LOAC Essentials Volume 4: Alley Oop 1939

After five years of writing this Flintstones-esque caveman comic, cartoonist V.T. Hamlin abruptly began incorporating time travel and science-fiction elements, utterly transforming the strip. In Alley Oop, Hamlin created a unique concept, marrying his fascination with dinosaurs and prehistoric times to a rollicking style of storytelling and drawing that was simultaneously serious, fantastic, and loaded with slapstick. The series was set in the kingdom of...
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After five years of writing this Flintstones-esque caveman comic, cartoonist V.T. Hamlin abruptly began incorporating time travel and science-fiction elements, utterly transforming the strip.

In Alley Oop, Hamlin created a unique concept, marrying his fascination with dinosaurs and prehistoric times to a rollicking style of storytelling and drawing that was simultaneously serious, fantastic, and loaded with slapstick. The series was set in the kingdom of Moo and starred Alley Oop, the club-wielding caveman, his girlfriend Ooola, friends Dinny the dinosaur and Foozy (who speaks in rhyme), plus Oop's rival, King Guz, and Guz's Queen Umpateedle. Yet Hamlin knew that the strip's horizons in Moo were limited. So it was, in early 1939, that Alley Oop and Ooola see a mysterious box and, to the utter amazement of Guz and his minions, promptly fade from view, followed by the caption: "Dear Reader: you must now say goodbye to Moo...if you are to follow Alley Oop in this strangest of many strange adventures. --V. T. Hamlin". Oop and Ooola had entered a time machine and were now living in the modern-day 20th Century! Their host was the inventor of the time machine, Dr. Elbert Wonmug! No change of such magnitude had ever occurred in a continuing newspaper strip, and readers responded enthusiastically. With every time period in history available as a backdrop, Alley Oop became even more popular.

This volume features Oop's final Moo adventure, followed by his trips to the 20th Century and ancient Greece, where he and Ooola share adventures with brave Ulysses, the lovely Helen of Troy, and the mighty Hercules. V.T. Hamlin would send his characters everywhere and everywhen--but the classic Alley Oop begins with the stories contained in this volume. The book is introduced by Michael T. Price, who first met V. T. Hamlin in the 1960s and remained friendly with him for the rest of the cartoonist's life. Price also composed the musical score for Hip Pocket Theatre's production, Alley Oop.

LOAC Essentials reprints, one year at a time, the daily newspaper strips that are essential to comics history, in a format that preserves, as closely as possible, the original reader experience. By reproducing the strips one per page in an oblong format, it allows us to have the experience of reading the comics one day at a time. Each volume contains seminal strips that are unique creations in their right and also contributed to the advancement of the medium, along with panel-by-panel annotations.