...and try to forget it is also (ironically) the 80th birthday of disgraced, twice-impeached, President Don (the Con) Trump, the Oldest President in American History!
Coloring goof: the Union soldiers in panel 5 are wearing Confederate gray!
Why is this 1955 comic entitled "Every Day's a Holly Day" instead of "Every Day's a Holiday"?
Because it was given away to kids by grocers who sold Holly Sugar!
Illustrated by John Rosenberger, it's a unique pamphlet covering a number of American holidays, including both Lincoln and Washington's Birthdays (before they were combined into "Presidents' Day" in 1962), Mothers' Day (though not Fathers' Day), Flag Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and a couple of holidays we've largely abandoned...Pan-American Day and American Indian Day! Note: We're gearing up for our traditional multi-blog Summer Blogathons which we'll announce the week before the 4th of July weekend and begin the week after!
In 1968, the creator of I Dream of Jeannie predicted what may yet occur in 2026...
...with a tv-movie that aired on network only once, yet had an enormous impact on those who saw it!
The year: 1968! Race Relations were cratering! The economy was doing well, but individuals thought, because they weren't personally doing well, the whole economy was collapsing!
The current President (a Democrat) was not on the ballot for the Presidental election!
A Republican who promised "law and order" and to "protect America from potential invaders" won the White House!
Sidney Sheldon, creator/producer of lightweight escapist entertainment like I Dream of Jeannie and The Patty Duke Show, looked at what was going on around him and took a chance.
Screen Gemsgave him carte blanche, probably expecting something in a similar vein to his previous projects.
He greenlighted a story by Nedrick Young, scripter of controversial movies like The Defiant Ones (1958) and the adaptation of the novel Inherit the Wind (1960).
Sheldon selected an experenced, versatile director, Richard C Sarafian, with credits ranging from Dr Kildare to Batman!
The cast used both established pros like John Forsythe (against type as the villainous General Bruce, the Leader's trusted military commander) and Jackie Cooper (as the heroic, but doomed, Lt Col Davis), as well as up-and-comers like Gene Hackman and Carol Lynley in supporting roles.
(Trivia Note: one of the supporting characters, Lt Allen, is played by Jonathan Lippe/Jonathan Goldsmith, known recently as "The Most Interesting Man in the World" in Dos Equis beer commercials!)
The protaganist, rebel leader Major McCloud, was played by Marc Strange in his only leading role.
The tv-movie, using concepts from both Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here and George Orwell's 1984, portrayed a near-future America where the President declared a national emergency and imposed martial law...but the undefined "emergency" never ended, and martial law quickly mutated into fascist repression!
But the Society of Man, an organized resistance group with people placed within the government, fights back as best it can against the overwheming military might and technological superiority of the fascists.
Left open-ended, the movie practically begs to be continued as a mini-series, if not an ongoing series!
Airing on ABC during the Christmas season (December 4, 1968), it failed to garner decent ratings, and the potential series died quietly!
(Trivia: Kenneth Johnson proposed a similar concept called Storm Warnings to NBC in the early 1980s.
They turned it down, and Johnson, following in the steps of Rod Serling and Gene Roddenberry, revamped the concept with science fiction elements, making the fascists into reptilian aliens, and sold the concept as V, which ran as two mini-series and a brief ongoing series in the 80s and a two-season reboot in 2009-10.)
Never available on VHS, DVD or BluRay, the only way, currently, to see Shadow on the Land is right HERE.
We reccomend you download it as well, since the flick is deleted wherever it appears!
I'd say "enjoy, but, it's really more disturbing and frightening than enjoyable...
...heck, I'll let the writer present a synopsis of the tale for me...
Written and illustrated by Art Gates, this tale from Charlton's Hillbilly Comics #2 (1955) was part of a brief trend in comic books during the Li'l Abner series' greatest popularity in the mid-1950s!
With Don da Con now Dictating Receivers of the Kennedy Center Awards...
