Early Installment Weirdness / Comic Strips

Left to right, top to bottom: May 28, 1979; September 7, 1981; October 21, 1996; February 18, 2013.
So much for liking Mondays.

• 91:an Karlsson: When it was launched in 1932, the comic used a layout with images drawn by Rudolf Petersson placed above the narration, which was written in rhyming prose and credited to one of two aliases, "Kadudd" and "Kåbeson". Petersson would only start writing all stages of the script himself and using conventional speech bubbles in the early 40's.
• Beetle Bailey:
  • The strip started as a comic about college students. When it didn't take off the characters enlisted in the army on a whim. Sixty years later they have yet to graduate from basic training.
  • Sergeant Snorkel started out as long-faced and only mildly overweight, and he acted like an actual drill sergeant should. Most notably, during this period he never acted violently towards Beetle, instead issuing various standard army punishments, like peeling potatoes. He was also married and had children (although his wife was only shown once, and his kids were only referred to).
• Blondie (1930): When the strip began, Blondie held the protagonist role (as opposed to Dagwood) and was cast as a flapper. The strip placed greater emphasis on Depression-era class divisions, with Dagwood the youthful son of a dynasty of millionaire railroad tycoons and Blondie his lower-middle-class love interest. Dagwood's parents disapproved of the relationship, eventually compelling Dagwood to stage a hunger strike to make his parents give their blessing for the marriage; upon actively wedding Blondie, he was instead disinherited, forcing him into the role of a middle-class homeowner and breadwinner. After this change, Blondie and Dagwood gradually switched roles, Blondie becoming the level headed sensible one, while Dagwood became the big source of comedy for the strip.
• Bloom County evolved massively. Early on, it was a bunch of people living in a boarding house, much like Doonesbury, with Milo Bloom as the main focus. Over time, many details were fine-tuned, many characters were dropped, and the strip shifted to the main focus of Milo, Binkley, and Opus the penguin. (Berkeley Breathed himself has said that he felt the strip didn't really find its focus until Opus became a regular.) The art style was also very blobby and unrefined, with a different lettering style.
• Calvin and Hobbes has enough to get its own page.
• Dilbert was initially focused on the personal life of Dilbert and Dogbert, and was largely Garfield except with a dog who can talk and a lot more in the category of random paranormal weirdness. The office-based strips came a few months later and even then only occasionally appeared. They more or less took over a few years later.
• The Family Circus, when it started out in the 1960s, had stiffer and more rounded art; PJ didn't exist yet; and the dad was more of a stereotypical deadbeat dad/buffoon type who was seen sneaking booze into family events and pounding on the table to ignore his wife. By the 1970s, the dad was overhauled into a much cleaner-cut and more sympathetic figure.
• For Better or for Worse:
  • The first two years or so in the strip were gag-a-day Deconstructive Parody of domestic strips. The format later changed to a long running family dramdey after the Pattersons adopted Farley.
  • The characters didn't start aging in real time until the 1980s.
  • John was initially more openly sexist to Elly to the point where he told her to Stay in the Kitchen. After the first few years, he got more calmer and supportive of Elly’s efforts to do more out of the house.
  • Connie was a Straw Feminist early on.
• FoxTrot, early on, was a lot more realistic and down-to-earth family strip, with realistic character interactions and only occasional bouts of "nerd" humor. Over the 1990s, it began gradually shifting more and more toward a less reality-based strip with greater emphasis on "nerd" humor, pop culture references, satire, and increasing damage to the fourth wall. The art and lettering were also a lot looser and more sketchy, as opposed to the stiffer, more "geometric" style the strip has had since roughly the mid-90s.
  • Pretty much everyone's characterizations got flanderized along the way.
    • Roger went from being credibly clueless and harried (many strips in the first years have him not knowing how to use a computer, which was very plausible for a 40-something in The '80s) to rivaling Homer Simpson in the Bumbling Dad department and losing quite a few IQ points (for instance, one later strip has a computer chess server matching his skill with that of a preschooler).
    • Andy went from merely being concerned for her family's well-being to an exaggeratedly meddlesome and overly-strict disciplinarian who cooks disgusting meals that push "healthiness" above everything else, keeps the thermostat so low that it flash-freezes steam from coffee, and gives her children dictionaries for Christmas. Also, she had a different haircut early on, but this was changed in the strip's first year to make her look less like Paige. Finally, she was originally established to be a newspaper columnist, but this was abandoned after a few years.
    • Peter's massive ego and exaggeratedly Big Eater tendencies were not established until several years in. Before this he was just a normal teenage slacker interested in girls, sports, and rock music.
