As you've probably seen countless online articles about now, works from 1930 have entered the public domain in the United States (the main character of the world). This includes primordial versions of Betty Boop and Mickey's mutt Pluto, the Marx Brothers' film version of Animal Crackers (it was a play first!), the Nancy Drew book series and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Maybe we can put together a film adaptation of the latter starring all those characters. Who wants to bankroll that?
1930 also included the debuts of Blondie and Dagwood, as Chic Young's long-running comic strip made its first appearance on September 8th of that year.
Before you get your slasher flick where Dagwood slices his victims up into sandwich meat into pre-production, you might want to know that the strip started off very differently from what most of us tend to think of nowadays. There were no sandwiches (giant or otherwise), and Blondie and Dagwood had no kids as they were not even married yet-- they were college-aged! About 18-20 or so. The first few years of the strip's run focused mainly on Blondie and Dagwood's attempts to court one another, much to the disapproval of Dagwood's wealthy parents (who eventually end up disinheriting him once they finally marry, hence why he's been stuck in a soul-crushing 9-to-5 job like the rest of us for the last 90-odd years).
To wit, I thought it would be fun to post the first month of the strip in its entirety to commemorate the moment. I have the first six years archived in their entirety on my personal digital comics stash, and, hey, sharing these in their entirety ain't piracy anymore!
Click on any of the images for a good look at them. Also, you might notice there's only one Sunday strip-- this isn't due to any omissions, the Sunday strip started on the 28th of the month. (Interestingly, the Sunday strip initially seemed to exist in a separate continuity from the dailies, and had Blondie dating a number of non-Dagwood guys, most prominently a hothead named Hiho.)
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