Early Pulps: Part 3 Zorro

Zorro

Zorro (Spanish for ‘Fox’) was created in 1919 by American pulp writer Johnston McCulley. The character appeared in works set in the Pueblo of Los Angeles during the era of Spanish California (1769–1821).

He was typically portrayed as a dashing masked vigilante who defended the commoners and indigenous peoples of California against corrupt and tyrannical officials and other villains. His signature all-black costume included a cape, a hat known as a sombrero cordobés, and a mask covering the upper half of his face.

In the stories, Zorro had a high bounty on his head, but was too skilled and cunning for the bumbling authorities to catch, and he also delighted in publicly humiliating them. Because of this, the townspeople started calling him “El Zorro” due to his fox- like cunning and charm. Zorro was an acrobat and an expert in various weapons, but the one he employed most frequently is his rapier, which he used often to carve the initial “Z” on his defeated foes, and other objects to “sign his work”. He was also an accomplished rider, his trusty steed being a black horse called Tornado.

Zorro was the secret identity of Don Diego de la Vega (originally Don Diego Vega), a young man who was the only son of Don Alejandro de la Vega, the richest landowner in California, while Diego’s mother was dead. In most versions, Diego learned his swordsmanship while at university in Spain, and created his masked alter ego after he was unexpectedly summoned home by his father because California had fallen into the hands of an oppressive dictator. Diego was usually shown living with his father in a huge hacienda, which contains a number of secret passages and tunnels, leading to a secret cave sometimes called “the Fox Den” that served as headquarters for Zorro’s operations and as Tornado’s hiding place. In order to divert suspicion about his identity, Diego hid his fighting abilities while also pretending to be a coward and a fop.

Zorro made his debut in the 1919 novel The Curse of Capistrano, originally meant as a stand-alone story and was serialized in five parts between August 9 and September 6, 1919 in the pulp magazine All-Story Weekly. At the denouement, Zorro’s true identity is revealed to all.

However, the success of the 1920 film adaptation The Mark of Zorro starring Douglas Fairbanks convinced McCulley to write more Zorro stories and in response to public demand fueled by the film, McCulley wrote more than sixty more Zorro stories, beginning in 1922 with The Further Adventures of Zorro, which was also serialized in Argosy All-Story Weekly.

At first, production of new Zorro stories proceeded at irregular intervals: the third novel, Zorro Rides Again (not to be confused with the 1937 theatrical serial) was published in 1931, nine years after the second one. Then, between 1932 and 1941, McCulley wrote four short stories and two serialized novels. Zorro stories were published much more frequently between 1944 and 1951, a period in which McCulley published 52 short stories with the character for the West Magazine. “Zorro Rides the Trail!”, which appeared in Max Brand’s Western Magazine in 1954, is the last story to be published during the author’s lifetime, and the second-to-last story overall. The last, “The Mask of Zorro” (not to be confused with the 1998 film), was published posthumously in Short Stories for Men in 1959. These stories ignore Zorro’s public revelation of his identity.

The Curse of Capistrano eventually sold more than 50 million copies, becoming one of the best-selling books of all time. While the rest of McCulley’s Zorro stories did not enjoy the same popularity.

Appearance

The character’s visual motif was typically a black costume with a black flowing Spanish cape or cloak, a black flat-brimmed hat known as sombrero cordobés, and a black sackcloth mask that covers the top half of his head. Sometimes the mask was a two piece, the main item being a blindfold-type fabric with slits for the eyes, and the other item being a bandana over the head, so that it was covered even if the hat was removed: this is the mask worn in the movie The Mark of Zorro (1920) and in the television series Zorro (1957–1959). Other times, the mask was a one piece that unites both items described above: this mask was introduced in The Mark of Zorro (1940) and appeared in many modern versions. Zorro’s mask has also occasionally been shown as being a rounded domino mask, which he wore without also wearing a bandana. In his first appearance, Zorro’s cloak was purple, his hat was generically referred to as a “wide sombrero,” and his black cloth veil mask with slits for eyes covers his whole face. Other features of the costume may vary.

Abilities

His favored weapon was a rapier, which he also used to often leave his distinctive mark, a Z cut with three quick strokes, on his defeated foes and other objects to “sign his work”. He also used other weapons, including a bullwhip and a pistol.

The fox was never depicted as Zorro’s emblem. It was used as a metaphor for the character’s wiliness, such as in the lyrics “Zorro, ‘the Fox’, so cunning and free ...” from Disney’s television series theme.

His heroic pose consisted of rearing on his horse, Tornado, often saluting with his hand or raising his sword high. The logo of the company Zorro Productions, Inc. used an image of Zorro rearing on his horse, sword raised high.

Zorro was an agile athlete and acrobat, using his bullwhip as a gymnastic accouterment to swing through gaps between city roofs, and was very capable of landing from great heights and taking a fall. Although he was a master swordsman and marksman, he has more than once demonstrated his prowess in unarmed combat against multiple opponents.

His calculating and precise dexterity as a tactician has enabled him to use his two main weapons, his sword and bullwhip, as an extension of his deft hand. He never used brute strength. Instead and more likely, he used his fox-like and sly mind, and well-practiced technique to outmatch an opponent.

In some versions, Zorro kept a medium-sized dagger tucked in his left boot for emergencies. He has used his cape as a blind, a trip-mat and a disarming tool. Zorro’s boots were also sometimes weighted, as was his hat, which he has thrown, Frisbee-style, as an efficiently substantial warning to enemies. But more often than not, he used psychological mockery to make his opponents too angry to be coordinated in combat.

Zorro was a skilled horseman. The name of his jet-black horse has varied through the years. In The Curse of Capistrano, it was unnamed. In Disney’s Zorro television series the horse got the name Tornado, which has been kept in many later adaptations. In most versions, Zorro kept Tornado in a secret cave, connected to his hacienda with a system of secret passages and tunnels.

Character Concepts

McCulley’s concept of a band of men helping Zorro was often absent from other versions of the character. In McCulley’s stories, Zorro was aided by a deaf-mute named Bernardo. In Disney’s Zorro television series, Bernardo was not deaf but pretended to be, and serves as Zorro’s secret agent. He was a capable and invaluable helper for Zorro, sometimes wearing the mask to reinforce his master’s charade.

In The Curse of Capistrano, Diego was described as “a fair youth of excellent blood and twenty-four years, noted the length of El Camino Real for his small interest in the really important things of life.” It was also said that “Don Diego was unlike the other full-blooded youths of the times. It appeared that he disliked action. He seldom wore his blade, except as a matter of style and apparel. He was damnably polite to all women and paid court to none. ... Those who knew Don Diego best declared he yawned ten score times a day.” Though proud as befitting his class (and seemingly uncaring about the lower classes), he shuns action, rarely wearing his sword except for fashion, and was indifferent to romance with women. This was, of course, a sham. At the end of the novel, Diego explained that he had planned his double identity since he was fifteen:

“It began ten years ago, when I was but a lad of fifteen,” he said. “I heard tales of persecution. I saw my friends, the frailes, annoyed and robbed. I saw soldiers beat an old native who was my friend. And then I determined to play this game.

“It would be a difficult game to play, I knew. So I pretended to have small interest in life, so that men never would connect my name with that of the highwayman I expected to become. In secret, I practiced horsemanship and learned how to handle a blade—”

“By the saints, he did,” Sergeant Gonzales growled

“One half of me was the languid Don Diego you all knew, and the other half was the Curse of Capistrano I hoped one day to be. And then the time came, and my work began.”

“It is a peculiar thing to explain, señores. The moment I donned cloak and mask, the Don Diego part of me fell away. My body straightened, new blood seemed to course through my veins, my voice grew strong and firm, fire came to me! And the moment I removed cloak and mask I was the languid Don Diego again. Is it not a peculiar thing?

This part of the backstory was changed in the 1920 film The Mark of Zorro: Diego was recently returned from Spain at the start of the movie, and Zorro later told Lolita that he learned his swordsmanship in Spain. The 1925 sequel Don Q, Son of Zorro expanded on this concept by saying that: “Though the home of the De Vegas has long been on California soil, the eldest son of each new generation returns to Spain for a period of travel and study.” The 1940 film The Mark of Zorro kept the idea of Diego learning his swordsmanship in Spain, and added the idea of him being unexpectedly summoned home by his father Don Alejandro when California fell into the hand of an oppressing dictator. Both ideas would then be included in most retelling of the character’s backstory.

McCulley’s portrayal of Diego’s personality, with minor variations, was followed in most of the subsequent Zorro adaptations.

