Welcome back to We Want Comics, a column exploring intellectual properties, whether they’re movies, TV shows, novels or video games, that we want adapted into comic books.
Seventy years ago this past Friday, a redhead from Jamestown and a Cuban bandleader teamed up to introduce us to their life at 623 East 68th Street, and the world of television forever changed. You know them better as Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, the stars of the classic television series I Love Lucy, which debuted on October 15, 1951. With friends and landlord/landlady Fred and Ethel Mertz, the world got to know, over the course of seven seasons, how to spoon your way to health with Vitameatavegamin, how not to package chocolates on a conveyor belt, how to somewhat successfully steal John Wayne’s footprints from Grauman’s Chinese Theater, and so much more. The series not only provided fun for television audiences from the 1950s through to today, but also revolutionized the medium itself. Had I Love Lucy not existed, we perhaps would not have had such staples of television viewing as the rerun and syndication. Moreover, this redhead American gal and Cuban bandleader showed – – long before Lin Manuel Miranda sang it on stage – – that immigrants do in fact, get the job done.
In the 1950s, there was no shortage of merchandise from the show, from dolls to pajamas to Ricky Ricardo’s iconic smoking jacket. It’s no surprise that there were comics based on the series as well, published by Dell from 1954 to 1962, as well as syndicated newspaper comic strip. But in honor of the 70th anniversary of the series’s debut, it’s high time to see what else could come from the world of I Love Lucy, a series that still runs in syndication on some tv stations today, and is available for streaming in the U.S. on Paramount+.
We all know Lucy wanted to be a part of Ricky’s act, but what if she was missing her true calling in the comic book world? We have a few ideas.
The Classic I Love Lucy Stories
The first thought that comes to mind is simple retellings of classic stories from the show, recreating everything from the episodes everyone knows and loves to perhaps some lesser known gems. This would be a wonderful opportunity to bring color to the black and white world of the Ricardos and Mertzes. Occasionally colorized episodes would show up on television as specials, but the technology of the 1950s has its limitations. And Lucy’s red hair just doesn’t seem as flaming crimson when the coloring is done after the fact. Comic books provide a blank slate for a colorist to go wild and bring some modern touches to Lucy, Ricky, Fred, and Ethel, but without making it too much of a caricature of the era.
Not every idea made its way to TV, and there have been a slew of unproduced and unaired scripts from not just I Love Lucy, but Lucy’s other TV series: Here’s Lucy, The Lucy Show, and Life With Lucy. The latter had actually filmed 13 episodes (with a 14th script written) when the show was canceled after a few weeks on the air in 1986, so over half the series has never been seen by the public, unless you bought the DVD set. Turning these episodes into comic stories proves a wonderful way to ensure that the creativity of the production team lives on in perpetuity, even if it never made it to TV screens.
There is one I Love Lucy episode that could deserve its own separate series: when Lucy met none other than Superman himself, George Reeves. We took a look at this episode as part of our Adventures of Superman Summer TV Binge last year. The premise is simple: Lucy schemes to get Superman at Little Ricky’s birthday party, but has to figure out some way to deliver the Man of Steel herself when he doesn’t show up. For a brief and hilarious moment, Lucy gets to be Superman, which had me wondering: what if Lucy teamed up to fight for truth, justice, and a better tomorrow with Kal-El? Wouldn’t it be amusing to see Lucy Ricardo scheme to put one over on Lex Luthor, or being besties with Lois Lane?
Continued belowThe Wild World of Little Ricky
TV Guide called him “Lucy’s $50,000,000 Baby” when he appeared on the cover of TV Guide in April 1953. And while the baby on the cover of that issue of TV Guide was Lucille Ball’s real-life son with first husband Desi Arnaz (Desi Jr.) the headline also referred to Lucy Ricardo’s baby boy. Timed to coincide with Ball’s real-life pregnancy, the birth of Ricky Ricardo Jr. (aka Little Ricky) was a landmark television moment. It wasn’t the first time a pregnant woman was shown on television (that honor belongs to Mary Kay Stearns on Mary Kay and Johnny in 1948), but thanks to the show’s skyrocketing popularity, it is the one people remember the most. The birth of Little Ricky was timed with Ball’s Caesarean section that delivered Desi Jr., so on January 19th, 1953, Lucy gave birth in real life and on television – – and over 71 million people watched (more than the inauguration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower the following day).
I Love Lucy also did not resort to rapidly aging Little Ricky, so viewers saw him grow up in real time. This meant that when the world of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo ended in 1961 with the end of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, Little Ricky remained perpetually eight years old. What happened to his life after that? A comic could give us a glimpse into Little Ricky’s teenage years, which would have taken place during the late 1960s, and college in the 1970s. America’s baby meets the Swinging Sixties and the counterculture? Oh the storytelling possibilities.