    • Paige's Lethal Chef tendencies didn't show up for a few years either; in fact, one strip in the first year even has Peter bribing her into baking cookies, a task that would result in Epic Fail any other time. Prior to this she was just a teenaged girl who was interested in shopping and boys but had no luck in the latter.
    • Jason became increasingly nerdy over the years, going from a somewhat normal 10-year-old boy interested in bugs, dinosaurs, and video games to someone capable of writing programs that can take down the entire Internet, and who does his entire year's worth of homework on the first day.
  • Eileen Jacobson and Morton Goldthwait, the respective rivals of Jason and Paige, did not appear until several years in.
  • Jason's teacher was originally Miss Grinchley, who was implied to be very old, strict, and easily angered. She retired after a few years (and only one on-panel appearance) and was replaced by Miss O'Malley, who started out more supportive of Jason's overachieving antics before settling into Apathetic Teacher mode.
  • Before Jason was established as a high achiever who loves school and is oblivious to sports, he was shown in one strip joining Peter and Paige in groveling to the parents on report-card day. In another strip, both he and Peter bring their mitts to a baseball game in hopes of catching a foul ball, and both are heartbroken when the ball they were straining for lands in Paige's popcorn. (Furthermore, Paige is indifferent to the TV cameras aimed at her.)
  • One very early Sunday strip has a throwaway gag of Jason playing Dungeons & Dragons with Peter, who has never been seen doing anything of the sort since.
• Funky Winkerbean was at one time ... we swear we are not making this up ... actually a humor strip, in contrast to the maudlin-drama-with-occasional-comedic-moments strip it later became. For the first two decades or so the main characters were permanent high schoolers who did not age (similar to the gang in Archie); in the early 90s, the characters were retconned so that Funky had graduated a few years previously and began aging in real time. In 2007, the strip suddenly jumped forward ten years (or at least the characters suddenly got ten years older).
• Garfield has lots of it.
  • The art style in the strip's early years looks very different: Garfield had a much fatter, uglier design that was strictly quadrupedal; Odie had black ears instead of brown ears (Jim Davis has implied that this change was done to make him look less like Snoopy), and the art was looser with less of the cartoonish roundness it would take on in The '80s.
  • Jon's claim to be a cartoonist in the very first strip; this is rarely mentioned again.
  • Jon smoked a pipe in early strips, but this quickly fell out of fashion.
  • The May 28, 1979 strip has Garfield state he loves Monday mornings. A Running Gag throughout the series' run is that Garfield hates or has bad luck on Mondays, often with some variant of the phrase "I hate Mondays". It should be noted that Garfield only says he loves Monday mornings because he doesn't have to go to work. It should also be noted Garfield had previously stated his hatred of Mondays in an earlier strip.
  • The early strips' humor also relied more on wordplay (in one early strip, Lyman jokes about watching a movie where a student puts a tack on his teacher's chair because he likes movies where "the guy gets the girl in the end"; another has Garfield calling a diet "'die' with a T") and topical or American-centric cultural references (such as Brigitte Bardot, The Mickey Mouse Club, Labor Day, college football, Milk Duds candies, and Weight Watchers, among other things). Jim Davis gradually phased out wordplay and pop culture references to make the strip more marketable internationally.
  • Several early strips used more than three panels, which rarely happened again after the first year or so. Even then, the few exceptions afterward still fit into the three-panel format just by dividing one of the three panels (most notably the Halloween 1989 arc).
  • A few strips in the first year don't feature Garfield at all, including the aforementioned "guy gets the girl in the end" strip, and another where Jon ogles a magazine centerfold. There have been other strips not to feature Garfield over the years, but they generally involve a "wacky" character (like a date or Jon's family) that Jon or another character can play Straight Man to (the two aforementioned strips do not have that dynamic). This is because some of the early gags were recycled from Jim Davis' previous strip Jon, which was more focused on Jon Arbuckle but still had some of the characters who would later appear in Garfield.
  • In one 1980 strip, Odie actually "speaks". Any other time Odie has been shown speaking since then, it's usually to indicate that someone is dreaming or that something is amiss (such as in the Garfield and Friends episode "Mistakes Will Happen").
• Get Fuzzy: Rob's eyes were almost always covered up by a pair of giant Opaque Nerd Glasses in the strip's early years, if not hidden by other means.
• Peanuts had a lot of oddities early on:
  • The art was quite different: heads were more oval-shaped, and far more perspectives were used (including three-fourths views) before it shifted to the minimalistic "front or side only" style.
