Jungle at Night

Let's get back to the Alley Oop sequence we started a while ago. It would be two years after this current time period that VT Hamlin would retire from drawing the Sunday strips, but his drawing seemed as fresh as all the decades before. Hamlin and Walt (Pogo) Kelly were two old-school masters still delivering the goods in the early 1970s.

For the decline of the comic strip, some folks blame the shrinking newspaper sizes, some blame the readers' changing tastes, some blame the zeitgeist. But let's face it, it's the individual cartoonist that makes all the difference, and when Hamlin and Kelly left the stage, the golden age of the comic strip left with them.