flook and moses maggot

So you will remember my interest a few weeks back on the origins of Flook and the difference between Flook in the UK (est. 1949) and Flook for the few years it ran in the U.S. (1951-53 or thereabouts). The US Flook story is not told anywhere else and I think probably Flook just became more and more of a UK political/social satire and less and less of an entertaining adventure for children, which was why it ended up unusable in North America, but we'll see about that when I finish my research.

Anyway, as I think I mentioned probably last week, I forked out big time for a copy of Rufus and Flook v. Moses Maggot, and when it came it had a whole lot of pages missing (not sure how many). The good news is, I got a refund. The other good news is that as far as I can tell (and I'd never sit down and compare anyway) the pages that do exist in this damaged copy of the book absolutely go right up to where the US version picks it up. You see the 'flying buttress' frame, which I made a point of talking about a month ago in the post linked in the previous sentence, at the end of these pages. None of the rest of this version of the story appeared in North America as far as I can tell. Whether it then goes straight into the US version I don't know, obviously. 

The only other thing that I find interesting in this original/alternative reality pertains to the whole reason I got into this Flook business in the first place: Colonel Pewter. Just as Flook was ostensibly a response to the Crockett Johnson strip Barnaby, about a boy with a fairy godfather, Colonel Pewter was apparently a reply to Flook a few years later (by which time, incidentally, Barnaby had been discontinued - it ended in February 1952). These strips were all in different papers, so I'm not suggesting there was any real connection other than inspiration/competition (I'm not even sure Barnaby ran in the UK). Rufus (which was the original title of what soon became Rufus and Flook and was, pretty quickly I'm sure, Flook) was about a boy of that name who lived with his uncle who, like Martin in Colonel Pewter, he calls 'uncle'. Rufus' uncle is not himself of great value except as a launching point and doesn't seem to have any interest in Rufus (or Flook) but only in his own home zoo (e.g. the 'dear animals') despite the fact that, yes, Flook himself is an animal and often referred to as such. Odd contrast too with the North American beginning of the strip where Rufus is thrown out of the house for the day and told to go to the natural history museum rather than collect a 'menagerie' of animals in the bathroom. I wonder if page 4 above ('bye uncle') is the last time Rufus ever saw his uncle? Also, speaking of lasts, re: the next page - is that the last time in western culture a boy was ever depicted running towards someone with a massive box of eggs, neither of them looking where they were going, but which merely led to a conversation about something else entirely not even pertaining even slightly to eggs, the value of looking where you were going, or really anything else that even slightly 'spoke to' the initial scenario? Answer: yes.*

*It was also the first and therefore the only