Blondie Read online

Page 4


  Who else but Dagwood can chronically come in late and leave early?

  Dagwood’s job title might as well be office procrastinator.

  CHAPTER 5

  BLONDIEGOES TO WORK

  Blondie, on the other hand, loves to work. And her decision to do so proved to be one of the most cataclysmic changes in the history of the comic strip.

  For the majority of her life, Blondie, like most of the women of her generation, was a homemaker. Content to run the household—a sizable task, especially when you’re married to a guy like Dagwood—she cooked, cleaned, ironed, and raised two children. But as more and more of her compatriots moved into the workforce—changing American life profoundly as they did so—Dean Young began to feel that maybe it was time for Blondie, often called the most famous housewife in America, to join them. In 1991, after months of overtures and hinting, she finally did so, opening Blondie’s Catering Shop with her best friend and neighbor, Tootsie Woodley.

  The decision was not an easy one.

  “I thought about it for a couple of years before I did it,” Dean Young said. “I thought about it and thought about it. I was a little apprehensive. All this time I’d been cruising, going along fine, and this was such a departure from the course we’d been on all these years, like going into uncharted waters.”

  After all, Blondie had happily worked at home for decades and the strip had prospered. Why change it now?

  But, Dean said, “I didn’t want the strip to be an anachronism. And I saw that more and more women kept going into the workplace. [His own wife, Charlotte, had been a teacher for sixteen years.] I wanted Blondie to be a contemporary woman, to be part of that movement. I thought, You can’t hold this back. It’s time to go.”

  Dagwood was harder to convince.

  “He was just used to the tried and true,” Dean said. “For sixty years he was used to having Blondie be a devoted wife and a wonderful mother, and all of a sudden she wants to break the mold and do something different? It’s like whoa, it’s going to change the setup of our household, and he didn’t realize it was going to be for the better. He sure did like the status quo. His thinking was Why would you mess with a good thing?”

  Astute readers will note a certain similarity between author and character here. It’s far from the only one, but the flesh-and-blood guy is a bit more sophisticated. And he has better hair.

  Eventually, though, Dagwood came around—especially when he learned about all the new food he would get to taste-test. Actually, Dean considered several possible careers for Blondie before settling on the catering business. At first, her negotiation skills suggested a very different option: politics.

  Blondie has great street smarts, good common sense, she’s fast on her feet—and she is a very attractive lady.

  “I thought she could run for mayor of her city, or even be a congresswoman or senator,” he recalled. “She’s got great street smarts, good common sense, she’s fast on her feet—she can handle anything—and she’s a very attractive lady. That’s a good combination for a politician. Anybody she ran against would be in real trouble. How could you not vote for Blondie?”

  Luckily for the politicians of the world, though, he decided to go with something closer to home, and on Labor Day 1991, Blondie’s Catering opened—in the Bumstead house.

  The move sent ripples throughout the nation. An icon of American womanhood, of the “traditional” family archetype, was following in the footsteps of millions of women before her and paving the way for millions since. Articles appeared in hundreds of publications; Blondie even made the cover of Working Mother magazine. Jay Leno joked about it on his show, and Peter Jennings named Blondie (and Dean) his “person of the week” on ABC News. Blondie Bumstead’s going to work signaled once and for all that women could be—and were— professionals, wives, and mothers all at the same time. The level of support for the change was astounding. Thousands of letters poured in from readers, men and women all essentially saying the same thing: “You go, girl!”

  “It was huge,” Dean recalled. “I was really surprised. But after all these years of Blondie being a housewife, and then boom, she goes out and gets a job, that was pretty earth-shattering. Maybe I waited a little too long, but still, for Blondie it was groundbreaking.”

  And in the pages of the newspaper, the catering shop was an immediate success. Within a year, Blondie and Tootsie were considering expansion, and in 1995 they moved their endeavor out of the house and into a storefront. Dagwood, as usual, was hesitant about the shift, but he got over it.

  “He had to change some of his ideas,” Dean said. “But I think there were a lot of men and husbands at the time having to reacquaint themselves with the new way of life. So he wasn’t alone.”

  For perhaps the first time in his long life, Dagwood didn’t fall prey to a change in circumstance—he embraced it. Now he is his wife’s number-one fan, customer, and helper, always ready to don an apron—or a napkin—to aid in her pursuit of the perfect meal.

  Blondie, too, has gained something—not just admiration from a new set of fans, but a new sense of self. “I think there’s a degree of respect and credibility that she gained by going out into the workforce,” Dean said. “She’s a gal who can do her own thing.”

  It was quite a transformation, from flighty flapper to professional workingwoman, gold-digger to small-business owner. But the transition from home to work was one that this unflappable lady took in stride. Though the details might be a little different, yet again, Blondie’s growth paralleled that of her audience.

  “I’m really happy with the choice she made,” Dean said. “I’m happy, the Bumsteads are happy, and most importantly, so are the readers.”

  Dagwood 1n his wife's number-one fan, customer, and helper, always ready to don an apron—or a napkin—to aid in her pursuit of the perfect meal

  The transition from home to work was one that this unflappable lady took in stride.

