Monday, January 16, 2006
A Strip that Stoops to Conquer
Here's the introductory strip for Sam & Silo, which ran on 4/18/1977 to accompany the first daily. This strip was a reworking of the classic Sam's Strip, Mort Walker's great feature that paid tribute to the history of comics and humorous illustration. Sam's Strip, with its self-referential humor, wasn't a big hit with the masses, and lasted less than two years (10/2/1961 - 6/1/1963).
Over a decade later, Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas teamed up once again to bring the main characters back, but this time in a strip more fit for general consumption. Sam And Silo specializes in slapstick, vaudeville style humor, and has stayed in syndication now with the new formula for almost three decades. Dumas took over full credit for the strip in 1981, and the Sunday strip seems to have been dropped around 1995. Sam And Silo is one of those strips that you never seem to see in newspapers, but yet still continues in syndication year after year. Perhaps it does well in foreign markets?
