Alley Oop: The Sawalla Chronicles, April 10 - August 28, 1936

Ken Pierce, 1983. Vincent Trout Hamlin (1900 - 1993) creator of the comic strip Alley Oop, was born in Perry, Iowa on 10 May 1900. In 1918, he served with the American Expeditionary Forces in France. After the war, he attended college, and worked at various jobs around the country, including working in the oil fields of Texas, and on various newspapers as a reporter, photographer and cartoonist. In 1925 he married high-school sweetheart Dorothy Stapleton. He created the Alley Oop comic strip in 1932 while working at the Des Moines Register, and he wrote and drew the strip (sometimes with the help of assistant Dave Graue) until 1971. Hamlin died in Florida in 1993 at the age of 93. Alley Oop is a syndicated comic strip created in 1932 by American cartoonist V. T. Hamlin, who wrote and drew Alley Oop through four decades for NEA (Newspaper Enterprise Association). Initially, Alley Oop was a daily strip which had a run from December 5, 1932 to January 3, 1933. Beginning August 7, 1933, the early material was reworked for a larger readership. "Alley Oop" is also the name of the strip's title character. A mix of adventure, fantasy and humor, the strip added a Sunday full page, on September 9, 1934. It also appeared in half page, tabloid and half tab formats, which were smaller and/or dropped panels. During World War II, the full page vanished due to the drive to conserve paper, and it was reduced to a third of a page. When V. T. Hamlin retired in 1971, his assistant Dave Graue took over. The last daily by Hamlin appeared December 31, 1972, and his last Sunday was April 1, 1973. From his studio near Caesar's Head, North Carolina, Graue wrote and drew the strip through the 1970s and 1980s until Jack Bender took over as illustrator in 1991. Graue continued to write the strip until his August, 2001, retirement; on December 10, 2001, the 75-year-old Graue was killed in Flat Rock, North Carolina when a dump truck hit his car. The current Alley Oop Sunday and daily strips are drawn by Jack Bender and written by his wife Carol Bender. Alley Oop was one of the comic strips characters commemorated by a U.S. postage stamp.. Reprint. Soft Cover. Fine. Illus. by b/w Cartoons.