Claude and Griffy muse over identity and soft serve in today’s Zippy:
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According to my records, Zippy and soft serve came together last in December, when I wrote, here:
In ZippyPopLand, redemption can be found in soft serve. (In particular, New England Soft Serve … in Colchester CT)
The Wikipedia entry on soft serve begins by treating the stuff as a kind of ice cream, which is the way ordinary people think of it:
Soft serve is a type of ice cream that is softer than regular ice cream. Soft serve ice cream has been sold commercially since the late 1930s.
… in ordinary English, ice cream covers a variety of frozen confections — but in the United States, the label is regulated, so that, technically, soft serve is not ice cream.
The inventor of the stuff is disputed; Carvel (Tom Carvel, in Hartsdale NY) and Dairy Queen (J.F. McCullough and his son Alex, near Moline IL) have competing claims to the invention of soft serve. It happened in the 1930s, in any case.
Nice contrast between soft serve and hard-nose (as applied to Dick Cheney).
The cast of characters:
Dick Cheney: Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney (born January 30, 1941) is an American politician and businessman who was the 46th Vice President of the United States from 2001 to 2009, under President George W. Bush. (link)
Captain Queeg: Lieutenant Commander Philip Francis Queeg, USN, is a fictional character in Herman Wouk’s 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny. He is also a character in the identically titled 1954 film adaptation of the novel and in The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, the Broadway theatre adaptation of the novel that opened in the same year as the film. (link)
Dondi: Dondi was a daily comic strip about a large-eyed war orphan of the same name. Created by Gus Edson and Irwin Hasen, it ran in more than 100 newspapers for three decades (September 25, 1955 to June 8, 1986).
… Dondi’s original backstory describes him as a five-year-old World War II orphan of Italian descent. The boy had no memory of his parents or his name, so when a pretty Red Cross worker said he was “a dandy boy,” he thought she was naming him “Dondi.” Two soldiers who spoke no Italian, Ted Wills and Whitey McGowan, found the child wandering through a war-torn village. The soldiers brought the child back to the United States and Ted eventually became his adoptive father. (link)
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Little Lulu, from Wikipedia: “Little Lulu” is the nickname for Lulu Moppett, a comic strip character created in the mid-1930s by Marjorie Henderson Buell. The character debuted in The Saturday Evening Post on February 23, 1935 in a single panel, appearing as a flower girl at a wedding and strewing the aisle with banana peels. Little Lulu replaced Carl Anderson’s Henry, which had been picked up for distribution by King Features Syndicate. The Little Lulu panel continued to run weekly in The Saturday Evening Post until December 30, 1944.
… [main characters] “Little” Lulu Moppet: Lulu is the title character and is often the ringleader of the girls… Lulu is a kind and sincere little girl who, though prone to mischief, usually ends up saving the day.
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Thomas “Tubby” Tompkins: Tubby, whose real name is Thomas, is Lulu’s friend and the leader of the fellers. He has helped Lulu many times and has tormented her just as much.
(#4)
Irwin Tripp: Irving Rose Tripp (June 5, 1921 – November 27, 2009), was an American comic book artist, best known as the illustrator of Little Lulu comics. (link)
A bonus from the Zippy site: “Zippy’s Comic Book Collection”:
30 little imaginary Zippy Comic covers, incuding horror, western, romance, funny animal and other titles. Parodies of Little Lulu, Plastic Man, Archie, Captain Marvel and more.
(#5)
Little Lulu is in the bottom row, the second full panel.
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