A notable exception to this portrayal is Disney’s Zorro (1957– 59), where Diego, despite using the original façade early in the series, instead became a passionate and compassionate crusader for justice and simply masqueraded as “the most inept swordsman in all of California”. In this show, everyone knew Diego would love to do what Zorro did, but thought he did not have the skill.

The Family Channel’s Zorro (1990–1993) took this concept further. While Diego pretended to be inept with a sword, the rest of his facade was actually exaggerating his real interests. Diego was actually well-versed and interested in art, poetry, literature, and science. His facade was pretending to be interested in only these things and to have no interest in swordplay or action. Zorro also had a well-equipped laboratory in his hidden cave in this version of the story.

Inspirations

The historical figure most often associated with the Zorro character is Joaquin Murrieta, whose life was fictionalized in an 1854 dime novel by John Rollin Ridge. As a hero with a secret identity who taunted his foes by signing his deeds, Zorro found a direct literary predecessor in Sir Percival Blakeney, hero of the Scarlet Pimpernel pulp series by Emma Orczy.

The character recalls other figures, such as Robin Hood, Reynard the Fox, Salomon Pico, Manuel Rodríguez Erdoíza, and Tiburcio Vasquez. Another possible historical inspiration is William Lamport, an Irish soldier who lived in Mexico in the seventeenth century. His life was the subject of a fictive book by Vicente Riva Palacio; The Irish Zorro (2004) is a recent biography. Another is Estanislao, a Yokuts man who led a revolt against the Mission San Jose in 1827.


The 1890s penny dreadful treatment of the Spring-heeled Jack character as a masked avenger may have inspired some aspects of Zorro’s heroic persona. Spring Heeled Jack was portrayed as a nobleman who created a flamboyant, masked alter ego to fight injustice, frequently demonstrated exceptional athletic and combative skills, maintained a hidden lair and was known to carve the letter “S” into walls with his rapier as a calling card.

Like Sir Percy in The Scarlet Pimpernel, Don Diego avoided suspicion by playing the role of an effete dandy who wore lace, wrote poetry, and shunned violence. The all-black Fairbanks film costume, which with variations has remained the standard costume for the character, was likely adapted from the Arrow serial film character The Masked Rider (1919). This character was the first Mexican black-clad masked rider on a black horse to appear on the silver screen. Fairbanks’s costume in The Mark of Zorro, released the following year, resembled that of the Rider with only slight differences in the mask and hat.

Regardless of these possible inspiration sources, Zorro is one of the earliest examples of a fictional masked avenger with a double identity and became a source of inspiration for similar characters that followed in pulp magazines and other media, and is a precursor of the superheroes of American comic books, with Batman drawing particularly close parallels to the character.

Early Pulps: Part 2 John Carter of Mars

John Carter of Mars

John Carter of Mars is a fictional Virginian—a veteran of the American Civil War—transported to Mars and the initial protagonist of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom stories. His character is enduring, having appeared in various media since his 1912 debut in a magazine serial.

John Carter was the lead character in the first novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, set on a fictionalized version of Mars known as Barsoom.

Written between July and September 28, 1911, the novel was serialized as Under the Moons of Mars in the pulp magazine The All-Story from February to July 1912. It later appeared as a complete novel only after the success of Burroughs’ Tarzan series. For its October 1917 hardcover publication by A.C. McClurg & Company, the novel was retitled A Princess of Mars.

The character paved the way for other characters like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and made popular adventures on Mars, which would influence writers like Heinlein and Bradbury.

Carter reappeared in subsequent volumes of the series, most prominently in the second (The Gods of Mars, 1918), the third (The Warlord of Mars, 1919), the eighth (Swords of Mars, 1936), the tenth (Llana of Gathol, 1948), and the eleventh and final installment (John Carter of Mars, published posthumously in 1964). John Carter is also a major secondary character in the fourth volume (Thuvia, Maid of Mars, 1920), and the ninth (Synthetic Men of Mars, 1940). In Spring 2020, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. released John Carter Of Mars: Gods of The Forgotten, the 12th book in the Barsoom series and is officially seen as canon.

Appearance

Carter stood 6 feet 2 inches (1.88 m) and had close-cropped black hair and steel-grey eyes. Burroughs described him as immortal. In the opening pages of A Princess of Mars, it is revealed that Carter could remember no childhood, having always been a man of about thirty years old. Many generations have known him as “Uncle Jack,” but he always lived to see them grow old and die, while he remained young.

His character and courtesy exemplify the ideals of the antebellum South. A Virginian, he served as a captain in the American Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. After the war, Carter and his companion Powell, who was also a captain in the Civil War, became gold prospectors. Carter and Powell struck it rich by finding gold in Arizona. While hiding from Apaches in a cave, he appeared to die; leaving his inanimate body behind, he was mysteriously transported by a form of astral projection to the planet Mars, where he found himself re-embodied in a form identical to his earthly one. Accustomed to the greater gravity of Earth, he found himself to be much stronger and more agile than the natives of Mars.

Background

On Mars, which its natives call Barsoom, Carter encountered both formidable alien creatures resembling the beasts of ancient myth, and various humanoids. He found his true calling in life as a warlord who strove to save the planet’s inhabitants. He won the hand of a Martian princess, Dejah Thoris of Helium, but after several years of marriage he sacrificed himself to save Barsoom from the loss of its atmosphere. Awakening again after this second death, he found he has been miraculously transported back to Earth, into his original body. Carter then collected the wealth that resulted from his discovery of a rich vein of gold ore right before his original passage to Barsoom. Unable to return to Mars, he spent several more years in a small cottage on the Hudson River in New York, where he once more appeared to die on March 4, 1886.


Again, Carter’s apparent demise was not a true death; rather, he was restored to Barsoom, where after more adventures he rose to the position of Warlord of Mars, having played an instrumental role in creating alliances among many of the sentient races of Barsoom. He returned to Earth on a number of occasions afterward to relate his adventures to his nephew (“Burroughs”), revealing that he has mastered the process of astral travel between the two worlds. During his adventures on Mars his earthly body reposed in a special tomb that could only be opened from the inside.

John Carter and Dejah Thoris became the parents of a son, Carthoris, and daughter, Tara. Carthoris played a secondary role in The Gods of Mars and The Warlord of Mars, and is the protagonist of Thuvia, Maid of Mars. Tara was the heroine of The Chessmen of Mars (1922), and the mother of Carter’s granddaughter Llana, heroine of Llana of Gathol.

In Comics

John Carter has appeared many times in short-lived comic strips and comic books, as well as in various Big Little Books of the 1930s and 1940s.

In 1932, Burroughs tried to convince United Feature Syndicate, the distributors of the Tarzan comic strip, to also make an adaptation of John Carter; however the syndicate rejected the idea. In 1933, King Features Syndicate, wanting a science fiction strip to compete with the popular Buck Rogers, which began in 1929, discussed a John Carter adaptation with Burroughs. Burroughs and the illustrator J. Allen St. John, expressed an interest in doing such a strip for King Features. However, Burroughs and King Features were unable to reach an agreement, and the syndicate decided to use an original strip — Flash Gordon by Alex Raymond — instead.

In 1941, United Feature agreed to the creation of a John Carter strip, hoping it would become as successful as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. The most notable John Carter comic adaptation to appear in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ lifetime, John Carter of Mars was written and illustrated by Burroughs’ son John Coleman Burroughs. This strip debuted on Sunday, December 7, 1941— the very day of the infamous Pearl Harbor Attack. This strip lasted only 4 months, ending on April 18, 1943. Coleman Burroughs’ strip was reprinted in book form by House of Greystoke in 1970.

Dell Comics released three issues of John Carter of Mars under its Four Color Comics anthology title. The issue numbers are 375, 437, and 488 and were released in 1952-1953. These were reprinted by Gold Key Comics (with different covers) in 1964.

Carter has appeared in various subsequent graphic adaptations of the Martian stories, notably the “John Carter of Mars” feature that ran in DC Comics’ Tarzan and Weird Worlds comics from 1972 to 1973, and in Marvel Comics’ John Carter, Warlord of Mars from 1977 to 1979.

Impact

John Carter of Mars was a major influence on other science fiction/fantasy tales and characters through the 20th century, including Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Superman, Adam Strange, Dune, Warp!, Den, and Star Wars to name just a few. The movie Avatar was inspired by John Carter of Mars. According to Avatar’s creator, James Cameron, “With Avatar, I thought, ‘Forget all these chick flicks and do a classic guys’ adventure movie, something in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mold, like John Carter of Mars – a soldier goes to Mars.’”

