Merry Menagery

Sunday Surprise Day. With yesterdays long run of Hi and Lois dailies from 1959 comes a similar run of another member from Walker Family of strips, the unjustly forgotten Mrs. Fitz' Flats. It was drawn by Frank Roberge (who also did the Beetle comics and worked for the family deep into this century), but if you compare it to his other work you can see he must have followed the sketches by Mort, Jerry Dumas and the other writers very closely. I love the basic idea of an old lady running a boarding house, I love the characters and the gags are of the same quality as those for Hi and Lois and Beetle at the same time.

Hi, honey! I'm not always home!

Saturday Leftover Day. You can always make me happy with any strip from the Walker Family of hits from late fifties and early sixties. What I particulary like about this long run of weekly combined dailies is that is includes all the side arena's the later 'family strip' still had in it's early days. It has Hi at his work (complete with a funny little boss), the two garbage men, the chinese laundry man (which was even becoming a little bit old fashioned even then) and if you are lucky you'll see Lucky's other brother - her famous brother being Beetle Bailey, of course - who has a much younger brotehr of his own, which we never see in Hi and Lois. In fact, in those early days, Hi and Lois wasn't as much a 'family strip' as it was a strip about a man at his work and at home - sort of like The Dick van Dyke Show, with similar humor.