| A Stretch in the Bone Age "Can
you imagine what would happen to the science of paleontology when a
crew working on the excavation of a large upper cretaceous dinosaur
comes upon the fossil remains of a humanoid in intimate juxtaposition
with the saurian's skull—especially when a grooved stone nearby is identified
as an axehead?" The question was mischievously posed
by V.T. Hamlin, who knew perfectly well that science long ago established
that humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time. But for Hamlin,
they did—albeit only on paper in the inked figments of his imagination,
the characters of his celebrated comic strip, Alley
Oop. Vincent Trout Hamlin arrived on May
10, 1900 in Perry, Iowa, the son of Frederick Clarence Hamlin, a dentist,
and Erma Garland Trout, housewife. Born prematurely, Hamlin was always
small (never more than five-foot-six, 150 pounds) but enjoyed playing
sports, particularly football. Drawing from an early age, he received
little formal instruction until entering college. As a youth, he delivered
newspapers and ran the projector at a local movie theater. While in
high school, he contributed cartoons to the local paper, learned photography,
and, playing football, broke his drawing hand, the first in a series
of fractures and injuries that plagued him all his life, resulting,
finally, in his claiming to have broken every bone in his body by the
time he was thirty. In April 1917, shortly after the United
States entered World War I and before his seventeenth birthday, Hamlin
quit school, lied about his age, and enlisted in the Army with seven
of his high school chums. Overseas, he served as a truck driver with
the Sixth Army's 307th Motor Transport Group. He was hospitalized
twice, once with the flu and once after falling into a canal, but was
under fire in only the last weeks of the war. Hamlin's outfit was poised
to assault the fortified city of Metz. "My God!" Hamlin exclaimed,
remembering the situation. "If we had been ordered to take that
under fire, I don't think any of us would have survived." But the
War suddenly ended. "On November 11," Hamlin
said, "the firing stopped. It was tremendous! All of a sudden—silence!
You have no idea what that silence was like. We had been listening to
that goddamn war for days. Then all of a sudden, it was quiet."
Discharged in the summer of 1919, Hamlin
resumed his high school career that fall, lettering in football. He
did not finish his senior year or get a diploma, but while drawing cartoons
for the yearbook, he met his future wife, the editor, Grace Dorothy
Stapleton, who was two years younger than he. He drove a cement truck
for a local construction company until September 1920, when, with a
veteran's dispensation in lieu of a highschool diploma, he enrolled
at the University of Missouri. Hamlin took courses in journalism, history,
and art but was dismissed from the latter after quarreling with the
instructor. The art teacher looked at Hamlin's
conventional rendering of a tiger and said it was "the work of
a truly fine artist, but he wants to perjure this God-given gift to
become a cartoonist." Hamlin said: "When she gave me my tiger
back, I proceeded to paint on a top hat, put spats on his feet, a cigar
in his mouth and a cane in the crook of his tail. After that, I was
out." He left a dissatisfied customer of academia: "I didn't
like the fact that I was spending money to get what I wanted, but [wasn't
getting it]. That didn't make any difference to them: I got what they
wanted to give me." He completed the semester and then
left for Des Moines, Iowa, where he was accepted at Drake University.
Working nights as a reporter at the Des
Moines Register, he enjoyed the work so much that he quit school
altogether. "It seemed," he said, "I was well on the
way—until one evening a smart-mouthed editorial hotshot provoked me
to smack him flat onto the night city editor's lap and got me fired."
Hamlin returned to Perry. One day he went target shooting with his father,
an expert marksman, whose gun inexplicably exploded and buried a bullet
in his son's left leg. While recuperating, Hamlin spent a good deal
of time getting to know Dorothy Stapleton better. After recovering,
he began a peripatetic life, traveling widely for the next eight years
in search of jobs and a career. He hopped a late-night passenger train
to Sioux City, but he found no openings in newspapers there or in Omaha.
