Raeburn van Buren - Abbie an' Slats daily 1946

Abbie an' Slats is one of those long-running strips that must have been quite popular in its day, but seems to have left no lasting impression on popular culture. There've always been lots of originals available, at reasonable prices. I think Raeburn van Buren was an excellent illustrator, designed great characters, and it has lots of period charm and detail, as in the background characters in this example. I admit that I haven't been able to get a feel for the writing of the strip (originally by Al Capp, who then handed it off to his brother Elliot), but it was a favorite of the young Jules Feiffer, who said of it, "I thought it was a perfect comic strip. It was the equivalent, I’ve written about this elsewhere, the equivalent of what Preston Sturges and in a sense Frank Capra were doing in the movies." Makes me want to read a solid run of it and see what he was talking about!

This one is from December 28, 1946. Love that fur coat!