In the first chapters of Gore Vidal’s novel Washington, D.C. (1967), the character Peter Sanford – aged 16 at the outset of the plot – indulged in vivid and detailed fantasies of being John Carter, and added explicit erotic scenes not appearing in the original Burroughs books.

In The Number Of The Beast, by Robert Heinlein, two of the main characters were inspired by the John Carter series. One was actually a reserve captain from Virginia named Zebadiah John Carter and his (soon to be) bride was named Deejah (Deety) Thoris Burroughs. They used technology to skip to various worlds, and ended up meeting Lazarus Long.

Early Pulps: Part 1 Tarzan

While comic strips and cartoon characters filled newspapers, the first pulp characters emerged. Tarzan and John Carter of Mars are the first in 1912, followed by Zorro in 1919. These characters are some of the most influential characters for the future of comic book heroes. Let’s examine each more closely.

Tarzan

Edgar Rice Burroughs created an elegant version of the wild man figure largely unalloyed with character flaws or faults. Calling him Tarzan, the character first appeared in Tarzan of the Apes (magazine publication 1912, book publication 1914), and subsequently in 25 sequels, several authorized books by other authors, and innumerable works in other media, both authorized and unauthorized.

Tarzan was described as being tall, athletic, handsome, and tanned, with grey eyes and long black hair. He wore almost no clothes, except for a loincloth. Emotionally, he was courageous, intelligent, loyal, and steadfast.

He was presented as behaving ethically in most situations, except when seeking vengeance under the motivation of grief, as when his ape mother Kala was killed in Tarzan of the Apes; or when he believed Jane had been murdered in Tarzan the Untamed. He was deeply in love with his wife and totally devoted to her; in numerous situations where other women express their attraction to him, Tarzan politely but firmly declined their attentions.

When presented with a situation where a weaker individual or party was being preyed upon by a stronger foe, Tarzan invariably took the side of the weaker party. In dealing with other men, Tarzan was firm and forceful. With male friends, he was reserved but deeply loyal and generous. As a host, he was, likewise, generous and gracious. As a leader, he commanded devoted loyalty.

In keeping with these noble characteristics, Tarzan’s philosophy embraced an extreme form of “return to nature.” Although he was able to pass within society as a civilized individual, he preferred to “strip off the thin veneer of civilization,” as Burroughs often put it. His preferred dress was a knife and a loincloth of animal hide; his preferred abode was any convenient tree branch when he desired to sleep; and his favored food was raw meat, killed by himself; even better if he was able to bury it a week so that putrefaction had a chance to tenderize it a bit.

Tarzan’s jungle upbringing gave him abilities far beyond those of ordinary humans. These included climbing, clinging, and leaping as well as any great ape. He used branches and swung from vines to travel at great speed, a skill acquired among the anthropoid apes.

Abilities

His strength, speed, stamina, agility, reflexes, and swimming skills were extraordinary in comparison to normal men. He had wrestled full-grown bull apes and gorillas, lions, rhinos, crocodiles, pythons, sharks, tigers, giant seahorses, and even dinosaurs (when he visited Pellucidar). Tarzan was a skilled tracker and used his exceptional hearing and keen sense of smell to follow prey or avoid predators.

Tarzan/John Clayton was very articulate, reserved, and did not speak in broken English as the classic movies of the 1930s depict him. He could communicate with many species of jungle animals, and had been shown to be a skilled impressionist, able to mimic the sound of a gunshot perfectly. This was a limitation of the author: even the Frankenstein monster spoke well primarily because the author could write broken English or did not think to include it as part of the character.

Extremely intelligent, Tarzan was literate in English before he first encountered other English-speaking people. His literacy was self-taught after several years in his early teens by visiting the log cabin of his infancy and looking at children’s primer/ picture books. He eventually read every book in his father’s portable book collection and was fully aware of geography, basic world history, and his family tree. He was “found” by a traveling Frenchman who taught him the basics of human speech and returned him to England.

Tarzan could learn a new language in days, ultimately speaking many languages, including that of the great apes, French, Finnish, English, Dutch, German, Swahili, many Bantu dialects, Arabic, Ancient Greek, Ancient Latin, and Mayan, as well as the languages of the Ant Men and of Pellucidar.

Tarzan has been called one of the best-known literary characters in the world. In addition to more than two dozen books by Burroughs and a handful more by authors with the blessing of Burroughs’ estate, the character has appeared in films, radio, television, comic strips, and comic books. Numerous parodies and pirated works have also appeared.

Reception

While Tarzan of the Apes met with some critical success, subsequent books in the series received a cooler reception and have been criticized for being derivative and formulaic. The characters were often said to be two-dimensional, the dialogue wooden, and the storytelling devices (such as excessive reliance on coincidence) strain credulity. According to Rudyard Kipling (who himself wrote stories of a feral child, The Jungle Book’s Mowgli), Burroughs wrote Tarzan of the Apes just so that he could “find out how bad a book he could write and get away with it.”

While Burroughs was not a polished novelist, he was a vivid storyteller, and many of his novels are still in print. In 1963, author Gore Vidal wrote a piece on the Tarzan series that, while pointing out several of the deficiencies that the Tarzan books have as works of literature, praised Burroughs for creating a compelling “daydream figure.” Critical reception grew more positive with the 1981 study by Erling B. Holtsmark, Tarzan and Tradition: Classical Myth in Popular Literature. Holtsmark added a volume on Burroughs for Twayne’s United States Author Series in 1986. In 2010, Stan Galloway provided a sustained study of the adolescent period of the fictional Tarzan’s life in The Teenage Tarzan.

Despite critical panning, the Tarzan stories have remained popular. Burroughs’ melodramatic situations and the elaborate details he worked into his fictional world, such as his construction of a partial language for his great apes, appeal to a worldwide fan base.

In her Manliness and Civilization, Gail Bederman described how various people of the time either challenged or upheld the idea that “civilization” was predicated on white masculinity. She closed with a chapter on Tarzan of the Apes (1912) because the story’s protagonist was, according to her, the ultimate male by the standards of 1912 white America. Bederman did note that Tarzan, “an instinctively chivalrous Anglo-Saxon,” did not engage in sexual violence, renouncing his “masculine impulse to rape.” However, she also noted that not only did Tarzan kill black man Kulonga in revenge for killing his ape mother (a stand-in for his biological white mother) by hanging him, “lyncher Tarzan” actually enjoyed killing black people, for example the cannibalistic Mbongans.

Bederman, in fact, reminded readers that when Tarzan first introduced himself to Jane, he did so as “Tarzan, the killer of beasts and many black men.” The novel climaxed with Tarzan saving Jane (who in the original novel was not British, but a white woman from Baltimore, Maryland) from a black ape rapist. When he left the jungle and saw “civilized” Africans farming, his first instinct was to kill them just for being black. “Like the lynch victims reported in the Northern press, Tarzan’s victims—cowards, cannibals, and despoilers of white womanhood—lack all manhood. Tarzan’s lynchings thus prove him the superior man.”

According to Bederman, despite embodying all the tropes of white supremacy espoused or rejected by the people she had reviewed (Theodore Roosevelt, G. Stanley Hall, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ida B. Wells), Burroughs, in all probability, was not trying to make any kind of statement or echo any of them. “He probably never heard of any of them.” Instead, Bederman writes that Burroughs proved her point because, in telling racist and sexist stories whose protagonist boasted of killing blacks, he was not being unusual at all, but was instead just being a typical 1912 white American.

The Tarzan books employ extensive stereotyping to a degree common in the times in which they were written. This has led to criticism in later years, with changing social views and customs, including charges of racism since the early 1970s. The early books give a pervasively negative and stereotypical portrayal of native Africans, including Arabs. In The Return of Tarzan, Arabs are “surly looking” and call Christians “dogs”, while blacks are “lithe, ebon warriors, gesticulating and jabbering”. One could make an equal argument that when it came to blacks that Burroughs was simply depicting unwholesome characters as unwholesome and the good ones in a better light—as in Chapter 6 of Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar where Burroughs writes of Mugambi: “nor could a braver or more loyal guardian have been found in any clime or upon any soil.” Other groups were stereotyped as well. A Swede has “a long yellow moustache, an unwholesome complexion, and filthy nails”, and Russians cheat at cards. The aristocracy (except the House of Greystoke) and royalty were invariably effete. In later books, Africans were portrayed somewhat more realistically as people. For example, in Tarzan’s Quest, while the depiction of Africans remains relatively primitive, they were portrayed more individualistically, with a greater variety of character traits (positive and negative), while the main villains were white people, although Burroughs never lost his distaste for European royalty.

