Blondie Volume 1
Readers of the long-running newspaper comic strip Blondie will be surprised to learn that it didn’t start out as a bland, formulaic domestic comedy. As these initial installments reveal, Blondie was originally a gold-digging flapper aiming to wed the hapless Dagwood Bumstead, son of a wealthy railroad tycoon who opposes the marriage. Two years after its inception, the strip was floundering—Dagwood would disappear from the continuity for weeks at a time as Blondie dallied with other beaus—until Young got the notion for Dagwood to stage a hunger strike until his parents agreed to the marriage. However, he had to renounce his inheritance to gain their permission, setting the stage for the seven decades of middle-class domesticity that followed. The stunt riveted the attention of newspaper readers, and the subsequent marriage cemented the strip’s place in the pop-culture firmament. The main interest in these early strips is historical and cultural—the art is crude and the humor dated—but comics aficionados will relish the chance to read these rare episodes, collected for the first time. --Gordon Flagg