The Flagstons first appeared in Walker's Beetle Bailey. They spun off into their own strip, written by Walker and drawn by Browne. Lois Flagston (née Bailey) is Beetle Bailey's sister and the two strips make occasional crossovers. One of these occurred on the strip's 40th anniversary in 1994, when Beetle visited his sister Lois and her family. Chip resembles his Uncle Beetle in attitude and appearance, especially the eyes.
The Best of Hi and Lois (1986) was reprinted in 2005.
The strip made efforts to keep up with the times, such as housewife Lois Flagston taking a career in real estate in 1980. In previous decades, the strip was acclaimed; in 1962, it earned Browne a Reuben Award from the National Cartoonists Society.
The strip faced some controversy given the changes in content restrictions since its debut in the 1950s. Once, editors insisted that belly buttons could not appear; in protest, Browne included a box of dimpled navel oranges.
The Flagston family was also featured in a series of Charltoncomic books. Eleven issues were produced from November 1969 to July 1971. The cover price was fifteen cents.[6]
Hi and Lois Flagston: Hi (short for Hiram[7]) and Lois are typical middle-class American suburbanites. Their names are a pun on the "opposite" terms of "high and low". Hi is a sales manager, Lois is a realtor. They have four children.
Chip: a slovenly, indolent, teenaged high school boy; a running gag has Chip dating new girlfriends. Eight years old at the time the strip started, Chip grew into his teenage years by sometime in the 1960s, where he has stayed.
Dot and Ditto: rambunctious twins Dot (girl) and Ditto (boy), four-year-olds when the strip began, now (and since the late sixties) grade school-aged; Dot is the better student of the two.
Trixie: the Flagstons' freckled, blonde infant daughter, who loves "talking" (through thought balloons) to Sunbeam, a ray of sunlight. While the other children have aged, Trixie has not.
Dawg: the Flagstons' large, lazy, shaggy sheepdog.
Thirsty Thurston: the Flagstons' fat, lazy, and frequently tipsy next-door neighbor; Hi's co-worker and golf buddy.
Irma Thurston: Thirsty's thin, weary, and long-suffering wife.
Mr. Foofram: Owner and president of Foofram Industries, where Hi and Thirsty work. Diminutive and at times short-tempered, but not a tyrant like J.C. Dithers from Blondie.
Ron Goulart praised Dik Browne's artwork for the strip, stating "Browne made Hi and Lois one of the most visually interesting strips on the comics page."[1] In an article for Entertainment Weekly reviewing then-current comic strips, Ken Tucker gave Hi and Lois a B+ rating, and added that it had the "gentlest humor" of all the Mort Walker comic strips.[8]
^ abRon Goulart. The Funnies: 100 years of American comic strips. Holbrook, Mass. : Adams Pub., 1995. ISBN1-55850-539-3 (p. 110)
^"Hi and Lois". www.comicskingdom.com. Retrieved 2021-05-13.
^Holtz, Allan (2012). American Newspaper Comics: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. pp. 189–190. ISBN9780472117567.
