Free comics from 1950

One of our papers, The Livermore Falls Advertiser, has a weekly feature called "This Week" in which the news from a random year is highlighted. We don't do a 25-50-75-100 years ago style feature because the archives are too trashed.

This year, the young reporter chose 1950 and wrote her piece, and then, as I do each week, I went through looking for an illustration. Unfortunately, none of these fell in the target week, but I found them interesting enough to photograph anyway. "Squire Edgegate" was in the paper fairly frequently, one of three or four regular strips that were made available for free. I'm not sure the business model, but I was tickled by the complaint about gas prices. (click on any of these for larger, more readable versions)

Then I flipped a few more pages and saw a familiar face:

As near as I can tell, the Savings Bonds people had tapped into the nostalgia of vets and probably some loyalty to War Bonds by getting cartoonists to reprise their wartime characters to persuade the vets to invest their benefit payments in bonds.

"Male Call" had ended four years previously, so the idea of a now-civilian running into Lace would be pretty appealing, particularly at a moment when he's got a wad of cash in hand. And, to tell the truth, the idea of Lace promoting bonds wasn't so far-fetched -- she always had a bit of Good Girl lurking around the perimeter. Wish the reproduction had been better, but it's hard to make Lace look bad.

The series ran for a few issues and also included this single panel:

According to lambiek.net, Nick Penn had a couple of strips, including "Helen Highwater," which was a pretty girl strip, and the Navy strip "Stalemate." I suspect that the idea that, with the war over, Stalemate had married Helen and had her knitting booties was pretty funny stuff for those who knew both strips.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the snow continues to slide off the roof. This chunk has a good deal of ice under it, so kind of came down in one piece. I expect at some point it's going to crash onto the path and I'm going to have some serious excavation to do. I just want it to hold on until the weekend so I don't have to confront it on the way to work at 6 a.m.

Anyway, things could be worse. Nobody was living in here -- the actual house is on the other side of the garage and they were mostly using this as storage. They had plans to fix it up, but I suspect those plans have changed. I don't know if the roof was flat before or not, but it sure as hell is now.