Your Friendly Post-Man


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Hi Folks,

      Not much going on this week. We saw the newly refurbished Griffith Park Observatory on Thursday with our painting group. Cathy and I did a painting apiece of the newly rebuilt L.A. landmark while being regaled by a travelling musician, who composed his own songs about people’s bathroom habits (what else?). You owe it to yourself to see all the new things that have been added to the underground, downstairs portion of the Observatory, big solar system models, comparative size models of the planets (Pluto is still included), a new Leonard Nimoy theatre, Wolfgang Puck’s Cafe at the End of the Universe and a new gift shop! It took almost four years to rebuild, but it was worth it. Admission is still free, but it costs adults seven bucks to see a Planetarium show.

In comics this week, here’s Nize Baby from 5/08/1927:

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Poor Papa Feitelbaum definitely has a rabbit problem in this strip.  I love the third panel with Mama getting speared by a goat!

Krazy Kat this week is from 10/2 to 10/7/1939:

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Ignatz can’t appease Offissa Pupp with apples no matter how hard he tries. Mrs. Kwakk-wakk’s no help either.

In Marvelous Mike this week (5/13 to 5/18/1957) :

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Mike uses the IRS and the FBI to put himself in the infamous Mr. Meadows’s foundling home. It looks like the baby-sellers are already on the move! I like how attached Cliff Crump has become to baby Mike. In the 5/12 strip, he declares that he “can’t stand being without him (Mike)..” Cliff’s attitude is slowly changing from being jealous and suspicious of Mike’s intelligence, to becoming dependent on it, and loving the baby more. I made a numbering error in my San Clemente and Comics post last time, the Marvelous Mike strips were actually from May SIXTH through May ELEVENTH, not the Fifth through the Tenth, 1957. It’s sometimes a little hard to read the dates on the strips themselves, so bear with me. As always, thanks to my brother Kurt in St. Louis, the most dangerous city in the U.S.! Kurt braved the hostile atmosphere of the downtown St. Louis public library to print out the microfilm copies of Marvelous Mike that you are reading here. This is a really rare strip, which I hope you are getting a kick out of reading. The promotional ad at the top of the post this week was from April 3rd of 1957. Newspapers still cared about the comic strips in the 1950s. And today….the Los Angeles Times just reduced the Sunday comics from 8 pages to 6, dropping two strips but cramming the remaining strips into such a cramped looking layout that only the faithful will still bother to read. Remember to click on any strip here to see it at readable size.

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