Dagwood

The 93-year-old newspaper comic strip Blondie could have been called Dagwood, given how often its gags revolve around Dagwood Bumstead’s insatiable appetite, chronic lateness and his love of napping.

Beginning Tuesday, however, Dagwood will be ceding panels to his wife, Blondie, as she begins a search for a new employee for her catering company.

Old comic strip fans might call it a Dagwood.

Fox has built a Dagwood Bumstead sandwich of spleen and ignorance nestled between soft white layers of wan insult humor.

John Wesley, 93, painter of flat, cartoonish figures that seemed to spring not from the well of Pop Art but from some deeper, stranger reservoir of the American unconscious inhabited by floating babies, rubbery nudes and the hapless comic strip husband Dagwood Bumstead, died Feb. 10 at home in Manhattan.