Old stuff #2 - Quid Pro Quo (early)

People always say, "Brian, show us that comic you used to do a long time ago! That one that was really good!" And I'm all, "well, I've done much better things since then. Look at my new stuff!" And they're like, "NO! YOUR CRAPPY OLD COMIC IS THE BEST THING YOU'VE DONE." The comic was called Quid Pro Quo, and though it's kind of a source of embarrassment for me at times, I can't avoid the fact that it's the most popular thing I've done, so I may as well post it here. This is the first Quid Pro Quo strip, published March 15, 1951.
The dimwitted newspaper editor confused the punchline in the last panel with the name of the strip, which is for better or worse where the strip's name comes from.


In the early years, the humor of the strip revolved around the same cigarette-lighting situation. Such "routine gags" were a very popular device of the era. Barry's catchphrase "Say, mister, do you have a light?" entered the cultural lexicon, but soon the iconic sentence had to be abbreviated in various ways because of the nationwide ink shortage of 1953.

Eventually the catchphrase evolved into a strange abstract shorthand:

By 1958, the humor of the strip had taken a subtle political turn, and had to be ended. The new era of Quid Pro Quo was not to begin until 2001, when I was finally paroled from a high-security federal penitentiary. Maybe sometime I'll show those later comics too.