...we are sincerely-surprised the cast of this surprisingly long-running rural "humor" anthology TV series isn't included in the first batch!
Both these two-page spreads are from Charlton's Hee Haw comics derived from the syndicated TV series.
These examples of the show's "humor" were written and illustrated by Frank Roberge and based on an ongoing skit featuring the entire cast (plus guest stars) in a cornfield popping up and doing jokes and one-liners! The series ran a surprising twenty-six seasons from 1969 to 1995, though the comic only lasted for seven (never-reprinted) issues!
Today, We Look at How Don da Con Follows Project 2025's instructions...
...told in the visual style of the beloved 1970s animated series Schoolhouse Rock!
Sadly, since there aren't any credits assigned to individual chapters, we don't know who did this superb piece inspired by Schoohouse Rock's "Im Just a Bill"
(And why did Israel also join Russia and North Korea?)
This example from Unquotable Trump by cartoonist R. Sikoryak, based on the cover for Marvel's Giant-Size Super-Villain Team-Up #2 (1975) by penciler Gil Kane and inker Al Milgrom shows what they have in common!
Here's a tale of a guy like the good ol' boys who support the disgraced, impeached (yet re-elected) President...
...from a short-lived 1950s title telling their stories!
Yep, these are the people Don da Con and other Republicans play to while decrying the "educated elites".
"Bubbleville', according to Repug Mike Huckabee, represents the big cities of New York, Washington and Hollywood where the educated (but not smart) people live.
"Bubbaville", I guess, is everywhere else in the good ol' USA.
And that's where the "real people" are.
The ones who are smart...without all that fancy book-learnin'. The ones we city-folk call "deplorables"!
Written and illustrated by the highly-underrated Art Gates, this never-reprinted piece from Charlton's Hillbilly Comics #1 (1955) shows the "wisdom" the Cheeto Benito's audience is famous for!
Wonder Why??? This example from Unquotable Trump by cartoonist R. Sikoryak, based on the cover for Marvel's Giant-Size Super-Villain Team-Up #2 (1975) by penciler Gil Kane and inker Al Milgrom shows what they have in common!
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Drawn & Quarterly Special Edition Unquotable Trump by R. Sikoryak
"Donald Trump is telling the truth and people don't always like that," said Donald Kidd, a 73-year-old retired pipe welder from Mobile. "He is like George Wallace, he told the truth. It is the same thing."
...you know Trump's hitting the target demographic he wants. Nativist, reactionary, undereducated. Wallace was so proud of his racist attitudes that he had them included in a comic book produced in 1960 during his election campaign!
These pages are excerpts of the 16-page comic considered instrumental in Wallace's victory in 1960.
You'll note an emphasis on "states' rights" of the sort MAGAs advocate as well as the paranoid fear that the Feds wanted to "take over" Alabama.
BTW, In his inaugural speech after winning the race, Wallace promised "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
Note: Ironically, Wallace was a Democrat.
However, Federally-forced desegregation as well as the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 caused many racist Democrats aka Dixicrats to switch to the Republican Party (which began catering to the right-wing audience with the "Southern Strategy") or, as in the case of Wallace, joining the newly-created American Independent Party.
In the late 1970s, Wallace became a born-again Christian and recanted his racist attitudes. But I don't think the 1970s Wallace was the one Donald Kidd was referring to...
Considering this was created only six months into Don da Con's (hopefully) sole term of office...
...the fact that it's still potentially-pertinent almost a decade later is indeed disturbing!
We present selected excerpts...
Written in a sing-songy rhyme and drawn in a beguilingly-impeccable ink line by Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes, each page is a miniature critique and expose of convicted criminal and impeached politician Don da Con and his janissaries, poltroons, and dissemblers, illustrating his public policies, his personal defects, his ethical dysfunction, and the unfortunate consequences of his Presidency on the lives of Americans ― in a format that is cleverly designed to reflect his minimal attention span and toddler-like mental level.
