COMICS WITH PROBLEMS (Issue #71 December 2015)

Presenting the entirety of the WASH TUBBS Alcoholics Anonymous comics strips

Happy Holidays! Every year (most years) Comics with Problems pops off a cork, and tries to find the best anti-alcohol comic for the Holidays. We're going on a history bender with this year's entry, with a pretty cool comic storyline that deserves a little more notice than it currently receives. WASH TUBBS was a newspaper comic syndicated by NEA, originally developed by Roy Crane. Leslie Turner took over the strip in 1943, and did some pretty daring stuff in the relative somber seeming strip.

The Alcoholics Anonymous storyline (posted below, in full) ran through 36 panels of WASH TUBBS, April 4th to May 14, 1949.

One note: This isn't AA approved literature (unlike, for example, the AA comic strips elsewhere on this site) - and can be considered popular interpretations of A.A. at the time. But the series is outstandingly odd for its serious tone, however. How many places in popular culture were A.A. discussed in 1949?

It's worth acknowledging the story is an exact AA pitch, though, through its characters, plot, attitudes about alcoholism (including one drink that would kill a man with the alcohol 'allergy', even after five years of previous sobriety). Interestingly, on a single day-by-day basis (or, one day at a time, to make a pun) most people reading the comic strip might not have been aware of the full message of this lengthy serialized episode, making the WASH TUBBS strips particularly sneaky and subversive for the A.A. storyline to be communicated on a drop-by-drop message to millions. A very interesting item.

Here's the entire run. Happy Holidays from Comics with Problems.