Meet the Mertzes
Throughout the years, producers offered Vivian Vance and William Frawley, who played the Ricardos’s best friends Fred and Ethel Mertz, their own spinoff series. But tensions between the actors, along with Vance’s desires to play more glamorous roles, put a stop to such an idea before it even began. And with Frawley’s death in 1966 (the first of the four cast members to pass away), even a one-episode reunion of the two would be forever out of reach.
But you don’t have to deal with on-set tensions in comics. A comic showing the Mertzes’ landlord life with the other tenants (which we met on occasion on the show), or their early years of marriage as a vaudeville team gives fans the spinoff they so wanted. If done properly, the comic could also finally establish some canon for the characters’s early years, something the show did play fast and loose with throughout the years, changing dates and facts to fit a particular script’s whim.
Before 623 East 68th Street
As mentioned in the previous section, I Love Lucy didn’t always get things right with the early days of its fabulous foursome. Details about when the Ricardos and Mertzes met each other, how long each couple was married, and how old they were often changed to fit the needs of a particular story or if a new writer came on board and didn’t dive deep into the story bible. A comic could finally set the record straight on life before everyone lived together at 623 East 68th Street.
(And before you go looking on a map for the address, it doesn’t exist – – unless you want to go to the bottom of the East River, that is.)
While Lucy was the one presumed to have the more conventional upbringing, a comic could have a lot of fun showing Ricky’s days in Cuba, his early days in America bringing his culture to American audiences, and even the formative years of Fred and Ethel Mertz. Everyone gets an origin story today. Why not Lucy and Ricky?
I Love Lucy Behind the Scenes
I Love Lucy did more than just make people laugh. It changed the way television was made, from the use of film instead of the kinescope that was common for West Coast-based productions to the development of the rerun. A program with a woman and a Cuban immigrant as its stars and producers was (to put it mildly) a novelty in the socially conservative 1950s and early 1960s. And as such, there were plenty of challenges to get it on the air which people may not fully know about. A graphic novel detailing just what it took to get I Love Lucy on the air, and the challenges it encountered throughout its run (such as writing in Ball’s second pregnancy), could shed light on history casual viewers may not know.
Continued belowLike with the “Lucy Meets Superman” episode, there’s one moment in the series’s history that could get its own graphic novel retelling: the one that almost led to the show’s cancellation. In 1936, Lucille Ball registered to vote and affiliated herself with the Communist party to please her socialist grandfather. At the height of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in the early 1950s, word got out about Ball’s registration, and she testified before the committee about those activities. Getting outed as a Communist in this era was the death knell for an actor’s career, and if not handled carefully, could have spelled the death for this sitcom. It was a tense time for everyone involved in the series, and how the entire affair was handled was a masterclass in public relations. (This may or may not be the premise behind the upcoming film Being the Ricardos, as the description hints at “a crisis that could end their careers and another that could end their marriage.”)
More than Just Lucy Ricardo
The people that made I Love Lucy could certainly deserve graphic novel biographies. There’s no shortage of books written about Lucille Ball, but not as many about her co-stars. Desi Arnaz wrote his own biography titled A Book in 1976, but never got a chance to write any follow-up to it (reportedly one was titled Another Book). And while there have been books about Vivian Vance and William Frawley, they also appear out of print. We all love Lucy, no doubt, but there is no Lucy without Ricky, Fred, or Ethel. And each of their portrayers had fascinating lives that deserve the spotlight: Frawley’s pioneering vaudeville career, Arnaz’s immigration from Cuba to the United States after the 1933 Cuban Revolution, Vance’s theater career.
Inevitably, though, we should think about a graphic novel biography of Lucille Ball, but rather than a simple retelling of her life, focus on certain aspects of it instead. An exploration of her early years, from childhood to her Hollywood studio days would prove interesting, as some of those details have been scant and inaccurate throughout the years (in some cases, by Ball herself). After her divorce from Arnaz in 1961, Ball bought out his shares of the company he founded to produce I Love Lucy and other shows (Desilu Productions) becoming a woman-owned studio, a rarity in the early 1960s. It’s also the studio that took a chance on some little known shows called Star Trek and Mission: Impossible. An exploration of Ball’s life in the context of developing these shows (somewhat similar to what the aforementioned Being the Ricardos film is doing) would be a different sort of biography than done in the past.
What other ideas for I Love Lucy comics do you have? Tell us in the comments!
