The March of Time was a popular radio series from 1931-1945 and regular feature in movie theaters from 1935-1951. As novelist John Dunning wrote, its purpose was to produce “dramatized news events, elaborately staged with sound effects and music, put together like a newspaper—often on deadline, with impact and accuracy its twin goals.” These newsreels not only made history come alive but helped ensure these important moments would always be remembered.
Many individuals and groups have worked hard to preserve and archive history. Our world is fast-paced, but our memories tend to be short-lived. Creating a permanent, living record about people, places, and things is vitally important for our society and future generations.
Which brings us to an intriguing (and ongoing) archival project: It’s rooted in one person’s unwavering determination to unearth and republish a classic comic strip he’s read and loved since childhood.
This is the story of Alley Oop and its faithful archivist, Christopher Aruffo.
Alley Oop is a long-running strip created by American cartoonist V.T. Hamlin that debuted on Dec. 5, 1932. The original storyline focused on Alley Oop, a caveman who lived in the prehistoric kingdom of Moo. (His name was likely derived from the French phrase “Allez, hop!” — or “Off you go!”) Other memorable characters included his girlfriend, Ooola, pet dinosaur, Dinny, and King Guz and Queen Umpateedle.
Hamlin introduced a plot twist in 1939 that forever changed Alley Oop. The main protagonist came face to face with a time machine invented by Dr. Elbert Wonmug. This was a pun on scientist Albert Einstein, whose last name can be broken into two words: “ein stein,” or “one mug.” Time travel became a permanent fixture in the strip, with Alley Oop, Ooola, and others visiting everything from ancient Egypt to modern-day America.
The Moovians who spoke near-perfect English began with a small syndicate, Bonnet-Brown. It went defunct in April 1933, leaving Alley Oop homeless after a 20-week run. The strip was picked up in August by a larger syndicate, the Newspaper Enterprise Association, and its visibility grew exponentially. Readers in over 600 newspapers today are still transfixed by Alley Oop’s time travel storylines and good-natured humor.
Here’s the surprising part. In spite of Alley Oop’s longevity and popularity, most of the strips had never been collected in book form. Several publishers, including Kitchen Sink Press and Dark Horse Comics, had previously released one-off volumes and small strip runs. Nothing similar to Fantagraphics’s The Complete Peanuts and Library of American Comics’s The Complete Terry and the Pirates had ever been attempted, however.
The strip’s lavish history was, in effect, lost in time. Until Aruffo came along, that is.
Why would a dialect coach and acting teacher, with a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology and no previous comics experience, want to do this? An all-consuming, lifelong passion with Alley Oop’s fantasy realm. “I’ve been an Alley Oop fan since I was eleven years old,” he wrote for a three-part series last February for comics historian Allan Holtz’s blog, The Stripper’s Guide. “I vividly remember encountering the strip in my local paper on October 22, 1983; there, among the banal levity of Priscilla’s Pop, Winthrop, and Short Ribs I found this panel of a fisherman…discovering a dead body?!” This was one of Alley Oop’s time travel episodes, and Aruffo was “immediately hooked.”
He devoured his library’s microfilm archives and consumed decades of Alley Oop. He clipped and saved strips published from 1984-1989. Those clippings were eventually scanned and sold “on a nascent eBay.” In doing so, Aruffo later realized that “creating files small enough to store on a floppy disk” meant he was “essentially destroying the strips’ artistic detail.” He decided to “repair some of these past sins” during the COVID-19 pandemic. He created a newspapers.com account and built a good quality strip run from 1933-1996. He shared it on the Newspaper Comic Strips blog, where it remains today, “and that, I thought, would be the end of it.”
Not even close, as it turned out.
Aruffo came across an eBay listing of 1975-1979 Alley Oop proof sheets. He initially didn’t know what they were but bought them as soon as he found out. “These were, of course, the best possible quality short of the original art itself,” he wrote in The Stripper’s Guide. “As the purpose of proof sheets is to be reprinted, I began to wonder … would I be able to reprint Alley Oop, and finally have them on my bookshelf, as I have wanted all these years?” He contacted United Media and purchased the rights to reprint six years of Hamlin’s strips and six years created by Hamlin’s longtime assistant and replacement Dave Graue. The archival adventure was underway.
Reproducing decades of high-quality Alley Oop strips wasn’t an easy task. Some newspapers and libraries had already digitized their archives and tossed out the original print editions that were cleaner and contained more detail. Fortunately, Aruffo discovered some buried treasure. The University of Texas at Austin’s Briscoe Center, for instance, still had a well-preserved print run of the Bonnet-Brown strips in the McAllen Daily Press, one of only five U.S. newspapers that carried it. He made important connections with helpful comics historians, including Manuscript Press/Comics Revue founder Rick Norwood and Library of American Comics co-founder Dean Mullaney, as well as Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, the world’s largest academic research facility related to comic strips. He taught himself to restore faded pen-and-ink daily strips by hand and revitalized Sunday strips back to their original (or near-original) color scheme and artistic glory.
This project has grown well beyond Aruffo’s bookshelves. His one-man publishing house, Acoustic Learning, will have released nearly 50 softcover volumes containing an entire year’s daily strips, along with several hardcover editions and Sundays collections, by year’s end. Another 18 books are scheduled for 2025.
Aruffo was kind enough to send me The First Time-Travel Adventures: Dailies 1939–42, Alley Oop: On the Mississippi, and Alley Oop: Back to the Moon. I also purchased the out-of-print Alley Oop and Dinny, which is available on the self-publishing website Lulu, that covers the Bonnet-Brown run and early NEA strips.
Each book is exquisitely done and of impeccably high quality. The crisp, rejuvenated stories about Alley Oop’s excursions to ancient Rome, Troy, and Cleopatra’s Egypt are visually stunning. The same can be said for the caveman’s trip to the moon with Oscar Boom, playing cards with riverside gambler Texas Jack East, visiting Mount Olympus, harrowing adventures with Dinny, and more.
These are among the most impressive independently produced books I’ve ever come across. It’s not your typical vanity press but rather a true labor of love.
Aruffo deserves credit for his yeoman’s work in reviving something that would have otherwise remained lost. His Herculean efforts and archival talents have helped ensure that his favorite time-traveling comic strip, Alley Oop, will always have a place in the march of time and in our collective memories.
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Michael Taube, a columnist for the National Post, Troy Media, and Loonie Politics, was a speechwriter for former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.