flook and mossy mildew

 Strips from 10-31 October 1951

 

Ok so I know you're thinking what I'm thinking... this is the Moses Maggot story, only Moses Maggot has been rechristened Mossy Mildew, presumably because there was a (highly justified) expectation that Moses Maggot would be seen as an offensive name for a clearly money-obsessed crooked miser with a big hooked nose. Funny that. Well, the humour is gentle with a lower-case g, but the drawing is really sumptuous, even the grotesques, but for instance the 29 October sequence with the dust is quite something. I wonder if Wally Fawkes copped flak in the jazz world for being a sell out and drawing a (kids') comic strip, or whether comic strips were suitably throwaway they seemed bohemian. To be honest I am still really keen to shell out for the Moses Maggot book to see how the story really begins, and also to see what word 'cases' substitutes for...