“Off to a Flying Start” is how V.T. Hamlin titled his introduction to the Alley Oop character and world in late 1932. And in fact Hamlin’s eponymous hero cries for help in the opening panel…only to be chased by the prehistoric dinosaurs of this fantastic “Bone Age.” For the next six or seven years, Hamlin’s art and story were at their best when his furry-crowned, thick-limbed everyman scurried at the center of screwball mayhem. We now have a great opportunity to review and reconsider Alley, as the small press Acoustic Learning recently launched reprint series of both Hamlin’s early adventures and later work by his successor Dave Graue.

My first impression diving into Alley Oop is Hamlin’s strong feel for set, background and character design Hamlin had from the beginning. Unlike Segar’s Thimble Theatre, Capp’s L’il Abner and certainly Gould’s Dick Tracy, Alley Oop doesn’t begin in a crude style that only finds its signature style over months and years. Hamlin goes into Alley Oop knowing he wanted to contrast fine-lined, simple but polished characters with detailed and accurate scenery and dinosaurs. Hamlin had a cultivated curiosity about prehistoric creatures in one of his many jobs as an illustrator in the Texas oil industry. He well knew the historical fantasty at the center of Alley Oop. The age of dinosaurs long preceded any human ancestors. But he was dedicated to drawing, naming and animating his Bone Age dinos as accurately as he could.

By contrast, his cast of cartoon humans, the males at least, are carefully built with a bit of the era’s deco minimalism. Oop, his rhyming buddy Foozy, Guz, the King of the Moos and the tribes of cave men are small of head, with enviable four-pack abs, and forearms and calves shaped like bowling pins. He builds his characters in order to animate them. Those bottom-heavy limbs become wonderful devices when fleeing, fighting or rioting. The action poses, freeze-frames of punches thrown and received, crowds of cave men imploding or exploding, all have an expressiveness that sits between cartoon abstraction and naturalism. This fine-lined, controlled art style is served very well in this reprint. The strips fully render Hamlin’s thin line shading of background flora and the dinosaurs.

Alley Oop is also one of those rare strips, along with Walt Kelly’s later Pogo, that renders the words as part of the art. From the strip’s first panel, Hamlin shows his distinct deco styling for characters shouting. They move from small to larger type sizes, megaphone-like, into the air. And Hamlin plays with bolding, differing type styles and sizes, words moving in and out of word baloons, to express tones, crowd murmerings, sound effects. In some ways he was bringing to his comic strip layers that mimiced the early days of the talking motion picture, still in its infancy when Oop appears in 1932/33.

And much like Segar’s approach to Popeye, even Gray’s Annie, Hamlin brings a populist sensibility to the strip. Conventional wisdom suggests that Alley Oop becomes more interesting and a genuine adventure strip in 1939 when he introduced a time travel device that brought Oop and girlfireind Ooola across major historical ages. But from the start, Oop is an everyman hero, good of heart, who is less of an adventurer than a victim of circumstance. He quickly becomes the unintentional antagonist to King Guz, the insecure and thin-skinned leader of the Moos. Guz envies Oop’s popularity when the cave man returns to the tribe astride his tamed pet dinosaur Dinny. Guz’s machinations to retain prestige and diminish Oop is the driving force of the strip’s first year. Oop fits neatly within the pantheon of Depression-era common many heroes. Prohibition, which didn’t end until the December 1933, and a deepening Depression had already undermined public trust in institutional authority, the purity and wisdom of legal and political institutions. Popular culture registered a generalized distaste for authority in everything from the romanticization of gangsters in the press to images of kings, politicians, policemen and bosses as either hapless or imperious. We usually come upon common men like Popeye, Tom Joad, Micky Mouse and Mr. Oop just trying to go about their business, only to become heroic in the face of the moral duplicity (or just stupidity).

As simple and familiar as these everyman heroes may seem, the idea of the inherently moral, simple and unpretentious “nature’s nobleman” runs deep and long in American culture, extending back to the tales of James Fennimore Cooper’s frontier hero Natty Bumppo and Jacksonian politics of the 1840s. American popular literature is filled with examples of the naturally ethical, American individualist asserting basic common sense and morality against both little human and big insitutional corruptions. Cast as he may be in the Bone Age, Oop was certainly in that tradition, one that had special valence to Depression-Era.