In regards to race, a superior–inferior relationship with valuation was implied, as it was unmistakable in virtually all interactions between whites and blacks in the Tarzan stories, and similar relationships and valuations could be seen in most other interactions between differing people, although one could argue that such interactions are the bedrock of the dramatic narrative and without such valuations there was no story. According to James Loewen’s Sundown Towns, this may be a vestige of Burroughs’ having been from Oak Park, Illinois, a former Sundown town (a town that forbids non-whites from living within it).

Tarzan was a white European male who grows up with apes. According to “Taking Tarzan Seriously” by Marianna Torgovnick, Tarzan was confused with the social hierarchy that he was a part of. Unlike everyone else in his society, Tarzan was the only one who was not clearly part of any social group. All the other members of his world were not able to climb or decline socially because they were already part of a social hierarchy which was stagnant. Turgovnick writes that since Tarzan was raised as an ape, he thinks and acts like an ape. However, instinctively he was human and he resorted to being human when he was pushed to. The reason of his confusion was that he did not understand what the typical white male was supposed to act like. His instincts eventually kick in when he was in the midst of this confusion, and he ended up dominating the jungle. In Tarzan, the jungle was a microcosm for the world in general in 1912 to the early 1930s. His climbing of the social hierarchy proved that the European white male was the most dominant of all races/sexes, no matter what the circumstance. Furthermore, Turgovnick writes that when Tarzan first met Jane, she was slightly repulsed but also fascinated by his animal-like actions. As the story progressed, Tarzan surrendered his knife to Jane in an oddly chivalrous gesture, which made Jane fall for Tarzan despite his odd circumstances. Turgovnick believes that this displayed an instinctual, civilized chivalry that Burroughs believed was common in white men.

Burroughs’ opinions, manifested through the narrative voice in the stories, reflect common attitudes in his time, which in a 21st-century context would be considered racist and sexist. However Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

[Burroughs’] conception of the feminine that elevates the woman to the same level as the man and that—in such characters as Dian of the Pellucidar novels or Dejah Thoris of the Barsoom novels— figures forth a female type who corresponds neither to desperate housewife, full- lipped prom-date, middle-level careerist office- manager, nor frowning ideological feminist- professor, but who exceeds all these by bounds in her realized humanity and in so doing suggests their insipidity.

The author was not especially mean-spirited in his attitudes. His heroes do not engage in violence against women or in racially motivated violence. In Tarzan of the Apes, details of a background of suffering experienced at the hands of whites by Mbonga’s “once great” people were repeatedly told with evident sympathy, and in explanation or even justification of their current animosity toward whites. Although the character of Tarzan did not directly engage in violence against women, feminist scholars have critiqued the presence of other sympathetic male characters who do so with Tarzan’s approval. In Tarzan and the Ant Men, the men of a fictional tribe of creatures called the Alali gain social dominance of their society by beating Alali women into submission with weapons that Tarzan willingly provided them. Following the battle, Burroughs (p. 178) states:

To entertain Tarzan and to show him what great strides civilization had taken—the son of The First Woman seized a female by the hair and dragging her to him struck her heavily about the head and face with his clenched fist, and the woman fell upon her knees and fondled his legs, looking wistfully into his face, her own glowing with love and admiration.

While Burroughs depicted some female characters with humanistic equalizing elements, Torgovnick argues that violent scenes against women in the context of male political and social domination were condoned in his writing, reinforcing a notion of gendered hierarchy where patriarchy was portrayed as the natural pinnacle of society.

In Comics

Tarzan of the Apes was adapted into newspaper strip form, first published January 7, 1929, with illustrations by Hal Foster. A full page Sunday strip began on March 15, 1931, with artwork by Rex Maxon. United Feature Syndicate distributed the strip.Over the years, many artists have drawn the Tarzan comic strip, notably Rex Maxon (1929–1947), Burne Hogarth (1937– 1945, 1947–1950), Ruben Moreira (1945–1947), Dan Barry (1948), Paul Reinman (1949–1950), Bob Lubbers (1950–1954), John Celardo (1954–1967), Russ Manning (1967–1979), Gil Kane (1979–1981), Mike Grell (1981–1983), Gray Morrow (1983–2001) and Eric Battle (2001–2002).

The daily strip began to reprint old dailies after the last Russ Manning daily (#10,308, which ran on 29 July 1972). The Sunday strip also turned to reprints after May 19, 2002. Both strips continue as reprints today in a few newspapers and in Comics Revue magazine.

The comic strip has often borrowed plots and characters from the Burroughs Tarzan books. Writer Don Kraar, who wrote the strip from 1983 to 1995, included in his stories characters from other books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, including David Innes of Pellucidar and John Carter of Mars.

Shortly after the daily strip launched in 1929, the stories were given titles; this practice ran until 1939. The Sunday stories had titles from 1931 until 1950.

Tarzan has appeared in many comic books from numerous publishers over the years, notably Western Publishing, Charlton Comics, DC Comics, Marvel Comics and Dark Horse Comics. The character’s earliest comic book appearances were in comic strip reprints published in several titles, such as Sparkler, Tip Top Comics, and Single Series.

Western Publishing

Western Publishing published Tarzan in Dell Comics’ Four Color Comics #134 & 161 in 1947, before giving him his own series, Tarzan #1–131 (January–February 1948 – July–August 1962), through Dell Comics as well as in some Dell Giants and March of Comics giveaways, then continued the series with #132–206 (November 1962 to February 1972) through their own Gold Key Comics. This series featured artwork by Jesse Marsh, Russ Manning, and Doug Wildey. It included adaptations of most of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s original Tarzan books (skipping only Tarzan and the Leopard Men, Tarzan the Magnificent, Tarzan and the Madman, and Tarzan and the Castaways), as well as original stories and other features. Almost all of the Dell and Gold Key Tarzan stories were written by Gaylord DuBois. Western also published a companion series, Korak: Son of Tarzan for 45 issues from 1964 to 1972. When Western refused to expand the number of Edgar Rice Burroughs comic books being published, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. sold the rights to DC Comics, who were willing to publish more comics so long as they sold. This decision was motivated by the lucrative overseas reprint rights, which Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. were selling to foreign publishers on a per-page rate.

Beginnings: Comic Strips Part 12 Mickey Mouse

Mickey Mouse

Mickey Mouse is the one of the first characters to appear in one medium and then transcend and appear in another. This would happen frequently to any character that became popular, as we shall see.

Mickey Mouse first appeared in a cartoon short (film) Steamboat Wille in 1928. He was created as a replacement for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, an earlier cartoon character that was created by the Disney studio but owned by Universal Pictures. Charles Mintz served as a middleman producer between Disney and Universal through his company, Winkler Pictures, for the series of cartoons starring Oswald. Ongoing conflicts between Disney and Mintz and the revelation that several animators from the Disney studio would eventually leave to work for Mintz’s company ultimately resulted in Disney cutting ties with Oswald. Among the few people who stayed at the Disney studio were animator Ub Iwerks, apprentice artist Les Clark, and Wilfred Jackson. On his train ride home from New York, Walt brainstormed ideas for a new cartoon character.

Mickey Mouse was conceived in secret while Disney produced the final Oswald cartoons he contractually owed Mintz. Disney asked Ub Iwerks to start drawing up new character ideas. Iwerks tried sketches of various animals, such as dogs and cats, but none of these appealed to Disney. A female cow and male horse were also rejected. (They would later turn up as Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar.) A male frog was also rejected, which later showed up in Iwerks’ own Flip the Frog series. Walt Disney got the inspiration for Mickey Mouse from a tame mouse at his desk at Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City, Missouri. In 1925, Hugh Harman drew some sketches of mice around a photograph of Walt Disney. These inspired Ub Iwerks to create a new mouse character for Disney.

The character’s original name had been “Mortimer Mouse” before his wife, Lillian, convinced him to change it. Actor Mickey Rooney claimed that during his time performing as the title character of the Mickey McGuire film series (1927–1934), he met Walt Disney at the Warner Bros. studio, inspiring Disney to name the character after him. Disney historian Jim Korkis argues that Rooney’s story is fictional, as Disney Studios was located on Hyperion Avenue at the time of Mickey Mouse’s development, with Disney conducting no business at Warner Bros. Over the years, the name ‘Mortimer Mouse’ was eventually given to several different characters in the Mickey Mouse universe: Minnie Mouse’s uncle, who appears in several comics stories, one of Mickey’s antagonists who competes for Minnie’s affections in various cartoons and comics, and one of Mickey’s nephews, named Morty.