So he continued westward, as he recounted in his unpublished autobiography,
The Man Who Walked with Dinosaurs: "On
a Union Pacific freight train with half a hundred other job-seeking
ex-servicemen, I rode the hump west out of Cheyenne, on past Ogden,
Utah, Reno and Sparks, Nevada, through miles and miles of snow sheds
and tunnels. Times were tough, but they taught me to make a dime do
a dollar's work for a healthy, hungry stomach. Roseville, California,
just north of Sacramento, took my last dime for doughnuts and coffee
in a little place where one could get the most for his money. It wasn't
too discouraging. I'd met up with some pretty nice guys, learned to
wash up in a hobo jungle, along with a gaggle of other bits of important
information—like making a serving of soup for free in a stand-up all-night
restaurant by crumbling a handful of crackers into a glass of one-half
catsup and water. North through Oregon, I dropped off to see my Aunt
Mary's old place in Salem, which I had visited with my mother back in
1908. Although Mary had been gone for many years, the weather-beaten
old house by the brook was still there, as was the old Y streetcar line
that ended two blocks away at the little grocery where we used to get
those yummy cocoanut macaroons." From Salem, Hamlin went through Portland
to Settle where his uncle, Frank Day, got him a job on the Seattle Star as a substitute for a vacationing
reporter. "It was an exciting ten days," Hamlin wrote, "devoted
mostly to coverage of a famous bank robber's escape from McNeil Island
federal prison." Then the reporter returned, and Hamlin "sadly
boarded a string of eastbound flats" through Idaho, Montana, and
South Dakota back to Perry, where his mother persuaded his father to
finance a correspondence course for him in newspaper art. The "dean"
of the correspondence school subsequently recommended Hamlin for a short-lived
job with a Des Moines advertising agency and then in the art department
of the Texas Grubstaker in Fort Worth, where,
on May 29, 1922, he became the cartoonist and head of the department.
And a Texan. Hamlin's varied journalistic career
as reporter, artist and/or photographer continued in Houston and, briefly,
in Cincinnati and Dayton, Ohio, as well as in Forth Worth. He also worked
in advertising agencies in assorted locales and drew maps of oil fields
in Texas. It was in Texas that he took his first airplane ride and subsequently
did aerial photography of oil fields. Then he turned to semi-professional
boxing for awhile and broke his drawing hand again; "I had glass
hands," he said later. In the spring of 1927, he went to California
and took and passed a film test in Hollywood but didn't find work in
the motion picture industry. Back in Texas, he photographed the 1928
Democratic Convention in Houston and, in 1929, took his camera to Mexico
to cover a short-lived revolution, and survived a plane crash on the
return trip. He wasn't injured, but by then his body had been abused
plenty. Recalling his Texas newspapering career, Hamlin said, "While
I was covering newsworthy events in the oil and cattle country with
a camera, I fractured my spine, broke my right wrist once and my nose
three times. I also stopped hot lead twice." In later life, Hamlin
looked the part he'd played: he was a short man with a lopsided face,
and his crooked grin sported a scar on the upper lip. But his life wasn't all work and abuse.
"Girls?" he asked rhetorically in his autobiography. "You
bet. In that business, you meet lots of people, and as any press cameraman
could tell you, there's far more women in the world than men, and a
goodly number are young, warm, and good-looking. I dated my share of
those fair young Texas lovelies—clerks, students, secretaries, a waitress
or two, all nice kids and good company." But the memory of "a
girl back in Iowa" brought him back to Perry in the summer of 1926.
"Perhaps dazzled by her suitor's opulence, as evidenced by his
flashy, six-cylinder buggy, she looked with favor on the suggestion
that she become a Texan—legally, of course." Dorothy became Hamlin's
wife on December 24, 1926, and within a year, they had a daughter; a
son was born nine years later. Dorothy was with him on his California
jaunt in the spring of 1927, and, as she would countless times in the
future, she bailed him out, pawning her engagement ring to get traveling
money for their return to Fort Worth. It was a picaresque trip. "We spent the first night asleep
in the car in a driving rainstorm on Donner Pass," Hamlin wrote.
"I don't remember the exact route or many of the places we passed
through. ... We had one canvas army cot and a couple of blankets, but
we managed to sleep well, warm and snug, through the vast high country.
At Geen River, Wyoming, we just had to take on a substantial meal even
though it left our treasury with barely enough to make it to Fort Collins,
Colorado. A newspaperman's gift of five dollars helped us along to a
telegraph office in Denver, and Dorothy's mother wired us a bundled
to see us from Blossom Bend in South Denver over Raton Pass and Texline,
where we once again put our feet under a restaurant table loaded with
pancakes and sausage. Fort Worth was not far away, and our faithful
roadster was performing like a hungry colt headed downhill for the barn."
In Fort Worth, Hamlin made a deal with
the editor of an oil industry newspaper to supply whatever editorial
art he needed in exchange for free office space and telephone privileges.
He then "corralled a remuda" of former clients "who seemed
pleased to have their map man back." In the ensuing months while
researching illustration material for the Texas
Oil World, Hamlin assembled a quantity of paleo-geological knowledge
that awakened an interest in prehistoric periods that would finally
find expression in Alley Oop,
moving from fossil fuel to fossils themselves and the ancient life
forms they represent. Throughout the epic of this decade,
Hamlin's interest in cartooning persisted. In 1923 while at the Forth
Worth Star-Telegram, the paper's circulation
manager, Harold Hough, persuaded him to do a comic strip based upon
Hough's daily performance as a comical hired hand on a local radio program.
