Here you see, courtesy of Steve Cottle of the I LOVE COMICS archive, three non-sequential mid-fifties Sundays from a comic strip I would love to see collected as, I know, would a lot of other people. I first heard of LONG SAM when I was a teenager and ran across an old suitcase in a storage area that my mother hadn't used in two decades , still packed from her last use. Along with old scarfs, a sweater and long atrophied makeup was a copy of a 1955 Sunday paper from North Carolina...and the one strip in it I had never heard of was LONG SAM.
Created by Al Capp as a kind of distaff version of his already classic LI'L ABNER, it was quickly turned over to the cartoonist's brother Eliot Caplin. Art the whole time was provided by Bob Lubbers who, I found out later, had worked in comic books and had a run on the syndicated TARZAN strip as well.
This is the Golden Age of comic book reprints. Somebody needs to reprint gems like this well-drawn and written strip!
Those are really great strips and now I want to see more. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteSometime in the '80s i got a call from Eliot Caplin (whom I didn't know--well, didn't personally know) inquiring about my willingness/interest in drawing a syndicated strip he wanted to sell... I can't remember the name, but it was, for all intents and purposes, LI'L ABNER... jim Engel
ReplyDeleteWould love to know how to view more
ReplyDeleteepisodes of this comic strip
of Long Sam. I always wondered
what happened to her.
Isn't she the girl that followed a star and would climb a mountain top
only to "disappear" then return
mysteriously again?
I'm trying to remember from the
fifties and was a young girl
who cut the comic strip out and
save to read over and over.
Lost it somewhere?
Supposed to be a fairly in depth piece on LONG SAM coming up in an issue of the magazine HOGAN'S ALLEY soon.
ReplyDeleteThe Long Sam strip began in a really backwoods setting where she lived with her mother. There came a time when she accidentally wandered into the 'real world'. I remember the strip wherein she and her mother attacked the 'monster', well actually it was an automobile with its headlights on! Great strip! I followed it in the Thomasville Times Enterprise, a then five cent daily in Thomasville, GA!
ReplyDelete