The Bumsteads had two children, Alexander and Cookie, and they were allowed to grow to teen years by the 1950s, but they're stuck at that age since then. Beasley, who Dagwood routinely collides with as he rushes to work. The strip mostly followed Dagwood's life, including his tense working relationship with his overbearing boss, Mr. Perhaps the most famous example of this over-the-top type of humor is Dagwood's famous giant stacked sandwiches that he would eat.
Now that she was married, Blondie became, essentially, the head of the household, the calm voice of reason, while Dagwood was now the comic relief of the strip, prone to over-the-top situations at work and at home. This, then, led to a total reconfiguration of the strip in terms of their personalities. His parents disowned him over the marriage to a "low class" woman like Blondie, and so the pair had to adjust to their new status in life, and just live a normal suburban life together.
Dagwood was the straight man sucked into Blondie's absurd dilemmas (as Young parodied the melodramas of other strips).Įventually, Young figured that he had hit a limit of soap opera-type stories to parody, so he had Blondie and Dagwood get married. Balancing her in the series was her loving rich playboy boyfriend, Dagwood Bumstead. Young's theory was that if people were too depressed with sad economic news (and most of the other flapper comics had taken on a melodramatic feel), he would go 180 degrees the OTHER way, and have Blondie be an over-the-top comedic character (to the get the sense of the sort of stuff Young was doing, note that an earlier strip he did was called Dumb Dora). After the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the start of the Great Depression, however, people were less interested in seeing flapper stories, and yet, that's exactly what Chic Young decided to try out with a new syndicated series called Blondie.īlondie followed the adventures of a flapper named Blondie Boopadoop. In the aforementioned Nancy spotlight, I noted that the 1920s were big on comic strips starring flappers, as people really got a kick out of the concept of young women essentially doing whatever they could to flaunt authority (just, you know, in rather safe methods for the rest of society as a whole, like cutting their hair short, partying a lot, drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes and having casual sex).
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