The strip gets a lot better once the rest of the cast shows up.

This might be an average strip to the layman....but Garfield and Friends fans already recognize its significance. It mentions "Planet Clarion."

For some reason, every single alien that appeared in a Garfield and Friends cartoon said it was from "Planet Clarion," and I can't find anything it would come from, other than this one strip. I guess the word just stuck with Davis.....

Top strip: You'll see more on this later. I don't know how many drawings Davis received of the "thing behind the wall," but it's a good bet most of them got lost in the mail. When I first saw this strip I thought "Jim Davis, In Care Of This Newspaper" was the address. I couldn't have been the only kid to think so.

Bottom strip: An early "epic" continuity involved hypnotically curing Wade of fear. It sounds like a great idea to use for a U.S. Acres TV cartoon, and many other strips were redone as cartoons, but this story was only adapted into the second half of another story. Kind of a waste.....

Wow, how unOrsonly of him.

Roy would do this to Wade on TV in Season 1's "The Worm Turns."

Well, THAT was inevitable.....

Yes, it's Lanolin. Keep reading....

Right off the bat, Lanolin made her presence known as the meanest thing around the farm, and the only one who could put Roy in his place. Her viciousness was toned down for the series, making her less funny. Roy was still the wisecracking joker who thought he was all that, but we rarely ever saw Lanolin slap his feathered behind back to reality, which was the funniest part of it. Shame.

The biggest difference between the strip and the TV show (besides the cat and dog you'll see later) is Bo. The strip version of Bo is defined by one word: stupid. He would frequently walk off cliffs and misinterpret words.
TV Bo isn't necessarily dumb....instead, they made him a surfer dude who said "whoa" and "man" in every sentence. That's not the original Bo. Jim Davis did have a hand in the development of U.S. Acres for television, so he must have liked the change. Surfer sheep, however, aren't as funny as stupid sheep.

With this strip, Booker began his ruthless worm-hunting career. Worm gags took up much of the strip later on.

Here's Wade talking to the thing in the hole again. It's unknown if this is someone's design, or if Davis came up with this guy on his own. But boy howdy, what an interesting week this would be....

Max never appeared again. After seeing this, I wanted him in a cartoon badly.

This is the beginning of a side of Sheldon the series never showed. From this point on, Sheldon became a philosopher and intellectual, musing on the mysteries of life from atop a little dirt mound. Not that there weren't still cheap egg jokes in the strip.

The top strip is yet another "first appearance"....of the Worm Family. That's yet another concept that stayed in the strip, and you'll find out more about it next.....