Mickey was first seen in a test screening of the cartoon short Plane Crazy, on May 15, 1928, but it failed to impress the audience and Walt could not find a distributor for the short. Walt went on to produce a second Mickey short, The Gallopin’ Gaucho, which was also not released for lack of a distributor.

Steamboat Willie was first released on November 18, 1928, in New York. It was co-directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. Iwerks again served as the head animator, assisted by Johnny Cannon, Les Clark, Wilfred Jackson and Dick Lundy. This short was intended as a parody of Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr., first released on May 12 of the same year. Although it was the third Mickey cartoon produced, it was the first to find a distributor, and thus is considered by The Disney Company as Mickey’s debut. Willie featured changes to Mickey’s appearance (in particular, simplifying his eyes to large dots) that established his look for later cartoons and in numerous Walt Disney films.

Audiences at the time of Steamboat Willie’s release were reportedly impressed by the use of sound for comedicpurposes. Sound films or “talkies” were still considered innovative. The first feature-length movie with dialogue sequences, The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson, was released on October 6, 1927. Within a year of its success, most United States movie theaters had installed sound film equipment. Walt Disney apparently intended to take advantage of this new trend and, arguably, managed to succeed. Most other cartoon studios were still producing silent products and so were unable to effectively act as competition to Disney. As a result, Mickey would soon become the most prominent animated character of the time. Walt Disney soon worked on adding sound to both Plane Crazy and The Gallopin’ Gaucho (which had originally been silent releases) and their new release added to Mickey’s success and popularity.

The character continued to appear in cartoons the following year. During this time, Joseph Connolly, the president of King Features Syndicate, suggested a Mickey Mouse comic strip in a July 24, 1929 letter to Disney animator Ub Iwerks: “I think your mouse animation is one of the funniest features I have ever seen in the movies. Please consider producing one in comic strip form for newspapers. If you can find time to do one, I shall be very interested in seeing some specimens.” The Disney team was busy producing new cartoons, but by November, samples of the new strip were approved by the syndicate. The comic strip launched on January 13, 1930, written by Disney himself, with art by Ub Iwerks.

Beginnings: Comic Strips Part 11 Little Orphan Annie

Little Orphan Annie

Little Orphan Annie is a daily American comic strip created by Harold Gray and syndicated by the Tribune Media Services. The strip took its name from the 1885 poem “Little Orphant Annie” by James Whitcomb Riley, and it made its debut on August 5, 1924, in the New York Daily News.

The plot follows the wide-ranging adventures of Annie, her dog Sandy and her benefactor Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks. Secondary characters include Punjab, the Asp and Mr. Am. The strip attracted adult readers with political commentary that targeted (among other things) organized labor, the New Deal and communism.

The Story

Little Orphan Annie displays literary kinship with the picaresque novel in its seemingly endless string of episodic and unrelated adventures in the life of a character who wanders like an innocent vagabond through a corrupt world. In Annie’s first year, the picaresque pattern that characterizes her story is set, with the major players – Annie, Sandy and “Daddy” Warbucks – introduced within the strip’s first several weeks.

The story opens in a dreary and Dickensian orphanage where Annie is routinely abused by the cold and sarcastic matron Miss Asthma, who eventually is replaced by the equally mean Miss Treat (whose name is a play on the word “mistreat”).

One day, the wealthy but mean-spirited Mrs. Warbucks takes Annie into her home “on trial”. She makes it clear that she does not like Annie and tries to send her back to “the Home”, but one of her society friends catches her in the act, and immediately, to her disgust, she changes her mind.

Her husband Oliver, who returned from a business trip, instantly develops a paternal affection for Annie and instructs her to address him as “Daddy”. Originally, the Warbucks had a dog named One-Lung, who liked Annie. Their household staff also takes to Annie and they like her.

However, the staff despises Mrs. Warbucks, the daughter of a nouveau riche plumber’s assistant. Cold-hearted Mrs. Warbucks sends Annie back to “the Home” numerous times, and the staff hates her for that. “Daddy” (Oliver) keeps thinking of her as his daughter. Mrs. Warbucks often argues with Oliver over how much he “mortifies her when company comes” and his affection for Annie. A very status-conscious woman, she feels that Oliver and Annie are ruining her socially. However, Oliver usually is able to put her in her place, especially when she criticizes Annie.

Plot Formulas

The strip developed a series of formulas that ran over its course to facilitate a wide range of stories. The earlier strips relied on a formula by which Daddy Warbucks is called away on business and through a variety of contrivances, Annie is cast out of the Warbucks mansion, usually by her enemy, the nasty Mrs. Warbucks. Annie then wanders the countryside and has adventures meeting and helping new people in their daily struggles. Early stories dealt with political corruption, criminal gangs and corrupt institutions, which Annie would confront. Annie ultimately would encounter troubles with the villain, who would be vanquished by the returning Daddy Warbucks. Annie and Daddy would then be reunited, at which point, after several weeks, the formula would play out again. In the series, each strip represented a single day in the life of the characters. This device was dropped by the end of the ‘20s.

By the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the formula was tweaked: Daddy Warbucks lost his fortune due to a corrupt rival and briefly died from despair at the 1944 re- election of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Annie remained an orphan, and for several years had adventures that involved more internationally based enemies. The contemporary events taking place in Europe were reflected in the strips during the 1940s and World War II. Daddy Warbucks was reunited with Annie, as his death was retconned to coma, from which he woke in 1945, coinciding with Roosevelt’s real-world death.

By this time, the series enlarged its world with the addition of characters such as Asp and Punjab, bodyguards and servants to Annie and Daddy Warbucks. They traveled the world, with Annie having adventures on her own or with her adopted family.

Main Characters

Annie is an eleven-year-old orphan. Her distinguishing physical characteristics are curly red hair, a red dress and vacant circles for eyes. Her catchphrases are “Gee whiskers” and “Leapin’ lizards!” In the comic, Annie attributes her lasting youthfulness to her birthday being on February 29 in a leap year, and ages only one year in appearance for every four years that pass. Annie is a plucky, generous, compassionate, and optimistic youngster who can hold her own against bullies, and has a strong and intuitive sense of right and wrong.

Sandy enters the story in a January 1925 strip as a puppy of no particular breed which Annie rescues from a gang of abusive boys. The girl is working as a drudge in Mrs. Bottle’s grocery store at the time and manages to keep the puppy briefly concealed. She finally gives him to Paddy Lynch, a gentle man who owns a “steak joint” and can give Sandy a good home. Sandy is a mature dog when he suddenly reappears in a May 1925 strip to rescue Annie from gypsy kidnappers. Annie and Sandy remain together thereafter.

Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks first appears in a September 1924 strip and reveals a month later he was formerly a small machine shop owner who acquired his enormous wealth producing munitions during World War I. He is a large, powerfully-built bald man, the idealized capitalist, who typically wears a tuxedo and diamond stickpin in his shirtfront. He likes Annie at once, instructing her to call him “Daddy”, but his wife (the daughter of a plumber’s assistant) is a snobbish, gossiping nouveau riche who derides her husband’s affection for Annie. When Warbucks is suddenly called to Siberia on business, his wife spitefully sends Annie back to the orphanage.

Other major characters include Warbucks’ right-hand men: Punjab, an eight-foot native of India, introduced in 1935, and the Asp, an inscrutably generalized East Asian, who first appeared in 1937. Also introduced in 1937 was the mysterious Mr. Am, a bearded sage millions-of-years old, whose supernatural powers include bringing the dead back to life.

Publishing History

After World War I, cartoonist Harold Gray joined the Chicago Tribune which, at that time, was being reworked by owner Joseph Medill Patterson into an important national journal. As part of his plan, Patterson wanted to publish comic strips that would lend themselves to nationwide syndication and to film and radio adaptations. Gray’s strips were consistently rejected by Patterson, but Little Orphan Annie was finally accepted and debuted in a test run on August 5, 1924, in the New York Daily News, a Tribune-owned tabloid. Reader response was positive, and Annie began appearing as a Sunday strip in the Tribune on November 2 and as a daily strip on November 10. It was soon offered for syndication and picked up by the Toronto Star and The Atlanta Constitution.

