Shakespeare in Dogpatch

"AIN'CHA goin' to the dance, Clarabelle?" asks Mickey Mouse in the first panel of "The Race for Riches," his newspaper comic strip story that begins on June 3, 1935. But no, Ms. Cow has "too much trouble" -- the bank is going to foreclose on her house. Then, on June 25, our hero discovers ("Boy-oh-boy! Hot dawg!") a map in a trunk in Clarabelle's attic that points to her gran'dad's buried gold. Eleven days of hijinks later, Mickey and Horace Horsecollar pack their gear and start the drive out West, with the nefarious Pegleg Pete and Eli Squinch in what used to be termed "hot pursuit."

It was the great age of daily newspaper comic-strip narrative continuity -- plots as twisty and compelling as anything found in standard prose. Surely, Little Orphan Annie's epic Depression-era adventures are the complex equal of those of that other orphan, Tom Jones; the dabs of crosshatched licorice black that puddle under the moon of some midnight scenes -- as she and the Asp and Uriah Gudge square off against villainy -- hold all the mysterious depths of Raymond Chandler's noirish back alleys.

These were extended narratives that stretched, in self-contained daily units, over many cliffhangered months. When Captain Easy was shanghaied onto a whaler, his adventures lasted for 107 Monday-through-Saturday installments

15 weeks. When Krazy Kat left Coconino County on a mission to bring back catnip tea, the story unfolded from June through December 1936. Prince Valiant's Viking saga. Buck Rogers' cosmos-kavooming romps. Mickey's thrill-ride in "The Race for Riches" ends on Sept. 28 (Clarabelle no longer imperiled, the bad guys stewing moodily in their comeuppance)

more than 14 weeks of roller-coastering plot. Here, we have the early scrappy Mickey, full of can-do gumption, not the later emasculated (emouseculated?) subur- banite.

This was the era when people across a democratic range of socioeconomic statures loyally followed "the funnies" with the avidity of "Sopranos" devotees today. Family members fought one another to be first to see the latest daily increment of "L'il Abner," "Brenda Starr," "Dick Tracy." A true American popular art, one of the few, along with jazz and the blues. It was reminiscent of all those throngs on the docks of New York four generations earlier -- the banker, bricklayer, brothel madam -- jostling together excitedly as the newest chapter of Dickens arrived. Was Little Nell alive, or