Resurrecting a visage he had concocted as a youth, inspired by the Irish
caricature in such comic strips as Happy
Hooligan, Hamlin adapted it to Hough's appearance, and The Hired Hand at WBAP ran as a four-panel comic strip for several
weeks, garnering enough popularity to be reprinted in a booklet in March
1924. A minor character in the strip was a secretary named "Dot."
As Hamlin hoped, the feature attracted the attention of "crusty
old Wallace Simpson, the Telegram's
cowboy artist," and Hamlin was transferred into the art department.
There, he did a daily two-column cartoon about the Forth Worth baseball
team, The Panther Kitten, whose face, minus a few feline modifications,
looked not unlike the simian-visaged Alley Oop would look a decade later.
Pictures of the animal conveyed in an instant the fate of the team.
"One look at the Kitten on the sports page," Hamlin said,
"and you knew how the home team fared that day. A happy cat denoted
a victory while an unhappy or angry one indicated that some club like
Shreveport or Wichita Falls had clobbered them. These cartoons were
drawn some time in advance and covered every possible contingency, even
rain-outs," so the editor could slip one into print without delay.
When the Panthers' hopes for a pennant were dashed that summer for the
first time in years by the Dallas Steers, Hamlin said, his "damned
black cat" got the blame. Subsequently, at the Houston Press late in 1928, he experimented with a strip about a flapper,
Flip and Flap, but lost interest
and gave it up. In 1929, Hamlin found a position at the Des Moines Register-Tribune as foreman
of the seven-person art department, and he got serious about working
up comic strip ideas. "I was turning thirty," he
wrote, "and if I was ever going to get into comics, I had better
get started. To get my foot in the door, I knew it was necessary to
come up with a subject not only of which I had a working knowledge,
but one differing from what was currently running in the comic sections."
The domestic theme was already being exploited by
Toots and Casper, Bringing Up Father, Gasoline Alley, Polly and Her
Pals, and others; "kid stuff" was over-crowded with Skippy,
Freckles, Reg'lar Fellers, Smitty, Orphan Annie, and so on. Joe Palooka and Barney Google "took care of sports." The adventure field
was on the cusp of its greatest years, but even before Dick Tracy and Terry and the
Pirates, Hamlin saw Wash Tubbs
and Hairbreadth Harry and
Tailspin Tommy as filling the niche adequately.
Then Dorothy bailed him out. "My wife," he explained, "kept
insisting I experiment with a comic based on my knowledge of the past."
And suddenly, that seemed to fit. As Hamlin put it: "My admiration
for Dick Calkins' work [on Buck
Rogers], a beautifully executed story strip concerned with the distant
future, had definitely inspired me [to become a comic strip cartoonist].
The challenge, as I saw it, was to come up with a storyline in such
great contrast to Buck's futuristic tale [that] they would just have
to go together. I would go 'way back into the dinosaur age that only
an imagination fueled by geological lore could dream up; an area as
yet untouched by the boys at the drawing boards. I called it the bone
age. I still do. We settled on what we felt would have an outstanding
eye appeal. We'd do a strip that featured dinosaurs. That subject would
be just the ticket for a couple of ambitious young folks from Texas
where Sinclair Oil Company had made the big prehistoric reptiles a startling
advertising showpiece. Not only did we choose dinosaurs for their spectacular
appeal, but we thought they'd be funny—like the big Plymouth Rock chickens
that amused me as a child on my grandparent's farm. They were funny
in their dignified dumbness, and, somehow, [they were] dinosaur-like.
They reminded me of the big two-legged variety I loved to draw with
mouths full of big sharp teeth. "So the first character I dreamed
up and perfected," Hamlin continued, "was Dinny the Dinosaur,
a big fellow some forty feet long with a row of upright pointed plates
along his spine from head to tail, a head more avian than reptile with
a big mouth full of tyrannosaurus-type teeth. I can assure you no paleontological
dig will ever unearth the skeletal remains of a creature such as my
beloved cartoonosaurus. In creating Dinny for my story's purpose, considerable
care was taken to construct a creature to look like a dinosaur, but
to be distinguishable from all others of that or any other geological
period. The body was a cross between a camarasaurus and a diplodocus,
the spinal plates slightly similar to those of a stegosaurus and the
head, mouth and all, came right off a Bluebook magazine cover illustration
by Herbert Morton Stoops, one of the most inspiring illustrators of
that grand period of pulp magazine adventure fiction. The critter wasn't
put together all in one day either, but once assembled, I had a feeling
he was going to take me and my characters a lot of places—and he did."
Later, Hamlin speculated that Sinclair Oil, in adopting a giant green
lizard dinosaur as its symbol, boosted the popularity of dinosaurs in
the popular imagination. Hamlin's first use of his cartoonosaurus
was in a strip about a modern family living in prehistoric times among
the dinosaurs, but he soon abandoned that idea in favor of a strip about
the adventures of a cave man. Entitled Oop
the Mighty, it paired its eponymous protagonist with Dinny. After
spending the year 1930 developing it, Hamlin decided the work was unsatisfactory.