Gray reported in 1952 that Annie’s origin lay in a chance meeting he had with a ragamuffin while wandering the streets of Chicago looking for cartooning ideas. “I talked to this little kid and liked her right away”, Gray said. “She had common sense, knew how to take care of herself. She had to. Her name was Annie. At the time some 40 strips were using boys as the main characters; only three were using girls. I chose Annie for mine, and made her an orphan, so she’d have no family, no tangling alliances, but freedom to go where she pleased.” By changing the gender of his lead character, Gray differentiated himself in the field of comics (and likely increased his readership by appealing to female readers). In designing the strip, Gray was influenced by his midwestern farm boyhood, Victorian poetry and novels such as Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Sidney Smith’s wildly popular comic strip The Gumps, and the histrionics of the silent films and melodramas of the period. Initially, there was no continuity between the dailies and the Sunday strips, but by the early 1930s the two had become one. The strip (whose title was borrowed from James Whitcomb Riley’s 1885 poem “Little Orphant Annie”) was “conservative and topical”, according to the editors of The Great Depression in America: A Cultural Encyclopedia, and “represents the personal vision” of Gray and Riley’s “homespun philosophy of hard work, respect for elders, and a cheerful outlook on life”.

Beginnings: Comic Strips Part 10 Gasoline Alley

Gasoline Alley

Gasoline Alley is a comic strip created by Frank King and distributed by Tribune Content Agency. It centers on the lives of patriarch Walt Wallet, his family, and residents in the town of Gasoline Alley, with storylines reflecting traditional American values.

The strip debuted on November 24, 1918; as of 2022, it is the longest-running current strip in the United States, and the second-longest running strip of all time in the United States, after The Katzenjammer Kids (which ran for 109 years, 1897–2006). Gasoline Alley has received critical accolades for its influential innovations. In addition to new color and page design concepts, King introduced real-time continuity to comic strips by depicting his characters aging over generations.

Early years

The strip originated on the Chicago Tribune’s black-and-white Sunday page, The Rectangle, where staff artists contributed one-shot panels, continuing plots or themes. One corner of The Rectangle introduced King’s Gasoline Alley, where characters Walt, Doc, Avery, and Bill held weekly conversations about automobiles. This panel slowly gained recognition, and the daily comic strip began August 24, 1919, in the New York Daily News.

Some of the early characters were based on people Frank King knew. Skeezix was based on his son Robert Drew King. Walt was based on “jolly” overweight bachelor and Western Union traffic engineer Walter W. Drew, who had “a wisp of unruly hair”. Bill and Amy were based on locomotive engineer William D. Gannon and his wife Gertrude.

The early years were dominated by the character Walt Wallet. Tribune editor Joseph Patterson wanted to attract women to the strip by introducing a baby, but Walt was not married. That obstacle was avoided when Walt found a baby on his doorstep, as described by comics historian Don Markstein:

After a couple of years, the Tribune’s editor, Captain Joseph Patterson, whose influence would later have profound effects on such strips as Terry and the Pirates and Little Orphan Annie, decided the strip should have something to appeal to women, as well, and suggested King add a baby. Only problem was the main character, Walt Wallet, was a confirmed bachelor. On February 14, 1921, Walt found the necessary baby abandoned on his doorstep. That was the day Gasoline Alley entered history as the first comic strip in which the characters aged normally. (Hairbreadth Harry had grown up in his strip, but stopped aging in his early 20s.) The baby, named Skeezix (cowboy slang for a motherless calf), grew up, fought in World War II, and is now a retired grandfather. Walt married after all, and had more children, who had children of their own. More characters entered the storyline on the periphery and some grew to occupy center stage.

Skeezix called his adoptive father Uncle Walt. Unlike most comic strip children (like the Katzenjammer Kids or Little Orphan Annie), he did not remain a baby or even a little boy for long. He grew up to manhood, the first occasion where real time was shown continually elapsing in a major comic strip over generations. By the time the United States entered World War II, Skeezix was an adult, courting Nina Clock and enlisting in the armed forces in June 1942. He later married Nina and had children. In the late 1960s, he faced a typical midlife crisis. Walt Wallet himself married Phyllis Blossom on June 24, 1926 and had other children, who grew up and had kids of their own. During the 1970s and 1980s, under Dick Moores’ authorship, the characters stopped aging. When Jim Scancarelli took over, natural aging was restored.

Sunday Strip

The Sunday strip was launched October 24, 1920. The 1930s Sunday pages did not always employ traditional gags, but often offered a gentle view of nature, imaginary daydreaming with expressive art, or naturalistic views of small-town life. Reviewing Peter Maresca and Chris Ware’s Sundays with Walt and Skeezix (Sunday Press Books, 2007), comics critic Steve Duin quoted writer Jeet Heer:

Unlike the daily strips, which traced narratives that went on for many months, the Sunday pages almost always worked as discrete units,” Heer writes. “Whereas the dailies allowed events to unfold, Sunday was the day to savor experiences and ruminate on life. It is in his Sunday pages that we find King showing his visual storytelling skills at their most developed: with sequences beautifully testifying to his love of nature, his feeling for artistic form, and his deeply felt response to life.

Beginnings: Comic Strips, Part 9 Thimble Theatre

Thimble Theatre

Elzie Crisler Segar created Thimble Theatre for the New York Journal. It debuted on December 19, 1919. The paper’s owner, William Randolph Hearst, also owned King Features Syndicate, which syndicated the strip. Thimble Theatre was intended as a replacement for Midget Movies by Ed Wheelan (Wheelan having recently resigned from King Features). While initially failing to attract a large audience, the strip nonetheless increasingly accumulated a modest following as the 1920s continued. At the end of its first decade, the strip resultantly appeared in over a dozen newspapers and had acquired a corresponding Sunday strip (which had debuted on January 25, 1925 within the Hearst-owned New York American paper).

Thimble Theatre’s first main characters were the lanky, long- nosed slacker Harold Hamgravy (rapidly shortened to simply “Ham Gravy”) and his scrappy, headstrong girlfriend Olive Oyl. In its earliest weeks, the strip featured the duo, alongside a rotating cast of primarily one-shot characters, acting out various stories and scenarios in a parodic theatrical style (hence the strip’s name). As its first year progressed, however, numerous elements of this premise would be relinquished (including the recurring character “Willie Wormwood”, introduced as a parody of melodrama villainy), soon rendering the strip a series of episodic comic anecdotes depicting the daily life and dysfunctional romantic exploits of Ham Gravy and Olive Oyl. It could be classified as a gag-a-day comic during this period. In mid-1922, Segar began to increasingly engage in lengthier (often months-long) storylines; by the end of the following year, the strip had effectively transitioned fully into a comedy-adventure style focalizing Ham, Olive, and Olive’s ambitious-but-myopic diminutive brother Castor Oyl, initially a minor character yet arguably the protagonist of the strip by 1924. Castor and Olive’s parents Cole and Nana Oyl also made frequent appearances beginning in the mid-1920s. By the late 1920s, the strip had likewise acquired a number of notable characters beyond the sphere of Ham Gravy and the Oyl family, including Castor Oyl’s wife Cylinda (to whom he was married from 1926 to 1928), her wealthy, misanthropic father Mr. Lotts and Castor’s fighting cockerel Blizzard, all of whom had exited the strip by the close of 1928 (although Cylinda would eventually martially reunite with Castor under R.K. Milholland’s authorship almost a century later).

Thimble Theatre had a number of topper strips on the Sunday page during its run. A topper strip is a small secondary strip seen along with a larger Sunday strip. The main topper, Sappo, ran for 21 years, from February 28, 1926, to May 18, 1947. (Sappo was a revival of an earlier Segar daily strip called The Five-Fifteen, aka Sappo the Commuter, which ran from December 24, 1920, to February 17, 1925.) For seven weeks in 1936, Segar replaced Sappo with Pete and Pansy – For Kids Only (Sept 27 - Nov 8, 1936).

There were also a series of topper panel strips that ran next to Sappo. Segar drew one of them; the rest were produced by Joe Musial and Bud Sagendorf.

Artists after Segar

Following Segar’s illness and eventual death in 1938 (with his final Thimble Theatre strip appearing October 2 of that year), numerous people were hired to draw and write the strip. Tom Sims, the son of a Coosa River channel-boat captain, acted as the writer for Thimble Theatre beginning in August 1938. Doc Winner, who had previously filled in for Segar between January and May 1938, initially acted as Sims’ artist, with Bela Zaboly succeeding him by December 1939. In 1954, Sims relinquished writing duties on the daily strip to Ralph Stein, who would continue to collaborate with Zaboly until both the daily and Sunday strips were taken over by Bud Sagendorf in 1959.

