Comic strip characters Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead kiss in this graphic released by King Features Syndicate. (Reuters)

Clearwater Beach (Florida), July 29 (Reuters): Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead are about to celebrate their 75th anniversary as one of the world’s most popular couples and many of their cartoon colleagues are coming to the party.

Garfield, Hagar the Horrible, Dick Tracy and Beetle Bailey are among the characters who will join the Bumsteads on Sunday, September 4. President Bush and his wife Laura will appear a week earlier, according to Blondie cartoonist Dean Young. He said the strip appears in over 2,300 newspapers in 55 countries with a readership of 250 million in 35 languages. And Blondie and Dagwood will show up in several other comic strips during the next few weeks as they prepare for the big event.

“I’m hoping it will be a lot of fun for the readers,” Young said in an interview at his studio in Clearwater Beach, Florida. Blondie was started by Young’s father Murat “Chic” Young in 1930. Dean Young, 66, took over the strip in 1973 when his father died. “He created these wonderful characters. He was a genius,” Young said of his father.

Chic Young had worked on other strips including “Beautiful Bab” and “Dumb Dora” before “Blondie.” When the strip started on September 8, 1930, its heroine was Blondie Boopadoop, who was pretty and single. Dagwood was the playboy son of a railroad tycoon and one of her several boyfriends. Blondie was popular at first but interest in a strip about rich characters declined as the Depression spread.

In 1932, Chic Young had Blondie and Dagwood fall in love. They were married in 1933, but Dagwood’s parents disapproved of Blondie and disinherited him, forcing him to go to work and live a middle class life.

Their son Alexander was born in 1934 and daughter Cookie joined the family in 1941. Both children grew until they became teenagers while Blondie and Dagwood remain in their early 40s.