Dupus Boomer is back.

Boomer, the newspaper cartoon character whose comical tales of hard living in Hanford's early days made life easier for thousands of sand-spitting Richlanders, will live again in a compilation to be published in January.

The book, 'Dupus Boomer, Cartoons by Dick Donnell', will include cartoons that were published earlier in two smaller books but have long since been out of print.

Published by Battelle Press, the book will be sold for $6.95 at the Columbia River Exhibition of History, Science and Technology. Gift certificates for the book already are available at the museum.

The single-framed Dupus Boomer cartoons appeared in the weekly Richland Villager from 1945 until the newspaper folded in 1950. The cartoons not only spurred belly laughs for thousands of displaced workers before there was such a thing as the Tri-Cities, they also chronicled a miserable desert life.

Boomer was often pictured braving the fierce Mid-Columbia winds, poking fun at cheesy government-built prefabricated homes or stuck in late-afternoon traffic leaving Hanford.

Donnell, a union relations manager at the time, also poked fun at the secrecy surrounding the Manhattan Project mission at Hanford, where workers manufactured plutonium for the atom bomb.

"We wonder all year what Santa Claus is making in his workshop," Donnell wrote above a cartoon one year at Christmas time, "but he probably wonders the same about us, so that makes us even."

Dave Harvey, a Battelle historian, considers the cartoons important cultural artifacts that seem to have been forgotten.

"You don't see them around anymore," said Harvey, noting the cartoons did well "to interject levity into what was obviously a serious situation."

Tri-City residents who weren't around in 1950 can relate to some of the features the chamber of commerce doesn't advertise - namely the searing summer heat, tireless wind and airborne waves of brown dust. But for all its shortcomings, the Tri-Cities today is nothing like it was 50 years ago when the overall-wearing, lunch-pail toting Boomer turned out chuckles every week.

"Some of these jokes, people won't get anymore," said Connie Estep, the museum curator who has spent the past two years working to get the book published.

But she hopes a new foreword will provide all the needed context that new readers will need to understand the miserable existence of Richlanders in the late 1940s and why Donnell's cartoons were so funny.

"You don't get this kind of social history very often," Estep said. "To see history down on the level of the people, what they were laughing about, what they were dealing with, it's really interesting."

The much-celebrated Donnell retired in 1980 and died of cancer in 1989.

"I can remember him sitting there at that table every night slaving away," his son, Rick Donnell, told the Herald in 1998. "A lot of what's in those cartoons is exactly what we went through."