OPEN POST: Sunday Comics With Alley Oop!

As a wee one, I was delighted by "Alley Oop," a comic strip about a hapless caveman and his varied exploits, though I had no idea how much it had changed since it first appeared. 

In fact, seven years after debuting in 1932, the strip made a jaw-dropping, even radical, transformation when its cartoonist, V.T. Hamlin, zapped his caveman hero into the 20th century - and thereafter, into every conceivable time period - making him a humorous and perpetual fish-out-of-water, time-traveling character. 

Before creating the strip, Hamlin served in WWI, where he survived a near-deadly poison gas attack and drafted cartoons during his long recovery. It was then when he realized that he might just have a future as a cartoonist. Luckily, he later ignored the rantings of a college art professor, who announced in class,"'Now here's a man with a wonderful talent and he wants to waste it on being a cartoonist!" 

As the Roaring Twenties unfurled, Hamlin tried unsuccessfully to sell a strip and made ends meet by creating fake labels for bootleg liquor bottles - and though I can't prove it, I'd like to believe that I also did this in a former life in the 1920s because it sounds so impossibly cool and period-specific. He was also, let's face it, kind of a hot piece. 

These days, Hamlin-penned "Alley Oop" book collections are mostly out of print, which is shame. But if you look, you can find them, and years ago, I was gifted with several. If you're a vintage comic strip fan like me, they're well worth seeking out. Whether the caveman is humorously whisked to the era of King Solomon's Mine or Ancient Egypt or to the 1930s and 40s, he's always charmingly blunt, a touch naive - the "dude's dude," in other words - and rarely without his pet dino, Dinny. In the late 70s, Alley Oop and Dinny earned their own stamp. I wish I had one. 

Art Credits: V.T. Hamlin, NEA and Bonnet-Brown Syndicates; University of Missouri, Getty Images, USPS