Blondie's day

Poem - This poem reimagines the American comic strip character Blondie as an Australian housewife in 1948. Blondie was created by U.S. cartoonist Chic Young; it ran each week in the Australian pictorial magazine Pix. Blondie’s day is a fantasy that draws on the cartoon strip as well as health advice about diet and the benefits of extended sunbathing given to postwar Australian mothers. The comic strip itself can be read as simultaneously conservative in its depiction of the limited roles available to women in postwar America and subversive in its representation of Blondie as an agential and sometimes domineering figure. I hope this poem achieves a similar balance. Norman Mailer’s debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published in 1948. It quickly became a bestseller.