Sagendorf wrote and drew the daily strip until 1986, and continued to write and draw the Sunday strip until his death in 1994. Sagendorf, who had been Segar’s assistant, made a definite effort to retain much of Segar’s classic style, although his art is instantly discernible. Sagendorf continued to use many obscure characters from the Segar years, especially O. G. Wotasnozzle and King Blozo. Sagendorf’s new characters, such as the Thung, also had a very Segar-like quality. What set Sagendorf apart from Segar more than anything else was his sense of pacing. Where plotlines moved very quickly with Segar, it sometimes took an entire week of Sagendorf’s daily strips for the plot to be advanced even a small amount.

From 1986 to 1992, the daily strip was written and drawn by Bobby London, who, after some controversy, was fired from the strip for a story that could be taken to satirize abortion. London’s strips put the characters in updated situations, but kept the spirit of Segar’s original. The Sunday edition of the comic strip was drawn by Hy Eisman from 1994 to 2022.

Beginnings: Comic Strips, Part 8 The Gumps

The Gumps

The Gumps is a comic strip about a middle-class family. It was created by Sidney Smith in 1917, launching a 42-year run in newspapers from February 12, 1917, until October 17, 1959.

According to a 1937 issue of Life, The Gumps was inspired by Andy Wheat, a real-life person Smith met through his brother. “Born forty-seven years ago [i.e., in 1890] in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, Andy Wheat acquired his unusual physiognomy as the result of an infection following the extraction of a tooth, which eventually necessitated the removal of his entire lower jaw. Through Dr. Thomas Smith of Bloomingdale, Illinois, a dentist and a brother of Sidney Smith, Wheat met the cartoonist, who saw in him an ideal comic character. Wheat subsequently had his surname legally changed to “Gump” to match the cartoon character. His wife’s name is Min, and he has two children, Chester and Goliath, now living in San Francisco, and an Uncle Bim who lives in Georgia. Gump’s home is in Tucson, Arizona, but he also has a farm near his birthplace in Mississippi.”

The Gumps were utterly ordinary: chinless, bombastic blowhard Andy Gump (short for Andrew), who is henpecked by his wife, Min (short for Minerva); their sons Chester and baby Goliath (plus an unnamed daughter in college and an unnamed son in the Navy); wealthy Uncle Bim; and their annoying maid Tilda. They had a cat named Hope and a dog named Buck. The idea was envisioned by Joseph Patterson, editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, who was important later in the early histories of Little Orphan Annie and other long-run comic strips. Patterson referred to the masses as “gumps” and thought a strip about the domestic lives of ordinary people and their ordinary activities would appeal to the average American newspaper reader. He hired Smith to write and draw the strip, and it was Smith who breathed life into the characters. Smith was the first cartoonist to kill off a regular character: His May 1929 storyline about the death of Mary Gold caused a national sensation.

The Sunday page also included several toppers over the course of the run: Old Doc Yak (December 7, 1930 - February 25, 1934), Cousin Juniper (January 2, 1944-1955) and Grandpa Noah (1955).

Beginnings: Comic Strips, Part 7 Krazy Kat

Krazy Kat

Krazy Kat is an American newspaper comic strip, by cartoonist George Herriman, which ran from 1913 to 1944. It first appeared in the New York Evening Journal, whose owner, William Randolph Hearst, was a major booster for the strip throughout its run. The characters had been introduced previously in a side strip with Herriman’s earlier 1910 creation, The Dingbat Family. The phrase “Krazy Kat” originated there, said by the mouse by way of describing the cat. Set in a dreamlike portrayal of Herriman’s vacation home of Coconino County, Arizona, Krazy Kat’s mixture of offbeat surrealism, innocent playfulness and poetic, idiosyncratic language has made it a favorite of comics aficionados and art critics for more than 80 years.

The strip focused on the curious relationship between a guileless, carefree, simple-minded cat named Krazy and a short-tempered mouse named Ignatz. Krazy nursed an unrequited love for the mouse. However, Ignatz despised Krazy and constantly schemed to throw bricks at Krazy’s head, which Krazy interpreted as a sign of affection, uttering grateful replies such as “Li’l dollink, allus f’etful”, or “Li’l ainjil”. A third principal character, Officer Bull Pupp, often appeared and tried to “protect” Krazy by thwarting Ignatz’ attempts and imprisoning him. Later on, Officer Pupp fell in love with Krazy.

Simple-minded, curious, mindlessly happy and perpetually innocent, the strip’s title character drifts through life in Coconino County without a care. Krazy’s dialogue is a highly stylized argot (“A fowl konspirissy – is it pussible?”) phonetically evoking a mixture of English, French, Spanish, Yiddish and other dialects, often identified as George Herriman’s own native New Orleans dialect, Yat. Often singing and dancing to express the Kat’s eternal joy, Krazy is hopelessly in love with Ignatz and thinks that the mouse’s brick-tossing is his way of returning that love. Krazy is also completely unaware of the bitter rivalry between Ignatz and “Offissa” Pupp and mistakes the dog’s frequent imprisonment of the mouse for an innocent game of tag (“Ever times I see them two playing games togedda, Ignatz seems to be It”). On those occasions when Ignatz is caught before he can launch his brick, Krazy is left pining for the “l’il ainjil” and wonders where the beloved mouse has gone.

Krazy’s own gender is never made clear and appears to be fluid, varying from strip to strip. Most authors post-Herriman (beginning with Cummings) have mistakenly referred to Krazy only as female, but Krazy’s creator was more ambiguous and even published several strips poking fun at this uncertainty. When filmmaker Frank Capra, a fan of the strip, asked Herriman to straightforwardly define the character’s sex, the cartoonist admitted that Krazy was “something like a sprite, an elf. They have no sex. So that Kat can’t be a he or a she. The Kat’s a spirit—a pixie—free to butt into anything.” Most characters inside the strip use “he” and “him” to refer to Krazy, likely as a gender-neutral “he.”

Ignatz, on the other hand, is driven to distraction by Krazy Kat’s naïveté, and generally reacts by throwing bricks at Krazy’s head. To shield his plans from Officer Pupp, Ignatz hides his bricks, disguises himself, or enlists the aid of willing Coconino County denizens (without making his intentions clear). Easing Ignatz’s task is Krazy Kat’s willingness to meet him anywhere at any appointed time, eager to receive a token of affection in the form of a brick to the head. Ignatz is married with three children, though they are rarely seen.

Ironically, although Ignatz seems to generally have contempt for Krazy, one strip shows his ancestor, Mark Antony Mouse, fall in love with Krazy’s ancestor, an Egyptian cat princess (calling her his “Star of the Nile”), and pay a sculptor to carve a brick with a love message. When he throws it at her, he is arrested, but she announces her love for him, and from that day on, he throws bricks at her to show his love for her (which would explain why Krazy believes that Ignatz throwing bricks is a sign of love). In another strip, Krazy kisses a sleeping Ignatz, and hearts appear above the mouse’s head.

In the last five (or so) years of the strip, Ignatz’s feelings of animosity for Krazy were noticeably downplayed. While earlier, one got the sense of his taking advantage of Krazy’s willingness to be “bricked”, now one gets the sense of Ignatz and Krazy as chummy co-conspirators against Pupp, with Ignatz at times quite aware of the positive way Krazy interprets his missiles.

Officer Bull Pupp, who loves Krazy, and always tries (sometimes successfully) to thwart Ignatz’s desires to pelt Krazy Kat with bricks. Officer Pupp and Ignatz often try to get the better of each other even when Krazy is not directly involved, as they both enjoy seeing the other played for a fool. He appears slightly less frequently than Krazy and Ignatz.

Beginnings: Comic Strips, Part 6 Mutt and Jeff

Mutt and Jeff

In a return to a straight humor strip, Mutt and Jeff began in 1907 created by cartoonist Bud Fisher about “two mismatched tinhorns”. It is commonly regarded as the first daily comic strip because it ran daily and for many years, unlike many other strips which ran for months or a few years.

A. Mutt, the comic strip that became better known by its later title, Mutt and Jeff, debuted on the sports pages of the San Francisco Chronicle. The featured character had previously appeared in sports cartoons by Fisher but was unnamed. Fisher had approached his editor, John P. Young, about doing a regular strip as early as 1905, but was turned down. According to Fisher, Young told him, “It would take up too much room, and readers are used to reading down the page, and not horizontally”.

