From the Philadelphia Inquirer late September-early October 1951
All very interesting though I have to say that the really difficult bit to swallow - harder than Flook turning into a pressure cooker - is that, I guess, a few hours after they first meet Flook is Rufus' 'very dear friend' - I mean, on the basis of what? Also, why is Flook sad in the second strip above? By the way I am of the opinion that the art has changed considerably since the first week of strips, to the style more commonly associated with Trog, which I don't object to (in fact I like it) but it makes me wonder if we've shot ahead in the Flook world and maybe we're not going to see Moses Maggot and I'll have to pay the $120 anyway.
A later thought:
I wonder whether 'flying buttress' was a slightly rude reference for the amusement of American children (because it has the word 'butt' in it)? As well as being a slightly amusing idea, either because Flook doesn't know what a flying buttress is or because it would be a hard (but not impossible) thing to become. 
2 comments:
A theory about sad Flook - notice the numbers in the last panel in each strip - they would seem to indicate that the strip was run Monday to Saturday. That it jumps one every seventh strip suggests that there's a missing strip which might have run in the Sunday edition (if they had a Sunday edition; the Wikipedia entry for the Inquirer describes it as a daily paper, but not all daily papers have a Sunday edition).
The second strip is 9-17...September 17, 1951 was a Monday. Strip #1 doesn't have a date, so it could have been from 15/9, and so something happens in the missing strip (which would have been Sunday's 9-16) that makes Flook sad.
You raise good points, B, however if there was a Sunday Flook, none of the four newspapers I looked at ran it. The last newspaper I sourced, the one from Ottawa, didn't even have a Sunday edition (or at least if it did, it wasn't included in newspapers.com) although it therefore included its big comics section in the Saturday edition as well as the Saturday comics (& no Sunday Flook). Some of the strips I included were actually run very much out of sync with the dates written on them (which makes me suspect that this belonged in the category of 'no Sunday instalment'). (Or at least, 'Sunday instalment optional). The UK Daily Mail did not have a Sunday edition until 1982 so if there was a Sunday Flook it would have meant Fawkes drawing up 50+ extra episodes to accompany the syndicated version while he was continuing to draw the regular daily Flook for the Mail. Phew! So in short, the theory is valid but I think probably not. When the big Flook/Fawkes celebration book I ordered turns up in, you know, September 2022, I may have more information.
It made me wonder about the major job someone must have had to get these big comics pages (20 or so strips? each day) assembled, even if most of the strips came from the same source, which they probably did. Mark Newgarden's book on Nancy shows how strips were cut, literally, into bits to fit as much as possible on a page.
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