Tag: prince valiant

Memory Lane: ‘Mary Worth’

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

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I used to read the comics section in several newspapers, when I was a boy; but I could never quite g0t into Mary Worth, which wasn’t funny, contained no exotic locations or adventures, and didn’t seem–to me, at 12 years old–to be about anything.

I was surprised to discover the Mary Worth comic strip is still going strong. It made its debut in 1938 and it’s still here.

But wait a minute–has Mary gotten younger since the 1960s? Where have all her wrinkles gone (you could turn that into a song, I think)? I’d hardly recognize her. I thought only Merlin got younger as the years went by. Well, Obst, too–but he’s in denial about it.

Mary was always a yenta. Now she speaks as a pop psychiatrist. Did she take a correspondence course? Good grief: “needing a lifestyle change…” Comic strip characters shouldn’t talk like that. It’s not decent. Please don’t tell me Prince Valiant talks like that.

Well, there’s not much point being nostalgic about anything that insists on changing with the times, even if it becomes unrecognizable. Mary Worth has changed more than I have.

I’m sure I don’t want to know any more about it.

Memory Lane: A Quiet Sunday Afternoon

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It’s 1957 again, early Sunday afternoon. I’ve already been to Sunday school, we’ve had our Sunday dinner. Usually on Sunday we visit someone else in the family, or someone visits us; but not today. It’s raining, too early in the year for any baseball on TV, and everything has sort of wound down for a little while: a Sabbath rest.

As for me, it’s time to revel in the Sunday color comics. Prince Valiant. Mandrake the Magician. Flash Gordon. Blondie. Freckles and His Friends. Bugs Bunny. Oh, so many of them! An eight-year-old could spend half the afternoon, doing this. And of course my favorite, Mark Trail.

I didn’t care much for the black-and-white Mark Trail stories on the weekdays, I didn’t understand them, but on Sunday it was goodbye to all that, it was color, and it was one cool animal after another. I didn’t care if I was the only kid on the block who knew about wart hogs, four-eyed fish, and bolas spiders. This was stuff worth knowing! Today I call it God’s stuff. Creation. Back then it was just wonderful, I didn’t have a word for it.

It’s been decades since I’ve had a Sunday newspaper, so I have no idea if any of those old comic strips have been continued. If Mark Trail’s still there, betcha anything they took away his pipe.

But at least he’ll never run out of animals; and neither will we. God never skimped on His Creation.

In Praise of Sunday Color Comics

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Tomorrow I’ll go back to telling truths that will make the progs and lib’rals  mad at me. To honor God, I do try to refrain from doing battle on the Sabbath Day. By obeying His commandment to rest on that day, we proclaim our God’s sovereign lordship over His creation.

Among the pleasant memories that lower my blood pressure are the quiet Sundays of my childhood and, whatever the weather, the Sunday color comics. Crack of the bat and clink of horseshoes in the summer; Sunday school and maybe an afternoon at the movies, if my father was willing, in the winter: but in all seasons, the funny papers.

My folks stuck to the local New Jersey papers, but my grandparents, both sets of them, got the New York Daily News, so they had New York comics. I read those, although a few of the strips in the New York papers, like Moon Mullins and Gasoline Alley, I couldn’t quite get, and one or two others, like Smilin’ Jack, struck me as vaguely sinister. But our local papers didn’t have The Teeny Weenies or Smoky Stover, so I couldn’t afford to ignore the comics in my grandma’s Sunday paper.

But here at home, every Sunday–aah! Prince Valiant: Hal Foster’s spectacular artwork made the Age of Arthur come alive for me–and it still is. Mark Trail midwifed my lifelong fascination with bugs and snakes and other critters. And does anyone out there remember The Little People? And not forgetting one of my all-time favorite lines on a Sunday afternoon: Mandrake gestures hypnotically… And then there was Peanuts.

Stretched out on the floor, quietly reading the comics–there was something to be said for that. Not that it did me any spiritual good, that I know of (although certainly Mark Trail was for me a gold mine of information about nature); but I have since learned that I belong to my Lord seven days a week, for every minute, and I don’t think He minds if I enjoy some undemanding fun on a Sunday.

But those old comics are gone, and the new ones are distasteful.