Room and Board is the title of two American comic strips. The first, created by Sals Bostwick, debuted on May 21, 1928. He drew it until his death in 1930, after which it was continued by cartoonists Brandon Walsh, Benbee, Darrell McClure, Dow Walling and Herman Thomas before coming to an end in 1932. In 1936, cartoonist Gene Ahern created the second strip, a continuation of a previous strip, Our Boarding House, which he drew from 1921 to 1936 for another syndicate. This second Room and Board was discontinued on November 29, 1958. Ahern's Room and Board had no connection with Bostwick's strip other than the similar title.

Revival history

Ahern was making an annual $35,000 doing Our Boarding House for Newspaper Enterprise Association when King Features Syndicate offered to double that figure. Leaving NEA in March 1936 for King Features, Ahern created a copycat strip, using the title of the previous King Features strip, Bostwick's Room and Board. The new Room and Board had more than a few parallels with Our Boarding House, including a larger-than-life blowhard as the central character.

Characters and story

A resident in the second Room and Board's boarding house was Judge Puffle, very similar to Major Hoople, the central character of Ahern's Our Boarding House. The mustache was slightly different, the nose was slightly smaller, and instead of a fez like that worn by Hoople, Puffle had a beret. Some strips featured a large roomer, that the landlord had rented a room to and asked various persons to evict. Comics historian Don Markstein traced the proliferation of Puffle and other Hoople variations: The strip also adopted Our Boarding House's format of a single panel daily with a multi-panel Sunday page.

The Squirrel Cage

Ahern's topper strip, The Squirrel Cage, which ran above Room and Board from June 21, 1936, until at least 1947, is notable because of the repetitive use of the nonsensical question, '"Nov shmoz ka pop?", which was never translated yet became a national catch phrase. As a consequence, The Squirrel Cage and Our Boarding House are today both better remembered than Room and Board, despite its 17-year run.

Reprints

There were several reprints in Dell Comics anthologies before the strip came to an end with Ahern's 1953 retirement.