, where he was wounded in action. While recuperating in Europe he was urged by two journalists in adjoining beds to become a cartoonist, and, following their suggestion, that’s just what he did. “When I went back to Perry in 1919 I returned to high school for a short while and then took a course in journalism at the University of Missouri.”

“My first jobs as a reporter were on the Des Moines Register Tribune and the Des Moines News. Later I left des Moines for a job as artist and photographer for the old Fort Worth Record.” As a reporter he covered a little known Mexican revolution, the Escobar uprising, in 1926. He got “shot up” in that affair.

In 1927, while Hamlin was producing artwork for an oil company he met a geologist who was a student of prehistoric life. “I became fascinated,” said Hamlin, “and took up the study of science out of library books. From geology I drifted into the study of life in past ages and later made history in general a hobby.”

Hamlin had the idea he would like to write a strip about dinosaurs with Dinny as the main character. He took a job with the Fort Worth Star Telegram as a reporter and rose to head of the art department. Hamlin had been drawing editorial cartoons for the paper when Alley Oop began to take form. He moved to Des Moines and one day in a fit of despondency threw all his drawings onto the fire. “I didn’t think I’d ever get over it,” his wife said.

In July 1933 Hamlin began all over again, writing and drawing his caveman feature for syndication by NEA beginning on August 7, 1933. Hamlin liked to think of himself as the biographer of the strip rather than the author. According to Hamlin Alley Oop was “just a big dope.” Mrs. Hamlin did all the color work for the Sunday Alley Oop.

In the beginning Alley, King Guz, Foozy, Oola and the other denizens of Moo were planned as human gimmicks to give conversation to a comic projected with mute Dinny the dinosaur as the lead character. The human element took over little by little and Dinny was relegated to the background. On April 7, 1939 Hamlin took a chance that his readers would follow Alley Oop into the present with the introduction of a time machine. One perplexed New York doctor psychoanalyzed Hamlin and “discovered” a dissatisfaction complex that had caused the artist to make the change.

When Hamlin retired in 1973 Oop’s writing and drawing were taken over by Dave Graue, his assistant of twenty years. Graue’s interest in cartooning began when he was a young boy copying the Chicago Tribune comics. V. T. Hamlin’s daughter, a high school classmate of Graue’s, introduced the two men. Graue was off to Air Force duty in WWII when Hamlin gave him a sketch of Alley Oop in an airplane. Graue gave him a sketch in return. “I guess I must have impressed him,” said Graue, “he got in touch with me after the war and asked me if I’d like to give up my job as a soda jerk to do some color charts and some lettering for him.”

Hamlin died at his home in Florida in 1993 but alley Oop continues to this day, written by Carole Bender and drawn by Jack Bender.

*The five Oop strips on top are dated April 3, April 4, April 6, April 8 and April 9, 1959. The three Oop strips on bottom are dated April 24, April 25 and April 30, 1959.