Sundays with Frank and His Friend

One of the best parts of the weekend was being able to see all your friends from the funny pages in color.

As a kid, Sundays were pretty bittersweet. You still had the day off and things were perhaps not quite as packed as they were on Saturdays, but it was the last day before school started again – and that meant I was going to have to start on my homework.

But although Sundays didn’t have the same carefree lightness that Saturdays had – where the whole weekend was spread out before you and school was two whole days away – Sundays had their own jewel that I looked forward to all week: The Sunday Funnies.

Our family’s newspaper had a comics section in the weekday editions with a coupe of pages of all the most popular strips, but it was nothing compared to the Sunday Funnies. When I was a kid, the Sunday Funnies were easily 12 pages with huge half-page layouts for the real blockbusters. The papers were a little bigger in those day (and of course, I was much smaller), and one of the best memories I have from back then is spreading out the comics on the living room floor (in front of the TV, of course), and having to sit on the paper to read the comics at the top of the page. Sitting like that on the paper, you could practically climb right into the page.

That’s definitely what I wanted to do reading the Frank and His Friend comics on Sundays. They were often set outsides, in either the woods or the best-imagined back yard ever, and with no place they needed to be. The characters had the freedom of being too young for school but the wisdom to know how great that was. In the Frank and his Friend comics in the Sunday Funnies, you found a world where it was always Saturday. Who wouldn’t want to climb into that?