Lost in the celebration today of the 35th anniversary of Doonesbury is the fact that 35 years ago, another strip started. Momma was the second newspaper strip of Mell Lazarus, who had previously done Miss Peach…and continued to do it, along with Momma, until 2002.
(Quick Aside: I'd love it if someone would reprint large quantities of Miss Peach. The strip never ran in any Los Angeles newspaper…or at least, no L.A. paper that came into my home. In 1961, I glommed onto a paperback collection of it when the Scholastic Book Club did one of its classroom book-hustlings, and it was hilarious…one of the dozen-or-so newspaper strips that ever made me laugh out loud. But for a long time, that was about all I saw of Miss Peach. I think I have all the subsequent collections and I've still only seen about 1% of all the ones Mell did. I'm sure there must be plenty of others as funny as the ones in those books.)
Mell forgives me that I never liked Momma quite as much as Miss Peach since I seem to be pretty much alone in this viewpoint. Maybe it's because my own mother was and is so unlike Sonja Hobbes, for which I will be ever grateful. But I have always enjoyed Momma. A few years ago, I wrote a short animated sequence of the strip — June Foray did Momma's voice — that was done for a TV project that never aired. Before I did it, I sat down with a pile of Momma strips, figuring I'd read a few weeks' worth just to get a feel for the characters. I got hooked and spent hours reading the whole stack, which was about five years worth. Good stuff. I'm not surprised it's been around as long as it has.