"And so, before the eyes of my astonished family, my wife Dorothy
and little daughter Teddy, I pitched the whole batch into the fireplace
and sadly watched them disappear in flames." But the caveman idea haunted him during
a summer trip [1931] to northern Minnesota, and while taking up fly
fishing, Hamlin re-imagined his concept and gave Oop a first name, and
when he returned to Des Moines, he produced his first Alley Oop strips. "Dinny was the subject of the feature's first
story," Hamlin remembered, "which began when our hero, deep
in the jungle in search of some choice morsel for dinner, happened upon
the huge monster hopelessly entrapped in a tangle of tough—and I do
mean tough—undergrowth. Alley's first thought was that this was a bonanza
of good red meat, enough to feed everyone in the kingdom for days to
come." But Oop decides, instead, to free the creature, and when
he does, Dinny, in gratitude, becomes the cave man's devoted pet forever
after. "Sound familiar?" Hamlin wrote. "Yes, it was a
definite literary theft, stolen, no doubt, from some Aesop's fable I'd
read about a chap who'd removed a nasty thorn from the paw of a lion."
Hamlin couldn't remember exactly how he came up with his cave man's
name. Considering his service in France during World War I, though,
he once supposed that Oop's name was probably inspired by a French term
used by tumblers (allez oop) because
"Oop is really a roughhouse tumbler." Later, Hamlin discovered
a translation of the expression that means "all of us." The first story, says Lee Castro, an
Alley Oop devotee, was "exuberantly
unique—a heady concoction of fast-paced slapstick, elegant farce, occasional
satire, and nightmarish monsters served up with an air of wild abandon
... a perfectly balanced farcical chase sequence in miniature, complete
with pratfalls, reversals, and plenty of thrills, chills and spills.
All this and scores of ferociously funny dinosaurs—who could ask for
anything more?" Hamlin took Alley Oop first to the outfit that distributed his much-admired Buck Rogers, but John Dille Syndicate rejected
it: saying it "neither fish nor fowl," they apparently couldn't
decide how to market it. Hamlin then responded to an ad in the Chicago Tribune asking for comic strip
submissions, and a small syndicate, Bonnett-Brown, bought Alley Oop. "This little Chicago outfit," Hamlin wrote later,
"was what was known in those days as a patent medicine syndicate.
They did a business with small, mostly rural publications, trading various
kinds of novelty features for valuable advertising space." Dinny
and Alley Oop debuted on December 5, 1932, and, Hamlin reported, it
quickly "proved to be Bonnett-Brown's headliner, and in no time
at all was being published in some 35-40 papers." But Bonnett-Brown,
struggling through the Depression, did not survive the winter; it went
out of business, and Alley Oop ceased with the strip dated March 2, 1933. But the newspapers who'd subscribed
to the strip wanted more of it, and some of them appealed to the Newspaper
Enterprise Association, a Cleveland-based syndicate, whose editors (one
of whom Hamlin had met while covering the 1928 Democratic Convention
in Houston) agreed that Alley
Oop was a good candidate—a brand new "reader tested" strip
ready for the taking. But by then, on one knew who to talk to about
a contract—or where to find Hamlin. Then one of the NEA salesmen found
the answer pinned to the wall over a reporter's desk in Fairbault, Minnesota—a
hand-colored Alley Oop Christmas card, complete with Hamlin's address.
The reporter (whose name Hamlin neglected to mention when telling this
story) had been in the bed next to Hamlin's when he was recovering in
an army hospital from the flu in 1918. The two struck up an acquaintance
based, at first, upon the other man's coming from Fairbault, a town
not too far north of Perry. "He wrote letters home,"
Hamlin recalled during an interview with Castro (The Comics Journal, No. 212; May 1999), "and I illustrated them
for him. He was a newsman, and he suggested that I go into the newspaper
business. After Alley Oop got
started with Bonnett-Brown, I sent him a Christmas card to prove that
I'd followed his advice—even though I'd decided to do that before he'd
suggested it." Hamlin re-drew and refined the opening
sequence of the strip for an August 7, 1933 re-launch with NEA and moved
to Cleveland. In those days—until Roy Crane broke the tradition—NEA
liked its cartoonists and columnists to live close at hand. Once Dinny
is established as Oop's pet and comrade-in-arms, we meet the rest of
the Moovians: King Guz of Moo (who begins a long rivalry with Oop when
he tries to steal Dinny), his wife Umpateedle (a formidable battle-axe),
and the delectable cave girl, Ooola, Oop's inamorata. (The name has
its origins in the same language that produced allez oop with another expression that
American soldiers might have employed when on leave and witnessing on
the streets of Paris any particularly attractive members of the opposing
sex, "Ooh la-la!") Oop's best friend Foozy (who speaks in
rhyme, an inspiration of Dorothy's) completes the initial ensemble;
later, Hamlin added a conniving shaman, the Grand Wizer. Alley Oop went
on having adventures in the monster-infested jungles and swamps of prehistoric
Moo for the next six years. Survival in this milieu required the toughest
sort of protagonist, and Hamlin made Oop just that. Alley Oop of the early strips is an
obstreperous, belligerent, club-wielding cave man. And if he isn't actually
looking for a fight everywhere he goes, he nonetheless finds one nearly
everywhere. Not only does he have the prickly disposition of a brawler,
he has the appearance of a strong man. Hamlin gave his cave man a great
barrel chest and a bewhiskered bullet-head with no neck (and no ears),
and then he chanced upon the same device that E.C. Segar had used in
showing Popeye's strength (but not consciously imitating Segar). Instead
of making Oop's biceps bulge with power, Hamlin bunched his hero's muscles
right behind his fists in ballooning forearms, a ploy that gave ham-fisted
a visual metaphor. Oop emerges at once as a fighter to reckon with.
