Gene Deitch was one of the great animation directors and my favorite work of his was the Tom Terrific cartoons which ran for years on the Captain Kangaroo show. Tom and his sidekick, Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog, stumbled through simple stories with simple drawing and simple premises and a simplicity of production that was hard to resist. (One guy did all the voices and one musician played all the music.) Whoever owns the rights oughta stop cockin' around and put out some Tom Terrific episodes on DVD.
In the meantime, Fantagraphics Books has favored us with a collection of a short-lived newspaper strip that Deitch created. Terr'ble Thompson only ran for about a year and I have to admit I'd never heard of it before. But it's enormous fun, and not just because it was an antecedent of the Tom Terrific shorts that debuted a few years later. Deitch was just as creative in one medium as he was in another.
I hereby suggest you click this link and order yourself a copy of Terr'ble Thompson. And if you're in a clicking mood, Fantagraphics has a nice freebee you can listen to right now. That's right: I said listen. The folks at Golden Records produced a 12-minute kids' record of Terr'ble Thompson starring none other than Art Carney. The record was never released but Deitch came across a copy of the tape in his files and it's been turned into an MP3. It's available for your listening pleasure on this page and so is a brief introduction that Deitch recently recorded, telling the tale of how the record came to be.
In his intro, Deitch says that the songs were written by two important Broadway composers, Marshall Barer and Alec Wilder. That's a bit of an exaggeration. At the time, Barer had only done one show that had reached Broadway. He was one of several composers who contributed to Once Over Lightly, a translation/parody of The Barber of Seville that ran a big six performances in 1942. That was the sum of his Broadway credentials in '55 when he penned the lyrics for Terr'ble Thompson. He later contributed to a couple of revues but his only real hit came when he wrote the lyrics for Once Upon a Mattress, which hit New York in 1959. Wilder's credits were even spottier. He also contributed to Once Over Lightly and then wrote incidental tunes for two non-musical plays which ran a total of 26 performances between them. But the two men did a nice job on the kids' record and it's well worth twelve minutes of your time. If you buy the book, read it while you listen.