  • Early on, Charlie Brown was originally a more cheerful child who liked to play pranks instead of the sadsack loser he'd be known for, and Snoopy was a non-sentient dog who walked on all fours and didn't seem to belong to anyone in particular, as opposed to being Charlie Brown's pet and clearly sentient enough to enact his own myriad fantasies. Overall, the writing was a lot more lighthearted and of a "kids say the darnedest things" nature (much like Schulz's previous strip Li'l Folks), as opposed to the drama, philosophy, religion, and fantasy of later strips.
  • A few early strips had background appearances by adults, or even offscreen dialogue from them. After a while, the strip became entirely focused on the children.
  • The original lead characters besides Charlie Brown were Shermy and Patty, not to be confused with Peppermint Patty. And even when some of the iconic characters were introduced, their characterizations were quite different. For instance, Linus, Lucy, and Schroeder all entered the strip as toddlers. Linus originally was a hyper-intelligent youngster instead of an Innocent Prodigy, and Lucy a precociously cute Cloud Cuckoolander instead of a bossy Jerk with a Heart of Gold. By The '60s, the personalities had settled into place, and by The '70s, Shermy had been dropped from the cast entirely.
  • Many of the other iconic characters who would later become iconic members of the cast did not exist until well into the strip's run: Peppermint Patty (1966), Woodstock (1967), Franklin (1968), Marcie (1971), and Rerun (1972).
  • Charlie Brown's original catchphrase was "Great Scott!" That would soon be phased out in favor of the more iconic ones such as "Good grief!" "Rats!" and "I can't stand it!"
• , Pluggers was originally drawn and written by Jeff MacNelly of Shoe fame. After a few years, so many readers began submitting gags to him that he made the gags entirely user-submitted, and later handed art duties to Gary Brookins so that he could focus all of his efforts on Shoe. (Brookins also became the artist on Shoe after MacNelly's death in 2000.)
• Rick O'Shay was a humor comic set in the 1950s and 60s until it transitioned to the 1860s and, while still having comedic elements, turned into more of a western adventure/drama strip with more realistic art.
• Sabrina at See-CAD: Several of Sabrina's defining character traits from the later Sabrina Online, her love of Amiga Computers, The Transformers, etc. are noticeably absent in See-CAD. Michael Fox, Sabrina's boyfriend in the later strips of See-CAD is ultimately Put on a Bus and mostly ignored in Online.
• Thimble Theater debuted at the close of the 1910s (long before the introduction of its most famous character) as a satire of stage melodrama and vaudeville featuring "actors" Harold Hamgravy, Olive Oyl and parodic top-hatted villain Willie Wormwood before rapidly relinquishing this premise within a month of its debut, eventually phasing out Wormwood and rendering the strip a gag-a-day humor strip focalizing the dysfunctional romantic interplay of Olive and the rechristened Ham Gravy, alongside (more sporadically) Olive's Cloudcuckoolander brother Castor Oyl. By 1923, however, the strip shifted further into a serialized comedy-adventure style focalizing Ham, Olive, and Castor, the latter recast as a bungling, short-sighted entrepreneur. Ultimately, Castor increasingly became more prominent as the 1920s progressed, even marrying and keeping house from 1926 to 1928 (during which Ham and Olive were marginalized in favor of Castor's wealthy, misanthropic father-in-law I. Caniford Lotts). This setup would be abandoned in 1928, however, restoring Ham, Olive and the strip's earlier status quo until a storyline mere months later featured Castor and Ham hiring an indestructible, malapropism-prone sailor named Popeye, with the rest being history.
• Turner the Worm started out as a series of completely nonsensical and ridiculous stories, including the strip's secondary protagonist falling in love with a giant Cornish pasty (and not even a sentient one at that), driving a wedge between him and the title character, until the pasty's owner (the creator of Roget's Thesaurus, who by that point had been dead for over a century in real-life) shows up and eats it. It eventually moved to mainly parodying popular films and TV shows.
• Zits: In the early strips:
  • The art was a a bit rougher, and some early strips had Jeremy serving as The Narrator.
  • Jeremy's garage band originally had an African American drummer named Y.A., who never really developed and quit the band early on. He was replaced by Pierce, who himself quickly evolved from an angry punk to a Cloud Cuckoolander.
  • Jeremy's mom was originally established as a child therapist, but this aspect was only brought up a few times as a throwaway.
  • His older brother, Chad, was originally a stereotypically "perfect" guy whose face was always blocked by word balloons, before being retooled into a more realistically "better" older brother who looked much like an older Jeremy with a goatee.

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