And his foes must reckon on more than just the cave man's strength.
Dinny's friendship makes Oop a formidable figure in a scrap: no opponent
can stand long against a man who has a dinosaur to do his bidding. His
own great physical prowess backed up by Dinny, Oop develops a colossal
self-confidence as a fighting man. Supremely secure in the knowledge
of his own physical superiority over just about any circumstance, Oop
proves to be virtually indestructable. (In one adventure, he stays under
water for days without showing the slightest discomfort or alarm.) He's
brave without reservation, and he likes nothing better than a good fight.
Although he is occasionally bested momentarily, he almost always triumphs
at feats requiring physical strength or military cunning. Pugnacious
and cranky—even somewhat peevish—Oop is quite unflappable in a crisis.
Unflappable and invincible—and therefore nearly uncontrollable. Only
Ooola can control him. Ooola is a genuine hard case. Although
she is beautiful (and Hamlin's treatment of her costumes always reveals
her figure to advantage), she is not at all feminine in the traditional
cringing manner of an adventure tales's damsel in distress. Ooola can
think rings around Oop, and if she can't control him by out-smarting
him, she is not above resorting to a swift right hook, which she can
deploy as effectively as Oop uses his stone axe. Hamlin was a little
cagey about the relationship between Oop and Ooola. They were pretty
clearly emotionally attached to each other: one would display jealousy
if the other showed any interest in a member of the opposing gender.
Ooola occasionally referred to Oop as her "boyfriend," so
we know they were, in her mind anyhow, more than mere acquaintances.
But in the 1930s through the 1950s, one had to be careful about how
such romances were conducted and described. Hamlin remembered getting
many questions about it. "Ooola was a pretty nice looking dish
as females go, about as delectable as I could draw her [Dorothy was
Hamlin's model], and it goes without saying that her male companion
was a pretty healthy looking animal—and they spent lots of time together.
Therefore such questions were not only routine, they were quite flattering
as to my ability to breathe life into my pen-and-ink creations."
But Hamlin never revealed whether the two were, er, intimate. In fact,
to the best of my knowledge, he never showed them even kissing—or holding
hands. "Alley was just a big blundering chauvinist," Hamlin
told Lee Castro. "Oh, he was a nice guy. He wasn't a womanizer.
He was very careful to keep his hands off of Ooola. I don't know what
he did behind the scenes," he gave a high-pitched giggle. "I
did a script on that one time—I guess it was about 1965—but I showed
it to my wife, and she just raised hell about it. She said, 'Don't you
dare do that!'" To the basic question, he said, "I plead nolo
contendre." Hamlin's cast made for some rousing
good fun in the jungles of old Moo. And fun it is. In approaching Oop's
adventures, Hamlin kept his sense of humor fully operative. Like Roy
Crane did with Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy, Hamlin treated the threats
against life and limb with realistic deference—the threats were real
enough and therefore dangerous—but Oop's encounters often had comic
outcomes. Hamlin kept up a merry round of madcap adventures in Moo for
the next five years before beginning to feel constrained by the narrow
range of story possibilities imposed upon him by his chosen locale.
Then Dorothy again supplied a vital prompt: remembering a story her
husband had written in high school, she suggested introducing a time
machine. If Alley Oop and Ooola could travel through history, stopping
here and there wherever a good story seemed likely, the story possibilities
would be limitless. Hamlin's interest in prehistory had by this time
broadened considerably into ancient history (as it would eventually
into all history), and time travel enabled him to pursue this interest
in the strip. He went to the syndicate editors in Cleveland immediately
and, after "the best part of a week" of persuading and pleading,
got permission to change the strip, a violent wrench of a change, something
no other strip at the time had managed. On April 6, 1939, Oop and Ooola suddenly fade from our sight in the Moovian jungle; and two days later, they materialize in the laboratory of a twentieth century scientist, Elbert Wonmug (a punning last name celebrating science's most famous theorist, "en stein" being German for "one mug"). Wonmug has invented a Time Machine, and, seeing the rugged resourcefulness of the prehistoric pair, he subsequently sends Alley and Ooola on "fact-finding" missions through the ages: they become time travelers and have adventures in every famous epoch in history.
