Right Around Home
Encyclopedia
Right Around Home was an innovative comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....

 by Dudley Fisher
Dudley Fisher
Dudley Fisher was a syndicated newspaper cartoonist, best known for his character Myrtle who was introduced in his Sunday page, Right Around Home, distributed by King Features Syndicate under various titles from 1937 to 1964....

 which was distributed by King Features Syndicate
King Features Syndicate
King Features Syndicate, a print syndication company owned by The Hearst Corporation, distributes about 150 comic strips, newspaper columns, editorial cartoons, puzzles and games to nearly 5000 newspapers worldwide...

 from 1937 to 1964.

Fisher drew a suburban setting with a focus on one family in that neighborhood, but what made his Sunday strip
Sunday strip
A Sunday strip is a newspaper comic strip format, where comic strips are printed in the Sunday newspaper, usually in a special section called the Sunday comics, and virtually always in color. Some readers called these sections the Sunday funnies...

 unique was the format. He employed an elevated down-angle view showing numerous characters in an immense single panel that completely filled an entire Sunday page.

Characters and story

The energetic Myrtle and her parents were central figures in the neighborhood. In 1942, King Features asked Fisher to do a daily version of Right Around Home in a conventional comic strip format, and the daily Myrtle began that year. Comics historian Don Markstein
Don Markstein's Toonopedia
Don Markstein's Toonopedia was a web encyclopedia of print cartoons, comic strips and animation. Don D...

 described Fisher's family:
Most pages showed the ensemble cast gathered together for a barbecue, a session of ice skating, or some other event where a lot of little things were going on all at once. But when, a few years later, the syndicate suggested Fisher start a daily version, he decided the smaller format called for a narrower focus. Myrtle, which starred one of the neighborhood kids, began in 1942. Myrtle was a high-spirited girl, not as bratty as Little Iodine
Little Iodine
Little Iodine was a popular Sunday comic strip, created by Jimmy Hatlo, which was syndicated by King Features and had a long run from 1943 until 1985...

 or as nice as Little Dot
Little Dot
Little Dot was a comic book character published by Harvey Comics between 1949 and 1982, and then sporadically until 1994. A little girl obsessed with dots, spots, and round, colorful objects, she first appeared in 1949 as a supporting feature in Sad Sack and by 1953 was given her own series,...

—about on the order of Little Lulu
Little Lulu
"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...

. Her mom and dad, Freddie and Susie in the larger version, were also central players, as were their dog Bingo and her pal Sampson. Other neighbors, including pets, made regular appearances. Even Archie and Alice, a pair of birds that nested in the area and sometimes commented from afar on the Sunday doings, turned up occasionally. Carl Ed (Harold Teen
Harold Teen
Harold Teen was a popular, long-running comic strip written and drawn by Carl Ed . Publisher Joseph Medill Patterson may have suggested, and certainly approved, the strip's concept, loosely based on Booth Tarkington's successful novel Seventeen. Asked in the late 1930s why he had started the strip,...

) also got at least partial credit from 1943-51.


After World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

, the Sunday strip was retitled Myrtle—Right Around Home and later Right Around Home with Myrtle (and sometimes simply Myrtle). When Fisher died in 1951, his assistant Bob Vittur stepped in to draw the strip, which continued until it was dropped in 1964.

Sources

Strickler, Dave
Dave Strickler
Dave Strickler is a reference librarian noted for his compilation of Syndicated Comic Strips and Artists, 1924–1995: The Complete Index, regarded as a major reference work by researchers and historians of newspaper comic strips....

. Syndicated Comic Strips and Artists, 1924-1995: The Complete Index. Cambria, California: Comics Access, 1995. ISBN 0-9700077-0-1

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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