Saturday, April 06, 2013

Sunday funnies on Saturday night: X-9 serial unit



In 1934, Secret Agent X-9 comic strip appeared, produced by Dashiell Hammett and Alex Raymond. Teacher and Writer Bill Blackbeard described Secret X-9 as "The gala wedding of the pulps to the comics."  When I was a boy, on Sunday (I'd be baby sitting my sister while my folks went first to church), they used to read the Sunday Funnies on the TV (WTMJ). This was much as I tried to do here. Out of curiosity, I further tried to make it a bit like an old radio show, with sound effects and music. The run time for this is 4:29, and it covers 21 'cels' from the comic strip (at 3 per day, plus Sunday roll up, that might have meant a week), as was discovered in Secret Agent X-9 (Nostalgia Press, 1976). Blackbeard wrote that X-9 was Hearst's answer to the News Syndicate success known as Dick Tracy.

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