Later, Oop will have no such scruple
about helping Ulysses evade the clutches of the Cyclops, Circe, and
the Sirens. Survival requires that he exercise whatever ingenuity he
can bring to bear upon the predicament he and his friends find themselves
in, and he's not about to sacrifice his life just so the "history"
Bronson tells him about can course unrippled through time. But Hamlin
always invented a way for Oop's "meddling" to extricate them
all from danger without changing history. Regardless of the cave man's
pragmatic disdain for the niceties of history, whatever he does always
has the effect of bringing events to pass in almost exactly the way
"history" has recorded them. For instance, in Hamlin's version
of the encounter with the one-eyed giant Cyclops, it's Oop who engineers
the escape—not Ulysses. Oop does it in approximately the same way as
legend reports that Ulysses did it: he blinds the giant. But Oop blinds
Cyclops not by driving a stake into his single orb but by punching the
giant in the eye, and the swelling of the resultant blackeye renders
Cyclops blind for the nonce, long enough for Oop and Ulysses and the
rest of Ulysses' crew to flee unharmed. It was this sort of tinkering with
history and legend that would give Alley
Oop its unique appeal over the next thirty years or so. Readers
who had at least a nodding acquaintance with literature and history
were delighted to meet "in the flesh" such intriguing personages
as King Arthur, Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Captain Kidd, Napoleon, Roberta
Crusoe, Aladdin, Julius Caesar, Richard the Lion-hearted, Nero, Pocahontas,
Macbeth, Brunnehilde, Jason and the Golden Fleece, and the like (and
to visit such picturesque places as the California in the days of the
1849 gold rush, Atlantis, ancient Egypt while the Sphinx was being built,
the battle of Hastings in Old England, the moon, and Venus)—and to see
how Oop might tamper with the legends, bending them slightly to suit
his own purposes but never breaking with "history" altogether.
It was a fascinating game. Oop returns to Moo occasionally—for
rest and relaxation presumably, a respite from the rigors of time travel.
But for Hamlin, the appeal of history and its legends proved irresistible,
and he always brought Oop back to the time machine. Having confronted Homer's Iliad, Hamlin
went on to put his gang through the Odyessy, too. In this adventure,
which follows the Trojan War episodes immediately, Oop battles Hercules.
And we are introduced to Oop's life-long nemesis, G. Oscar Boom ("Go
Boom"), an explosives expert who sometimes relies upon Hamlin's
experiences with nitroglycerin in the oil fields of Texas. Boom is a
black-sheep of a scientist who often travels in time with the cave man
but not out of scientific curiosity. Boom's chief motive is to loot
history of valuable relics that might enrich him in the 20th Century.
He tricks Wonmug and Oop into enabling his schemes, but in their execution,
he invariably brings the wrath of the looted down upon himself and Oop.
As a result, Oop is always suspicious of whatever notion Boom comes
up with. But Boom is a highly useful plot device: his nefarious plans
initiate many a time trip. Despite his larcenous proclivities, Boom
is not a villain. In fact, remarkably, there are very few villains in
Alley Oop. And no downright evil. Oop has
antagonists a-plenty, but most of them are legendary characters or historical
personages, and they act as they are supposed to act. Usually, this
means they regard Oop and his entourage as the intruders they are. And
this creates conflict enough for the workings of Hamlin's plots. It
was not necessary to have evil-doers. Hamlin's characters lived for him.
"They were all flesh and blood, like people to me," he said.
"After I got them started, they became a part of me. ... Alley
was not heavily endowed with brains," Hamlin continued. "He
wasn't supposed to be. I think he had a certain physical charm that
was obvious, but it's kind of hard for me to sit here and give you a
word picture of him because he really was a gentle soul, and I think
that he was capable of a lot of affection. I was pretty sure I knew
this character because he practically slept with me: half or two-thirds
of the stories were written while I was in bed—or asleep!" Once Hamlin exclaimed, "Alley
Oop is my life. It's me! Honestly, that guy and I are the same person.
