The Biggest Comics Crossover of All Time

[filkertom]

Nicked from Mark Evanier's blog, News From Me:

The Blondie newspaper strip will be 75 years old on September 8. To celebrate, members of her clan are paying visits to other strips to invite their characters to a big party. The festivities start today... all the strips involved... lead up to an appearance in the feature by George W. and Laura Bush on September 4. If Cindy Sheehan is still camped out in Crawford on that date, we will probably hear remarks that Bush is too busy to meet with the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq but he has plenty of time to visit Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead.

In any case... here's the current schedule of crossover strips...

• Saturday, August 20: Garfield, Rose is Rose
• Sunday, August 21: B.C.
• Monday, August 22: Mutts
• Tuesday, August 23: Beetle Bailey, Mother Goose and Grimm
• Wednesday, August 24: The Family Circus
• Saturday, August 27: Hi and Lois
• Sunday, August 28: For Better or For Worse, Sally Forth
• Wednesday, August 31: The Family Circus
• Friday, September 2: The Lockhorns
• Saturday, September 3: Dennis the Menace
• August 29-September 3: Curtis
• August 29-September 4: Hagar the Horrible
• Dates Unknown: Zits, Wizard of Id (and again), Gasoline Alley, Dick Tracy, Bizarro

I'll try to keep up on all of these. A silly thing, I know, but I kinda like it.

(Many individual links also nicked from Mark Evanier.)

Comments

[jadasc.livejournal.com]

How much you wanna bet they make an "unscheduled stop-over" in the Boondocks?

[kengr]

If Cindy Sheehan is still camped out in Crawford on that date,

She's been gone for a day or two. She had to return home because her mother suffered a stroke. There was a fair bit about it on the local news because a couple of Oregon mothers had gone there to join the proterst and are staying to "take her place".

[anneb.livejournal.com]

I was wondering if something was up when I saw Elmo show up with the invite in Rose is Rose, yesterday. Way cool.

[denali1.livejournal.com]

Aw man, this is awesome!

[smoooom.livejournal.com]

Way cool!

[rollick.livejournal.com]

Your B.C. link demanded I create a login for the site. You can see the strip here (http://comics.com/creators/bc/archive/bc-20050821.html) without becoming a member of anything.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the heads-up. I actually subscribe to both services, but when I Googled it originally, today's strip came right up....

[rollick.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the heads-up yourself. This is an odd stunt, but I'm curious to see how it plays out.

[wouldyoueva.livejournal.com]

I loved the cross-over strips they do (there was one on April Fool's, many years ago, and recently Dilbert was taken over by a week by various artists), so I'll be looking forward to this.

[darthparadox.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they actually did the April Fool's mix-up for a few years in a row. I was disappointed when they stopped.

[kshandra]

Thanks for posting about this! I'm going to add this to my Memories listing, so when I get back from That Thing In The Desert, all the links will be in one place.

[unclelumpy.livejournal.com]

Each comic as LAME as the last!

(except maybe 'Mutts', that one's kinda cute)

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Like it or not, they're all among the most popular. Besides, For Better Or For Worse, Bizarro, and Sally Forth are top-tier superb. And even The Lockhorns had one of the best and most obvious jokes that no one else ever did: One day, Loretta opened the front door to find Xena: Warrior Princess standing there, holding some books, and Loretta looks over her shoulder and asks, "Leroy? Did you order something from Amazon.com?"

Now, if Mallard Fillmore was in there, I wouldn't have even mentioned this thing. That is lame beyond lame, and not just because I don't agree with the politics.

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

Yeah I'll second that, without being nearly as nasty as I would like to. I'll just say that, imo, this list reads like a primer on What is Wrong With the Comics Page.

[dandelion-diva.livejournal.com]

It's very silly, but I like it too.:)

Gessi

[wwetuesday.livejournal.com]

The Wizard of Id one was today, the king is preparing to make the trip.

[capt-video.livejournal.com]

Looks like The Wizard of Id may be doing a whole week of this... todays strip was also a Dagwood reference.

[cktraveler.livejournal.com]

Err ...

I will grant that perhaps the Wizard of Id can travel forward in time to reach the party, and could use a crystal ball to predict its occurrence. I don't really remember, since I haven't read that strip in a decade and I seem to recall it mostly being about a king, not a wizard. (I don't read any of these any more, now that I think about it.)

Exactly how could characters from B.C. or Hagar the Horrible possibly attend a party in the twenty-first century? (Or twentieth, if we take Blondie being stuck in the 1950s literally.)

Or am I taking things too seriously again?

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Short answer: Yep. ;)

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised that Foxtrot isn't on the list.

That said, I would love to see the party thrown for Dag & Blondie by Boondocks, Zippy, Doonesbury, Non Sequitur, and Get Shorty.

[awfulhorrid.livejournal.com]

I'm watching for an unofficial appearance in Pearls Before Swine.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

That's kind of cool.

I knew this was a big thing in webcomics, but I can't recall having seen it done in commercial strips before. Not that I follow many commercial strips...

[rollick.livejournal.com]

Ooo. Here's the Mutts contribution (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/fun/mutts.asp?date=20050822). I've been coming back to this post and following your links because it saves so much time, and saves me reading a lot of horrid strips looking for the tie-in.

Though I am looking forward to seeing what the "For Better Or For Worse" version looks like.

[rollick.livejournal.com]

Oh, and also:



This is from "Medium Large," (http://www.drinkatwork.com/mediumlarge.html) a sorta-daily webcomic by the guy who writes "Sally Forth," who is apparently a wicked sarcastic bastige when off-duty, and does a lot of comics putting other comics characters or pop-culture figures in compromising lights.