Sam's Strip
| Sam's Strip | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Jerry Dumas, Mort Walker |
| Current status / schedule | Ended |
| Launch date | October 16, 1961 |
| End date | June 1, 1963 |
| Syndicate(s) | King Features Syndicate |
| Publisher(s) | Fantagraphics Books |
| Genre(s) | Metacomic |
| Followed by | Sam and Silo |
Sam's Strip was a humorous comic strip created and produced by Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas. It was distributed by King Features Syndicate from October 1961 to June 1963. The series depended heavily on metahumor, and appearances by famous comic-strip characters.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas would meet on Monday mornings to go over the gag ideas they had worked up for future installments of Walker's strips Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois. Just for fun, they started putting their considerable knowledge of comic-strip history to use in creating gags about characters from different strips and time periods meeting and interacting. An idea eventually came out of these exercises: What about a feature starring a guy who runs his own comic strip as a business? Walker, a fan of alliteration, came up with the title Sam's Strip. They split the gag writing, Dumas did the drawing, and Walker the lettering. When the pair took samples to Walker's regular distributor, King Features Syndicate, four executives barraged them with questions ahout the contents, but there was enough laughter that the editor finally gave the go-ahead.Sam's Strip debuted as a daily only on October 16, 1961.
Bulb-nosed, seemingly neckless Sam owned and operated the comic strip he inhabited, and both he and his bespectacled, unnamed assistant were aware of their fictional, artistic status. They commented on the elements of cartooning, talked to the readers, abused their artist (a fictionalized Dumas), and played with the stock in their Cartoon Prop Closet (which contained everything from idea bulbs and flying money to pain stars and angry thought bubbles), all the while trying any scheme to make their business a success. Along the way, they encountered strip stars such as Blondie and Charlie Brown, cult favorites like Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse, and old-timers such as Happy Hooligan and Tillie the Toiler. Dumas took pride in drawing each character's style exactly (there were no good copy machines at the time), but the job was intensely time-consuming. It took him three weeks to create a week's continuity about a comic characters convention that featured dozens of "guest stars."
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