Blondie Daily Strips, 2, 3, and 4 Feb 1933; Three Consecutive Post-Hunger Strike/Pre-Wedding Blondie Dailies

Blondie and Dagwood were married only 17 days after the Hunger Strike ended on 31 Jan 1933, which means that there are only 15 daily strips during the engagement period. The February 4, 1933 daily was the first Blondie original that I ever bought. I saw it on a dealer's table at the San Diego ComicCon in July 1985. I couldn't believe how beautiful Blondie looked in this strip compared to all the other Blondies I had ever seen prior to that moment. When the dealer told me that it was really drawn by Alex Raymond, I not only understood the reason for its supriority, but I also developed a new mania for Blondie originals by Raymond. A couple of months later, I bought the first Hunger Strike from another dealer (who had gotten it before San Diego from the dealer who sold me the Feb. 4 daily).

Not to beat to death my strong disagreement with all who have claimed that Alex Raymond played a relatively minor role in drawing some Blondie originals in the early 1930s, with some going so far as to say that he only drew background elements, minor figures, and the bodies of some of the major characters [with Chic Young drawing the heads], consider how much the woman in profile in the third panel of the second strip shown here resembles the early images of Dale Arden in Raymond's Flash Gordon just a few months later. One only has to look at the Blondie dailies from about the spring of 1931 through the middle of 1933 to see that Alex Raymond, despite representations to the contrary, was drawing all the main characters, beginning probably with Blondie and soon thereafter Dagwood, and, if anything, Young or an assistant other than Raymond, drew the secondary figures -- those figures are very rubbery compared to Raymond's own work. I suppose that one can only speculate why most of literature on the history of Blondie seems to go out of the way to minimize Raymond's participation beginning just a few months after Chic Young created the hugely popular and long published title, but the visual evidence belies these unsupportable claims, which have resulted in some of Raymond's earlist work and most important contributions to humor strips being largely overlooked. This is not to say that Young was not completely justified in originally being credited for the work of a ghost artist in his employ, but after approximately 85 years of keeping a legally permitted fiction/factual deception alive, the issue of Alex Raymond's actual contributions to the strip should be widely reconsidered and recognized.

I had already had these three consecutive strips framed together before I bought the fourth in the sequence, the 5 Feb 1933 daily at an Illustration House auction.