  CHAPTER 6

  FAVORITE STRIPS

  The themes that have been constant in the history of Blondie—eating, sleeping, making a living, and raising children—are the focus of most of its thousands of strips and the source of countless jokes, gags, and one-liners. But as the characters and the comic strip have grown, so too have the situations they find themselves in, from the daily car pool to the catering shop.

  Each new scenario has presented an opportunity to create new characters—like carpoolers Dwitzel Tweezer and Claudia, the no-nonsense attorney; and the endless parade of kooky clients that come knocking on Blondie’s door at the catering shop—and explore a new twist on the Bumstead brand of humor.

  “I want to do new stuff that people can relate to, so I keep updating the comic strip,” says Dean Young. “I think it’s important in the world today that we are current in our thinking.”

  Of course, some stalwart setups and backdrops have remained comical since the early days. The lunch counter, for example, where the special always seems to come with a side of too-honest-for-its-own-good service. Good plumbers will always be hard to come by and expensive to work with. And while traveling salesmen are an extinct breed these days, telephone solicitors are as prevalent as ever (though they are harder to kick out the door). And Dagwood and his family still interact with a variety of service personnel and professionals, from supermarket managers to pet store employees to dentists and doctors—none of whom know what they’re in for when a Bumstead walks in the door.

  “The themes that have been constant in the history of Blondie—eating, sleeping, making a living, and raising children—are the focus of most of its thousands of strips and the source of countless jokes, gags, and one-liners.”

  Finding the humor in these everyday situations is as much a Blondie trademark as Dagwood’s screwy hair.

  Here is a selection of Dean’s favorite strips that deal with the problems that everyone encounters. Hopefully, next time you find yourself stuck with something similar, you’ll be more likely to laugh it off
.

  “I love doing new and current stuff because it keeps the strip fresh and up to date.”

  “I’m happy with my work. The strip’s doing great, and no man, surely, could be happier in his work than I am. I wouldn’t want to be anything other than a cartoonist.”

  CHAPTER 7

  THE 75 TH ANNIVERSARY

  Before television and the Internet, before video games and iPods, the Bumsteads were entertaining multiple generations with their good-natured take on family, domesticity, and the American dream. Even today, when all those things and more serve to divide people’s attention, Blondie enjoys unbelievable popularity. Syndicated to twenty-five hundred newspapers in fifty-five countries and thirty-five languages, devoured by 290 million readers, seven days a week, it is without a doubt the world’s most beloved comic strip.

  So when it came time to commemorate this classic’s seventy-fifth anniversary in 2005, Blondie wanted a real celebration. She clearly deserved it. The party that Dean Young dreamed up for her and the rest of the Bumstead clan was unprecedented; its VIP guests included many of the other beloved characters in the newspaper’s funny pages. Even the president of the United States made an appearance, personally congratulating Dean in a letter.

  The storyline began two months in advance of the actual anniversary gathering—September 4, 2005—when the Bumsteads started sending invitations to their fellow comic mainstays, from Dilbert to Beetle Bailey to Hagar the Horrible, to come to the bash chez Blondie. Making a circuitous journey through the strips of their neighbors-in-newsprint—a trip that was as rare as it was clever, considering the competition among today’s cartoonists—they also made personal appearances or were mentioned in dozens of cartoons to promote the occasion.

  Blondie wanted a real celebration. She clearly deserved it. And Dean Young dreamed up an unprecedented one.

  The anniversary storyline appeared in Garfield, Rose Is Rose, Wizard of Id, Dick Tracy, B.C., Mother Goose & Grimm, Family Circus, Shoe, Hi & Lois, Sally Forth, Gasoline Alley, Snuffy Smith, Buckles, Baby Blues, Zits, Mutts, Curtis, Marvin, For Better or Worse, Born Loser, Dennis the Menace, Cathy, Thick Thin, and Bizarro. Al Konetzni of Walt Disney and Floyd Johnson also memorialized it in single-panel strips. It worked! The Bumstead anniversary was the most star-studded affair in comic history. Fellow comic artists also paid their own tributes to the strip.

  The Bumstead anniversary was the most star-studded affair in comic history.

  Blondie is without a doubt the world’s most beloved comic strip.

  “That immortality-the sense of fantasy-is what’s fun about comic strips. That’s the magical quality.”

  —Dean Young

  Marking more than forty years of his own work on the strip, the event was a highlight for Dean Young. Against all odds, he has managed to extend and even elevate the characters his brilliant father created during the Depression, carrying them through the turn of a century and into another era.

  “The Bumsteads’ world is pretty steady and nice, and it will stay that way,” he says proudly. “That immortality—the sense of fantasy—is what’s fun about comic strips. That’s the magical quality.”

  And just as Dean inherited Blondie from his father, he is preparing to pass it on to his successor—daughter Dana Coston, who will put her own spin on the characters for decades to come.

  Immortality is possible in the comics where the magic, fun, and humor of Blondie will carry on.