I can't tell where I leave off and he begins. I guess it's just a little
man's worship of a big man." Physically, Alley and Hamlin had nothing
in common: the cartoonist was five-and-a-half feet tall and weighed
about 150 pounds; he estimated that Oop was a six-footer, weighing over
210 pounds. Still, there was a vital connection. The intimacy of the
relationship between Pygmalion and his creation is scarcely unexpected,
but Hamlin stopped short of making Alley his equal. "I found it
expedient to keep my hero's intelligence quotient somewhat inferior
to my own limited mental machinery," he once said. "I never
could understand how a comic artist could live with a character inherently
smarter than he was. Look at Milt Caniff and his characters in Steve Canyon. Now I know Milt Caniff, and
he can't be as smart as his characters." Hamlin's science, as must be apparent
by now, is fantastical. And the cartoonist's interest in science-fiction
is non-existant: his science-fiction is more fiction than science. Hamlin
was not bashful about admitting it. As soon as Wonmug appears on the
scene, the cartoonist had the means to recognize the impossibility of
the Moovian milieu he'd been depicting for the past six years: man and
dinosaurs did not exist concurrently. But Hamlin did not bother to explain
the impossible; he merely acknowledged it.
When Wonmug's assistant protests that
man was "not heard of" in the age of the dinosaurs, Wonmug
nonchalantly gestures at Oop: "Behold the unheard of," he
says simply. Similarly, Hamlin dispenses altogether
with the language barrier by merely ignoring it. Said he: "I offer
no apologetic explanations as to how my caveman could and did converse
with Dr. Wonmug in pretty good run-of-the-mill Americanized English.
In my world of cartoon science there just was no place in the strip's
balloons for a quantity of 'ugs' and 'woofs' and grunts to express what
Oop had on his mind. He'd been speaking understandable English back
in prehistoric Moo, so why not in his new setting?" If Hamlin ever
acknowledged that Oop should not be able to communicated as readily
as he does with Wonmug, Helen of Troy, Cleopatra and all the rest, the
language problem would dog his strip forever and foul the fun that he
and his readers could have. The decision was scarcely good science,
but it was canny storytelling. "My handling of the language problem
didn't seem to bother my readers to any noticeable extent," Hamlin
saisd; "I received no mail on the subject." With the advent of the time travel,
Hamlin makes another subtle change: Oop must now assume a less comedic
and more commanding role in the strip. Oop, after all, is the chief
decision-maker in directing the escapades of several persons whose welfare
often depends upon his skill as both warrior and tactician. Oop becomes
a cool pragmatist, his temper honed to a fine belligerence: he is as
peevish as before albeit much less excitable. But there is still comedy
a-plenty in his adventures: when his horse gives out while he is pursuing
Boom, Oop dismounts but continues his pursuit, now carrying the horse. From the very onset, Hamlin's delicate
cross-hatched shading elevated the artwork in Alley Oop, and his technique improved with time, giving the panels
the textured quality of eighteenth century etchings. And Hamlin enhanced
the eye-appeal of his etchings with strategic use of white space. Sometimes
he left portions of his drawings unfinished, letting the background
fade out entirely in one portion of a panel, which made the picture
function visually as a design rather than as illustration. He played
with the devices of the medium: a speech balloon might appear as smoke
from Oop's cigar; the action depicted in one panel might spill over
into the next in an overlapping rather than sequential manner. Hamlin's strip was a thoroughly unique
creation. As Lee Castro said: "Alley
Oop remains one of a small group of comic strips that defies easy
categorization. Like Little Nemo,
Pogo, and a handful of others, Alley
Oop established its own genre and has never been successfully imitated.
It was not, strictly speaking, an adventure, humor, or fantasy strip
although it contained elements of all of them. At times, It embraced
unrestrained fantasy; and at others, it was scrupulously realistic.
It could be altenately funny and serious. There was no such thing as
a typical Alley Oop story."
But Hamlin was doing more than simply telling a story: he was cartooning a story, blending word and picture
to create his narrative. Throughout the saga of his caveman time traveler,
Hamlin deployed the verbal and the visual in a seamless blend in which
neither words nor the pictures conveyed alone the meaning they achieved
in tandem. The pictures show us a hulking gorilla of a hero; but when
he speaks, we hear a pragmatic realist. When Oop goes into action, brute
force serves canny analysis, and the results are neither haphazard nor
theoretical: they are perfectly executed maneuvers (which, admittedly,
sometimes go awry but always suggest a motivating rationale), and fantasy
becomes reality, idealism animates action, and the brute achieves nobility.
As unique as Alley Oop was in genre, Hamlin's achievement
in the masterful exploitation of his medium made the strip a virtual
exemplar of the art of comic strip cartooning. While putting Oop through his paces
hither and yon, Hamlin led a far from sedentary life himself. Just about
the time Hamlin joined NEA, Roy Crane moved to Florida and set NEA cartoonists
free, and Hamlin followed, settling in Sarasota. But he and his wife
journeyed west every summer to escape the heat, traveling to Oregon,
Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado and sometimes to Texas. During the days,
they fished avidly; and in the evenings, Hamlin produced the comic strip
from whatever rented abode they were occupying. One 1947 story, he drew
on the front porch of his sister's house in Perry, Iowa. During World War II, they gave up travel:
gasoline was hard to come by for civilians. Hamlin volunteered for military
service, but he was forty-one. "They didn't need me," he said.
