Sunday 9 October 2011

Flintstones, Sunday, October 1961

Here’s the bonus comic post we promised. The Flintstones Sunday comics debuted 50 years ago this month so let’s spend the anniversary looking at what Stone Age family fans got to see back then. The debut comic has been grabbed from Mike Lynch’s website, the others are scans of newspaper photocopies. Jerry Eisenberg told me his dad Harvey did the first five Sunday comics then begged off because of the workload.



The Flintstones’ first appearance in the Sunday (in Canada, Saturday) papers was October 8th. The overhead view of the garage is a nice layout variation.
Why Dino is going “gleech,” I don’t know. And there’s a bit of unintentional inside humour with Barney pretending to be Dino’s voice, since Mel Blanc did both of them on the cartoons. Wilma batting Fred like that doesn’t strike me as something that would happen on TV, especially after Pebbly-poo was born and the show became tame. Fortunately, that little shark-jumping bait hadn’t been invented yet.



The guys are floating in the air on October 15th, reminiscent of ‘The Flintstone Flyer’ episode. One of the things I’ve noticed about these early comics is the character designs look pretty much like what you see on TV (Wilma in the lower left-hand panel for example). Their faces started to look disconcertingly odd after awhile; I won’t begin to speculate who was drawing the comics then.



A couple of silhouette panels highlight the October 22nd comic. I can see this as a gag they’d use on the TV show.



They must have loved dentistry in Bedrock. This comic from October 29th predates the ‘Nuttin’ But the Tooth’ episode of The Flintstones with Smiley Molar, dinosaur dentist (only on the TV show, Barney is the patient).

As with the Yogi Sunday comics, you can click on them to enlarge them.

5 comments:

  1. The interesting thing about these initial Sunday comics is that, at the time, this was the only way people could regularly see "The Flintstones" in full color. Even though the series was filmed in color from the beginning, ABC did not colorcast it until September 1962, due to a lack of technical and financial resources.

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  2. it is nice that you have the first comic which was October 8th 1961 Welcome to The New York Galete (Galeta) in Italian.

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  3. "Yowp-Yowp" Dodsworth and HB-fans from the whole world,

    Three months before the Flintstones comic strip première in the newspapers from the whole world (via McNaught Syndicate), the Flintstones classical series (Hanna-Barbera/Columbia Pictures, 1960-66) was appearing for the first time in a cover from the TV Guide magazine.
    And this cover appears in the following link:

    http://timstvshowcase.com/610701.jpg

    Enjoy to see it!

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  4. There's a tryout of a Flintstones daily strip drawn by the legendary Harvey Eisenberg (the "Carl Barks from Hanna-Barbera") in the early 60s, which I've seen in the following link: http://www.comicartfans/forsaledetails.asp?artid=373494. On it, Fred is having a nightmare where he's being chased by a T-rex with the Barney's face, a pterodactyl with a Wilma's face and a crowd of vultures, all of them with the Wilma's face (which reminds very much the legendary harpies [creatures which have the body of eagles and the head of women] from the Greek mythology).
    Enjoy to see this material!

    "Harpies Bizarre (a parody of the centenary Harper's Bazaar magazine): it's what all the wise witches are reading!" (Agnes Moorehead [as Endora], in Bewitched)

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  5. We cannot forget that, when Harvey Eisenberg was drawing the first five Flintstones Sunday pages, he's was very involved with the Yogi Bear daily panels and Sunday pages, as also with the Hanna-Barbera comic books which he was drawing for Dell Comics.
    He was also doing the first Flintstones daily strips alternatively, with Gene Hazelton.

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