Happy birthday George Washington from Jacky’s Diary

Jack Mendelsohn has been providing us laughs for decades. We might just not recognize the name. Among other things he has written are the Carol Burnett Show and the Yellow Submarine animated movie. He is a talented humorist but also a cartoonist who had a hit over 50 years ago with his Sunday comic strip, Jacky’s Diary (by Jacky Mendelsohn, age 31 1/2).

My brother and I read and loved the strip for the three years it was in our local newspaper. I found out from a book reprinting the entire three-year run of the strip, published by IDW and produced by Craig Yoe and his wife, Clizia Gussoni, that the strip was killed because it was too much of a hassle for the syndicate to prepare it for overseas publication. I imagine the child-like drawing is self-explanatory but there is a lot of wordplay going on, where Jacky substitutes words like “finely” for “finally” and “gruesome” for “grew some”...I imagine translating it would take some doing.

These two strips, which I have scanned from the book, celebrate today’s event, the anniversary of George Washington’s birth. (For the record, G.W. is 282 years old today.) Jacky gives the Washington story his own unique perspective. In other words, funny.

Copyright © 1959, 1960 King Features Syndicate, Inc.
Digital scans from the book are © 2013 Gussoni-Yoe Studio, Inc.