Thursday, September 02, 2010

Happy 60th Birthday, Beetle Bailey!

Welcome to Kingsport, Beetle. The Kingsport Times was one of only 12 newspapers to carry Beetle when he first began in syndication.



Here's the first Beetle Bailey strip to appear in the Kingsport Times on Sept. 4, 1950. He was a very different Beetle, a college freshman!



Here's how the comics page looked on the day that Beetle debuted.



Beetle didn't catch on until he joined the Army on March 13, 1951.

2 Comments:

At 3:54 PM, Blogger Rachel Newstead said...

Did you happen to notice that the title on the first Beetle Bailey strip is printed as "Bailey Beetle?" At first I thought perhaps the title was meant to be read bottom-to-top, but none of the other two-word titles are printed that way.

 
At 1:37 AM, Blogger Rachel Newstead said...

Decided to revisit this blog post after many years, and happened to notice an odd coincidence. Or rather, one momentous day in comics overlapping with another. Beetle Bailey happened to join the Army the same day that Dennis The Menace appeared in comics for the first time.

 

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