An author-friend of mine is writing a book with and about a rather famous celebrity. In discussing his formative years, the celebrity recalled a comic book strip he followed when he was young, and the author-friend has asked me to try and identify it. Here's how the celebrity described his childhood fave…
I've always had, I guess, what most people would think of as the kindest reading of it, a much wider concept of what a family is than most people have. I remember I got busted for reading a comic book. It was my favorite comic book with a flashlight under my blanket, about a group of various orphaned kids who had somehow found each other and all joined together to live on a ranch together and survive and they came under, there was some adult who took over the father figure part and the mother figure, and I remember thinking that that was all how it should be.
The celeb was born in 1941 and lived at home until around 1959 or 1960. His comic book reading years therefore might have been as early as, say, 1948 or as late as the mid-fifties. He recalls the feature in question as one that never earned its own book and appeared instead in an anthology comic or as a back-up strip.
I'm stumped. It doesn't sound like the Simon-Kirby Boys Ranch to me and while I can think of a couple of other candidates, not one of them fits exactly. Anyone else got an idea?