ABSTRACT
Blondie was one of the most popular, if not the most popular, American comic strip until the meteoric rise of Peanuts in recent years. Dagwood Bumstead, as many commentators have pointed out, is an infantile, weak, greedy, and incompetent figure. Marshall McLuhan sees Dagwood as assuming a "little-boy role" under the pressure of Blondie's "mothering wedlock" and goes on to relate the strip to Margaret Mead's notions about the third generation in America being the one that will succeed. Dagwood is an important archetype in the American psyche: the irrelevant male. Many American males are currently struggling with the problem of attaining a useable male identity. Dagwood's decline, then, mirrors a sense of inadequacy and irrelevance and, in particular, powerlessness that was quite widespread in American society. After his fall from power as the son of a rich man making merger plans all the time, to a disinherited, castrated family man, he takes on the semblance of a clown.