  CHAPTER 8

  FOREVER YOUNG

  One of the funny pages’ longest-lasting and most dynamic storylines began inauspiciously enough, with a man who even his friends and family considered painfully shy.

  Murat Bernard Young was born in Chicago, January 9, 1901, and grew up on the south side of St. Louis, a German-Lutheran neighborhood where he inherited typically Teutonic traits like stubbornness, dedication, and frugality, as well as the decidedly un-German nickname “Chic.” His father, James, was a shoe salesman who didn’t think highly of artists. Of course, this meant that all four of his children were creative types. Son Walter was a painter, daughter Jamar a commercial artist, and Chic’s older brother Lyman, the first Young drawn to comics, wound up creating the adventure strip Tim Tyler’s Luck for King Features Syndicate, where Chic would eventually find a home.

  In fact, it was Lyman who cultivated Chic’s talent, urging him to draw at every opportunity. Chic worked on his high school yearbook, but with after-school and weekend jobs as a postal clerk and salesman at the family shoe store, he didn’t have much time to practice. After high school and a typewriting course, he found a job in Chicago as a stenographer for the vice president of the Illinois Central Railroad, who may have served as inspiration for Dagwood’s father, railroad tycoon J. Bolling Bumstead. But he didn’t neglect his talents entirely; he enrolled in night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. The classes paid off. When he was only twenty, Chic secured a job as a cartoonist for the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA) in Cleveland, where he created the first in a long line of strips centered on pretty girls, The Affairs of Jane, which debuted on September 26, 1921.

  Chic working at his drawing board

  Though Jane only lasted six months, it provided Murat Young, as he then signed his work, with a salary (albeit a meager one, twenty-two dollars a week) and a sounding board for his still-maturing talent. His strengths included an unerring ear for social trends and an equally unerring eye for drawing young women, who in the 1920s were finally coming into their own in the pages of the comics and elsewhere.

  Athel Lindorff at her concert harp, just about the time she met Chic Young.

  After his stint with NEA, Chic switched syndicates and created another similarly themed strip, Beautiful Bab, which drew the attention of a particularly important fan. William Randolph Hearst was renowned for discovering talent, and now his attention had landed on Chic Young, then still a struggling young Cleveland cartoonist. The offer that Hearst extended—a job in the art department at the King Features “bullpen” in New York—was technically a step down. But the company was so prestigious for comic artists—many of the cartoonists who were then making it big had started as office boys or touch-up artists there—that Chic gleefully accepted.

  Dumb Dora, Chic Young’s most enduring creation before Blondie, is taking over a newspaper office in this promotional drawing.

  And after he moved to New York, he realized that he’d had a near miss with King Features more than a year before. A King executive traveling through Cleveland had spotted The Affairs of Jane and called NEA. Chic remembered the call; he had answered it himself. But the bullpen at NEA was so full of practical jokers—Chic included—and a call from a King exec to a newbie was so ridiculously unlikely that he simply listened with mock politeness to the request for a meeting with him, made an appointment at a false address, and then hung up, wondering which one of his unsuspecting colleagues was responsible for such a good gag. None of them, it turned out; the offer had been real. But the call he got a year later was at the behest of Hearst himself, so the deal was a better one. Practical jokes, though, were never quite as appealing.

  By 1924, Chic had come up with a more lasting strip, Dumb Dora (subtitle: “She’s Not So Dumb As She Looks”). A true creature of the Jazz Age, Dora sported miniskirts and a cavalier attitude about her suitors. Soon the strip was appearing in more than one hundred papers. Chic’s move to New York had proved fruitful; he was on his way to becoming a success.

  In 1927, he made another step in that direction when he met the beautiful, auburn-haired Athel Lindorff, a French-trained concert harpist from Rock Island, Illinois, who was touring New York. Within days of their first date, she found him on the sidewalk beneath her window.

  “Why don’t you come in out of the cold?” she asked. But he wasn’t interested in short-term company.

  “I want you to come down,” he said. “Let’s get married.” Surprisingly, she agreed, and the marriage lasted forty-six happy years.

 
Though “A,” as Athel came to be known, gave up her career once she married, she always kept a beautiful gold harp in the Young home, which she played regularly to keep her skills intact. (And to allow her husband to make the joke that she was always “harping” on something.) Throughout her life she was an important force in the success of Blondie, reading every strip before it was sent to the syndicate, just as Dean’s wife Charlotte does to this day.

  Jeanne, Athel, Dean, and Chic Young visited Paris in the early 1950s.

  Chic Young

  Personally and professionally, Chic Young now felt set, but it wasn’t long until he felt a creative itch again, not to mention a financial one. After the stock market crash of 1929 dissolved his carefully laid out investments, he was more determined than ever to improve his salary. When the management of King Features refused his request for a raise or for the ownership of Dora, he left—sailing on a cruise ship to France with A in tow. King blinked first, and Chic returned to the promise that he could do his own strip. Over several weeks in the summer of 1930, in his studio in Great Neck Long Island, he created the last comic strip he would ever work on—Blondie.