StoriesAugust 15, 1993

Associated Press

*When World War II broke out, comic strip character Joe Palooka immediately enlisted and President Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly thanked cartoonist Ham Fisher. Tillie the Toiler joined the WACS. Orphan Annie mustered her young readers into the Junior Commandoes to collect scrap metal, tinfoil and paper. Terry & the Pirates were already busy fighting off the Japanese invasion of China. Tiny Tim donated his dog to the K-9 Corps while Prince Valiant valiantly took on the Hun.

*Because of wartime passions and prejudices, the Katzenjammer Kids were renamed ''The Captain and the Kids'' in World War I, and after Pearl Harbor the Green Hornet's faithful Japanese servant Cato was born again as a faithful Filipino.

*Brenda Starr, girl reporter, started off on the drawing board as a gal gangster.

*During a New York newspaper strike in the late '30s, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia read the comics to the kiddies on the radio.

*Painter Pablo Picasso and poet e.e. cummings found inspiration in George Herriman's surrealistic ''Krazy Kat.''

*War ace Eddie Rickenbacker helped write the story line for ''Ace Drummond.'' Dashiell Hammett of ''The Maltese Falcon'' fame plotted some of the doings of Secret Agent X-9. ''Rex Morgan M.D.'' was the creation of Dr. Nicholas Dallas, a practicing psychiatrist, and ''Wonder Woman'' was the brainchild of psychologist William Marstan.

*Novelist John Steinbeck proposed that ''L'il Abner'' creator Al Capp be given ''serious consideration for the Nobel Prize.''

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*Texas spinach growers erected a statue to Popeye.

*Astronauts aboard the Apollo 10 moon shot named their command ship ''Peanuts'' and their lunar module ''Snoopy.''

*Skeezix of ''Gasoline Alley,'' one of the few strips in which characters advanced in age, saw service in World War II and then worried about his son going off to Vietnam.

*Echoing the Vietnam peaceniks, Rodney, the spear carrier in ''The Wizard of Id,'' resisted going off to the Crusades.

*''Apple Mary,'' a street vendor during the Great Depression, became suburban do-gooder ''Mary Worth'' when the economy recovered.

That's all folks ...

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