Tim: The price of the earrings changes and the “joke” seems to be “You want good thing? Well, you get bad thing” with no wit or twist.
Bill: I wish I could decipher the original publication date on this one: kind of curious how early people were using “atomic” in this manner.
Comics I Don't Understand 
1991 is the copyright date. That doesn’t seem right.
That is just the rerun date. Andrews & McMeel did not exist when this was first drawn. I think the original copyright and signature was in the last panel, it looks like it got wiped out when it was colorized.
The joke is that she found it to be useful. If this was reprinted recently, the final line could have been rewritten (when the second “ten” was re-inked to “fifty”) to capitalize on the 2017 film.
I’m pretty sure the shift from $10 to $50 was created during a reprint, because $10 earrings didn’t seem extravagant enough to justify the response it got, and (at the time of that reprint, $50 did.)
The real gag, such as it is, is not just Jeff’s cheapness but also the absolute lack of romance or holiday spirit represented by a broom. It’s not even a labor-SAVING device; just an implied statement of A Woman’s Place.
MAD Magazine once suggested The Honeymoon Is Over when a replacement vacuum cleaner hose is an anniversary gift. Homer Simpson once presented Marge with a slick new bowling ball, expecting her to give it back to him because she didn’t bowl.
Andrea: Pierre S. DeBeaumont’s mother married Bud Fisher. They separated after a month, but never divorced, so she wound up inheriting the rights to the strip, and now her son’s name is on the reprints.
That bothers me enough, but the fact that they removed the name of the actual artist from the strip (this is Al Smith, who did it after Bud Fisher died) is indefensible.
The entire dialogue has been re-“inked” in what is clearly a computer font. So someone had to type both the “TEN” and the “FIFTY” in, likely much more recently than 1991.
My two guesses:
1) She told him the earrings were ten dollars. He went to the store between panels 3 and 4 and discovered they were really fifty. The broom “gift” is payback for her lying to him about the price.
2) The typist corrected the price for inflation but forgot to do it in both mentions. The broom joke makes no sense other than just (in modern language) “Jeff is a d!@k.”
I don’t think even $50 diamond earrings existed in the same time era as “atomic.” Blonde or otherwise.
ignatzz: Is that the same Pierre S. de Beaumont who founded Brookstone?
I’m sticking with guess 3)… the mistake was made at some point back in the day, and if the text was re-created after 1991, it was done by someone who didn’t have authority to make changes. (There are copyright considerations in making changes.)
CaroZ made an excellent catch in noticing the computer font. There’s one other odd change that parallels the price jump: in the first two panels, the earrings are plural, but in the third panel (where the price jumped) they suddenly become singular (“They‘re very cheap” would have sounded more “normal”.)
“(“They‘re very cheap” would have sounded more “normal”.)”
Meh. “Cheap” has two meanings, one to quality, one to price. To my ear, “they’re cheap” suggests one meaning while “it’s cheap” suggests the other. YMMV.
I read it as: (The sum of) $50 is very cheap (for a pair of diamond earrings).
@Phil Smith: Yes, the Brookstone founder was the same person who inherited the copyright to “Mutt and Jeff.”
When she said “It’s very cheap” she meant “the price is very cheap.”
The phrase “atomic blonde” was in use at least as early as 1947, according to a Google Books search. And those uses are from company magazines, so my guess would be the phrase started almost as soon as the war ended.
OK, I concede the point on the singular verb, but it doesn’t make the dialog any less stilted. Whoever decided to rehash these old strips did a really poor job. Perhaps Bill could expand the URL: GoDaddy, and the squirrel, and Mutt and Jeff must all die. Let sleeping zombie comics lie.
“Let sleeping zombie comics lie.”
Yes. Let’s also get rid of all the old books, movies, plays, and heck, even the people who remember that old stuff. Riverdale has ALWAYS been a teen-soap-opera about sex and drugs and gangs and serial murderers. Sherlock Holmes NEVER discussed any Mormons in any of the mysteries he solved. Greedo ALWAYS shot first.
Let’s not stifle creativity. There is a fundamental difference between careful re-editing and mercenary repackaging. I have no objection to a skillful adaptation: there are plenty of excellent movies based on books, and occasionally a remake supercedes the original (“Ocean’s 11” is a good example).
Tolkien re-worked LoTR because of copyright concerns (fundamentally a mercenary issue), but he took the opportunity to make a very large number of improvements. He also completely reworked The Hobbit to fit in better with the story. I doubt that anyone would claim that the first edition of either book is the “authentic” version of the story, such as many Star Wars fanatics are prone to doing.
The strip above has no relationship to the sort of retroactive editing done by Tolkien or Lucas. What we see here is a cheap, thoughtless reworking (and needless colorization) of the original material, with the sole objective of filling space in newspapers and/or websites at minimum cost. It would have been better to simply reprint the original black & white drawings.
“There is a fundamental difference between careful re-editing and mercenary repackaging.”
There’s ALSO a fundamental difference between deciding that you, personally, choose or would choose not to consume something, and extending that to everyone. “I don’t like this product, so it shouldn’t be available to anyone.”
As an example, I wish that the owners of certain literary properties that I have an interest in would stop letting JJ Abrams get his grubby paws on them. Some people, on the other hand, like Mr. Abrams’ work, in some cases even more than the original creator’s. I can only vote with MY dollars.
Joshua K.: Wikipedia and I beg to differ. Phil Smith III doubtless understands how a son who bears his father’s name (let alone his grandfather’s) may find himself mistaken for an ancestor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_de_Beaumont
Kilby, Mutt and Jeff is already dead: it just doesn’t know it.
ignatzz, I couldn’t agree more: regardless of who owns the rights to a comic strip, or a book, or a painting, the nane of the person who created it should be inviolable.
Considering what the owners are doing to the strip, I’m not sure the creator would like his name to be associated with it.
They seem to be reprinting the strip randomly: Atomic Blonde, which presumably first appeared around 1945, showed up a few weeks after one referencing the moon landing (1969]
We’re complaining about stilted dialog in a strip from more than half a century ago?
My reading was that Jeff knows that when she says something costs ten dollars (trying to get him to buy it), it actually costs at least fifty.