Condo's Favorites

In APRIL 1969 Alley Oop artist V. T. Hamlin and assistant Dave Graue paid tribute to Armando D. Condo in a continuity that began as an investigation of a haunted house and ended with Condo’s characters Osgar and Adolf and Everett True returned to 1911 and their own comic strip via Professor Wonmug’s time machine. Any reader not in their fifties or sixties at the time must have been bewildered until the ‘history’ was explained.

Hamlin was wrong in his dates however -- all of Condo’s characters, Osgar, Adolf and Everett True were created and ran in alternating cartoons in 1904. Osgar and Adolf originated as a single panel with “Lyrics by Fred Schaefer and Music by Condo” and in time became a multi-panel strip. That may have been the point of the December 6 1911 strip below where Osgar and Adolf recruit Everett True to pound on base imitators Mutt and Jeff who had their beginnings on November 15 1907 when A. Mutt was introduced to the sports-page of the San Francisco Chronicle.