Them Days Is Gone Forever

A little while back, I was digging around for information on the old Everett True comic strip and stumbled across Barnacle Press where they're housing a huge number of old comic strips. Scanned at pretty decent resolution and cleaned up (a bit) for all the world to see. Obviously, it's all public domain stuff but there's famous works like Barney Google and Katzenjammer Kids to more obscure titles like Diana Dillpickles and Soosie the Shopper (which apparently only lasted a couple months). Lots of great comics to find and enjoy there, plus they seem to update it fairly regularly.

In looking through their archives, I came across this... The brainchild of Al Posen, Them Days Is Gone Forever ran from 1922 until 1925 (sort of). The strip sounds excessively complicated on first glance, but Posen did put some restraints on himself, in theory, to make things more productive. The melody running across the top of the strip was identical every day. So he wasn't creating new music all the time; in fact, the rhythm essentially forced the wording structure of the language in each panel. And the last panel always featured one or some of the characters singing "Them days is gone forever!" There weren't any recurring characters or ongoing plotlines, though, so Posen just had to come up with short vinettes in which people compare the past to the present. Usually mournfully.

He changed the strip in April 1924 to The Jingle Belles to change things up a bit, but that didn't go over very well and he changed it back six months later. That didn't go over so well either, and it was axed completely in early 1925. Although United Feature Syndicate continued to sell it as reprints for several more years.

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