men washing the dishes in the early 1950s

One thing that must have completely baffled readers of Flook in North America in the early 1950s must have been the way that there is no sequence in which anyone washes dishes. Looking occasionally at the comics pages (which are freakin' sumptuous, by the way)* of the various papers I've been sourcing those Flooks from, there are really two kinds of comic strip: soap opera/adventure/melodrama strips (I really want to go back and read the Little Orphan Annie strips from that time, it's one of those 'Annie loses her memory' storylines I like) and strips about people being made to wash dishes. In the hilariously topsy-turvy world of the funny pages, it's usually men who are forced to wash dishes, viz:

(The Flapdoodles, Ottawa Citizen 14 January 1952) 

I mean I think the main thing Mr. Flapdoodle has to be grateful for here is that he is not forced to wear an ostentatiously feminine apron, just a more or less standard one. When I was looking at the Philadelphia Inquirer for late '51 it seemed like every second Blondie strip was about Dagwood being made to wash dishes, but scientists have shown that is a misconception and in fact it's only 30%, the other strips being equally distributed between jokes around Dagwood in the bath or Blondie making Dagwood go downstairs to check if there's a burglar there. Overall, by the way, Blondie still holds up and in fact to my mind that strip is still, in 2020, often quite funny, in part because of the template set up in the thirties. The Flapdoodles - this is the only example I've seen - seems to be the result of an artist being told 'just read Blondie and then draw uglier versions of those people.' 

If I had my time over yes, I would do my PhD thesis on men being made to wash the dishes in mid-century comic strips but to be honest I'm not unhappy with the choices I made. 

21 November update: Natural order is restored in the 1 April 1952 instalment of Flook: 

...of which more anon. 

*One of the Canadian papers, was it the Vancouver one? had a Sunday comics section that was bigger than most comic books I've read, and the art was incredibly impressive, in the main.