Dave Graue, 75; ‘Alley Oop’ Creator’s Successor

He’s a club-wielding caveman who lives in the prehistoric land of Moo. He’s prone to insisting, “I ain’t no ape,” but he looks just like one. And although he’s not too bright, he’s clever enough in a crisis.

The irrepressible Alley Oop boasts a pretty girlfriend named Ooola and gets around on a devoted dinosaur called Dinny--that is, when he’s not traveling through the eons in his friend Doc Wonmug’s time machine.

Launched in 1933 by Vincent T. Hamlin, “Alley Oop” is one of the longest-running syndicated cartoon strips in the world.

Dave Graue, the artist who inherited “Alley Oop” from Hamlin in 1973 and continued working on the strip until four months ago, has died at 75.

Graue died Monday after suffering head injuries when his car was struck by a dump truck near his home in Flat Rock, N.C., according to North Carolina authorities.

Graue (pronounced Grau-ee) was one of only three artists to work on “Alley Oop,” which inspired the 1960 hit tune of the same name by the Hollywood Argyles.

Hamlin’s inspiration for a Stone Age comic strip grew out of his interest in fossils, which he developed while working on advertising layouts for a Texas oil company in the early 1930s. He launched his prehistoric hero Aug. 7, 1933, naming him after the words used by French gymnasts and trapeze artists: “allez oup.”

Graue became Hamlin’s assistant in 1950 and took over as both artist and writer of the strip when Hamlin retired in 1973.

Graue partially retired at the end of 1991, when artist Jack Bender began drawing the daily and Sunday strips. But Graue continued to write the strips until he fully retired late last summer.

At its peak, “Alley Oop” appeared in about 800 newspapers. It is now distributed worldwide to about 650--most of them small--with a readership of 20 million.

“It’s still significant, and that’s due to Dave,” Bender, of Tulsa, Okla., told The Times. “He did a wonderful job through the years. There aren’t many strips that . . . hold up like that.”

Said Amy Lago, vice president of comics and graphics for United Media, which syndicates “Alley Oop”: “Dave did what is really considered to be a thankless task in this industry, and that is to take over producing a strip from its original creator. And he did so in a way that was so true to Hamlin’s vision but was still unique to him. He did a wonderfully smooth transition.”

Born in Oak Park, Ill., Graue began drawing at age 8 by copying “Dick Tracy” and other comics from the Chicago Tribune. In high school, after moving to Sarasota, Fla., with his family, he drew comic book-style adventure stories on lined notebook paper.

One of his high school classmates was Hamlin’s daughter, who introduced the budding young artist to her father in 1943.

Hamlin was so impressed with Graue’s sketches that he offered him a job as his assistant doing the lettering and color guides for the strips. After working with Hamlin, Graue spent two years in the Air Force, during which he made his first professional cartoon sale to the Pacific Stars and Stipes.

After his discharge, he attended the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and worked as a staff artist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

In 1950, Graue finally took up Hamlin’s offer to return as his assistant.

By then Hamlin wasn’t restricting “Alley Oop” to the prehistoric world, 14 years earlier having introduced Doc Wonmug, the 20th century inventor of a time-traveling machine. Thanks to Wonmug’s appearance, the adventures of Alley Oop and company were no longer restricted to the Stone Age. Oop and company showed up in stories dealing with everything from the Crusades to Caribbean pirates--a format that has contributed to the strip’s longevity.

“You’ve no idea how fast a daily and Sunday feature can devour material, especially as limited as my ancient Land of Moo,” Hamlin wrote in “The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Book Art,” edited by Jerry Robinson.

By the mid-1960s, Graue was writing the daily strip while Hamlin continued to write the Sunday version. As Hamlin neared retirement, Graue did more and more work on “Alley Oop.”

In continuing the strip after Hamlin’s retirement in 1973, Graue lightened the characters’ personalities.

“Alley Oop was kind of mean and violent, and as the comics sort of evolved, so did ‘Alley Oop,’ ” Bender said. “While he was still a superman as far as being the hero and so forth, the kind of humor and everything was much more light: The characters didn’t hit each other. There just wasn’t a place for that anymore in the comics.”

As a comic strip artist, Bender said, Graue was one of the best in the business.

“His work is so detailed, and most everybody else [now] is just doing a pretty simple kind of art,” he said. “Dave’s was kind of semi-realistic and had lots of detail in the background.”

Bender became Graue’s assistant in 1990 on the Sunday strip.

When Graue decided to retire at the end of 1991, Bender asked him if he would continue as the strip’s writer.

Graue is survived by his wife, Eliza; two sons, Jeff, of Lexington, Ky., and Dan, of Sarasota, Fla; a daughter, Karin Dowdy, of Hendersonville, N.C.; and seven grandchildren.