So he joined the war effort as many of his colleagues did—by urging
his readers to buy war bonds. He also mustered a troupe of show people
and emcee'd their performances before soldiers in camps and hospitals
around Florida. "We had a lot of boys coming in who were badly
damaged and need to be entertained, and other fellows were going over
who needed to be entertained," he remembered. "We had this
big show where four or five of my people would come out, and I would
introduce them by drawing on a great big sheet of paper. There was a
dancer, a singer, and a skater. It was easy to do that kind of stuff.
I had an orange grove, and I put Alley Oop wrappers around oranges,
and during the performance, I would toss a bushel of Alley-Oop-wrapped
oranges into the audience. That was a big success." Hamlin also
raised the morale of the 92nd Heavy Bomber Group based near
their Florida home, painting Alley Oop on the noses the B-17s. The 92nd
was thereafter known as the "Oop Group." In 1942, Hamlin took up boating and
built his own 21-foot cabin cruiser. He joined a yacht club but gave
up sailing ten years later after a near-fatal accident in Sarasota Bay
when he fell overboard while out fishing alone. In 1951, he began racing
midget autos, continuing in the sport even after breaking both wrists
when he flipped the car in a 1959 race. Dorothy was "very angry,"
Hamlin reported, and had "plenty to say about the care of an artist's
hands." But he didn't give up driving until 1963. Then he started
golfing, but he sponsored other drivers in races for several years.
In 1960, Alley Oop hit the airways
in an oft-played eponymous song, one of only four popular ditties based
upon comic strip characters. (The other inspirations were Popeye the
Sailor Man, Orphan Annie, and Barney Google "with the goo-goo-googly
eyes.") Hamlin realized royalty income from the song—"It more
than paid for our sparkling red-leather cushioned T-bird," he said.
And in 1965, Hamlin celebrated his 65th birthday in Iraan,
Texas, scene of some of Hamlin's oil field adventures as a youth, which
chose the occasion to name its municipal park after his character. At its peak in the 1950s, which Hamlin considered his best period, Alley Oop's client list numbered 800 newspapers, but Hamlin's eyesight was deteriorating. In 1950, he had hired an assistant, Dave Graue, who began by lettering the strip and worked into inking backgrounds and then drawing minor characters; and by 1967, Graue was doing most of the drawing. Hamlin continued writing the daily strip until 1970 and wrote and drew the Sunday through 1972, his last Sunday published April 1, 1973. Hamlin's wife Dorothy, who, Hamlin maintained, had done all the thinking for him, died in November 1985; within a year, macular degeneration had destroyed all but Hamlin's peripheral vision. Hamlin died June 14, 1993, in a nursing facility near his home in Brooksville, Florida, where he had moved in 1985 to be near his son. Alley Oop is continued today by Jack Bender and his wife Carole, who writes the strip, but Hamlin's exemplary blend of history and fantasy is, as Lee Castro said, inimitable. Here's a gallery of Oop-art from Hamlin, including a couple of memorable vignettes.
Sources. Hamlin's papers and much of his original art are archived at the University
of Missouri in the Ellis Special Collections. His papers include a 37-page
autobiographical fragment that Hamlin wrote in the early 1980s, The Man Who Walked with Dinosaurs, the
chief source of information here, thanks to Frank Stack, another Hamlin
fan, who sent me a copy. The Comics
Journal, No. 212 (May 1999) published a long 1988 interview Hamlin
gave to Lee Castro, a dedicated fan and historian of the strip. Castro
also wrote "Neither Fish Nor Fowl," an elegant introductory
essay in Kitchen Sink Press's Alley Oop: The Adventures of a Time-Traveling
Caveman (1990), the first of three reprint volumes from KSP. Manuscript
Press subsequently issued a fourth in the continuity. Brief histories
of the strip can be found in standard reference works: Comic Art in America (1959) by Stephen
Becker, The Comics: An Illustrated
History (1974) by Jerry Robinson, and
The Encyclopedia of American Comics from 1897 to the Present (1990),
edited by Ron Goulart. The Bonnett-Brown sequences of the strip are
reprinted in Nos. 1 and 2 of Alley
Oop: The Magazine (1998, Spec Productions, Manitou Springs, CO).
Hamlin's unpublished writings, archived in the Ellis Collections, include
two autobiographies, the aforementioned and For the Record, plus a fishing memoir,
Four Rivers, and a novel, The Devil's Daughter. An obituary appeared
in The New York Times, June
17, 1993.
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