This strip focused on a single main character until the other half of the duo appeared on March 27, 1908. It appeared only in the Chronicle, so Fisher did not have the extended lead time that syndicated strips require. Episodes were drawn the day before publication, and frequently referred to local events that were currently making headlines or to specific horse races being run that day. A 1908 sequence about Mutt’s trial featured a parade of thinly-disguised caricatures of specific San Francisco political figures, many of whom were being prosecuted for graft.

On June 7, 1908, the strip moved off the sports pages and into Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner where it was syndicated by King Features and became a national hit, subsequently making Fisher the first celebrity of the comics industry. Fisher had taken the precaution of copyrighting the strip in his own name, facilitating the move to King Features and making it impossible for the Chronicle to continue the strip using another artist.

The main character of the comic strip were Augustus Mutt, a tall, dimwitted racetrack character—a fanatic horse-race gambler who was motivated by greed. Mutt had a wife, known only as Mrs. Mutt (Mutt always referred to her as “M’love”; Al Smith admitted in a Boston Globe newspaper column that her first name was Ima – and conceded that he did not use it often because it was not a complimentary name). The Mutts’ son was named Cicero. Mutt first encountered the half-pint Jeff, an inmate of an insane asylum who shares his passion for horseracing, in 1908. They appeared in more and more strips together until the strip abandoned the horse-race theme, and concentrated on Mutt’s other outlandish, get-rich- quick schemes. Jeff usually served as a (sometimes unwilling) partner. Jeff was short, bald as a billiard ball, and wore mutton chop sideburns. He has no last name, stating his name is “just Jeff—first and last and always it’s Jeff”. However, at one point late in the strip’s life, he is identified in the address of a cablegram as “Othello Jeff”. He has a twin brother named Julius. They look so much alike that Jeff, who cannot afford to have a portrait painted, sits for Julius, who is too busy to pose. Rarely does Jeff change from his habitual outfit of top hat and suit with wing collar. Friends of Mutt and Jeff have included Gus Geevem, Joe Spivis, and the English Sir Sidney. Characteristic lines and catchphrases that appeared often during the run of the strip included “Nix, Mutt, nix!”, “For the love of Mike!” and “Oowah!”

The original inspiration for the character of “Jeff” was Jacques “Jakie” Fehr, a tiny (4 ft 8 in (142 cm)) irascible Swiss-born shopkeeper in the village of Occidental, California. One summer day in 1908, Fisher, a member of San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, was riding the North Pacific Coast narrow-gauge railway passenger train northbound to the Bohemian Grove, the club’s summer campsite. During a stop in Occidental, Fisher got off the train to stretch his legs and observed the diminutive walrus-moustached Fehr in heated altercation with the tall and lanky “candy butcher”, who sold refreshments on the train and also distributed newspapers to shops in towns along the train route. The comic potential in this scene prompted Fisher to add the character of Jeff to his A. Mutt comic strip, with great success.

Beginnings: Comic Strips, Part 5 Little Nemo in Sumberland

Little Nemo in Slumberland

Little Nemo was another adventure strip, it time a fantasy adventure taking place in Nemo’s dreams. The character was created by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. He originated in an early comic strip by McCay, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, before receiving his own spin-off series, Little Nemo in Slumberland. The full-page weekly strip depicted Nemo having fantastic dreams that were interrupted by his awakening in the final panel. The strip is considered McCay’s masterpiece for its experiments with the form of the comics page, its use of color and perspective, its timing and pacing, the size and shape of its panels, and its architectural and other details.

The comic strip ran in the New York Herald from October 15, 1905, until July 23, 1911. The strip was renamed In the Land of Wonderful Dreams when McCay brought it to William Randolph Hearst’s New York American, where it ran from September 3, 1911, until July 26, 1914. When McCay returned to the Herald in 1924, he revived the strip, and it ran under its original title from August 3, 1924, until January 9, 1927.

The weekly fantasy adventure featured the young Nemo (“No one” in Latin) who dreamed himself into wondrous predicaments from which he awoke in bed in the last panel. The first episode began with a command from King Morpheus of Slumberland to a minion to collect Nemo. Nemo was to be the playmate of Slumberland’s Princess, but it took months of adventures before Nemo finally arrived; a green, cigar-chewing clown named Flip was determined to disturb Nemo’s sleep with a top hat emblazoned with the words “Wake Up.” Nemo and Flip eventually became companions, and were joined by an African Imp whom Flip found in the Candy Islands. The group traveled far and wide, from shanty towns to Mars, to Jack Frost’s palace, to the bizarre architecture and distorted funhouse-mirror illusions of Befuddle Hall.

The strip showed McCay’s understanding of dream psychology, particularly of dream fears—falling, drowning, impalement. This dream world had its own moral code, perhaps difficult to understand. Breaking it had terrible consequences, as when Nemo ignored instructions not to touch Queen Crystalette, who inhabited a cave of glass. Overcome with his infatuation, he caused her and her followers to shatter, and awoke with “the groans of the dying guardsmen still ringing in his ears”.

McCay experimented with the form of the comics page, its timing and pacing, the size and shape of its panels, perspective, and architectural and other detail. From the second installment, McCay had the panel sizes and layouts conform to the action in the strip: as a forest of mushrooms grew, so did the panels, and the panels shrank as the mushrooms collapsed on Nemo. In an early Thanksgiving episode, the focal action of a giant turkey gobbling Nemo’s house received an enormous circular panel in the center of the page. McCay also accommodated a sense of proportion with panel size and shape, showing elephants and dragons at a scale the reader could feel in proportion to the regular characters. McCay controlled narrative pacing through variation or repetition, as with equally-sized panels whose repeated layouts and minute differences in movement conveyed a feeling of buildup to some climactic action.

In his familiar Art Nouveau-influenced style, McCay outlined his characters in heavy blacks. Slumberland’s ornate architecture was reminiscent of the architecture designed by McKim, Mead & White for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, as well as Luna Park and Dreamland in Coney Island, and the Parisian Luxembourg Palace.

McCay made imaginative use of color, sometimes changing the backgrounds’ or characters’ colors from panel to panel in a psychedelic imitation of a dream experience. The colors were enhanced by the careful attention and advanced Ben Day lithographic process employed by the Herald’s printing staff. McCay annotated the Nemo pages for the printers with the precise color schemes he wanted.

For the first five months the pages were accompanied with captions beneath them, and at first the captions were numbered. In contrast to the high level of skill in the artwork, the dialogue in the speech balloons was crude, sometimes approaching illegibility, and “disfigur[ing McCay’s] otherwise flawless work”, according to critic R. C. Harvey. The level of effort and skill apparent in the title lettering highlights what seems to be the little regard for the dialogue balloons, their content, and their placement in the visual composition. They tend to contain repetitive monologues expressing the increasing distress of the speakers, and showed that McCay’s gift was in the visual and not the verbal.

Beginnings: Comic Strips, Part 4 Happy Hooligan and Buster Brown

Happy Hooligan

The next important comic strip was Happy Hooligan created and drawn by the already celebrated cartoonist Frederick Burr Opper. It debuted with a Sunday strip on March 11, 1900 in the William Randolph Hearst newspapers, and was one of the first popular comics with King Features Syndicate.The strip ran for three decades, ending on August 14, 1932.

The strip introduced the idea that a comic strip relate an adventure of a character. In this case, the adventures were of a well-meaning hobo who encountered a lot of misfortune and bad luck, partly because of his appearance and low position in society, but who did not lose his smile over it. He was contrasted by his two brothers, the sour Gloomy Gus and the snobbish Montmorency, both just as poor as Happy. Montmorency wore a top hat and monocle but was otherwise as ragged as his siblings.

Happy Hooligan initially did not run on a regular schedule, skipping Sundays from time to time, while some other weeks two pages appeared at once; the character also played a role in some of Opper’s daily strips. After a few years, though, Happy Hooligan became a regular feature with both daily strips and Sunday pages.

The Sunday strip changed titles and focus many times during the 1910s and 20s. The Happy Hooligan Sunday feature went on hiatus after January 16, 1916; when it returned on June 18, 1916, it was called Happy Hooligan’s Honeymoon, a title which stuck until April 7, 1918. The next week, it was back to Happy Hooligan until May 26. Starting June 23, the strip was called Dubb Family, and didn’t feature any appearances by Happy Hooligan; this title lasted until September 29. From October 6 to November 17, the strip was back to Happy Hooligan, and then switched to Mister Dubb from December 8, 1918 to April 24, 1921. For the next two years—May 1, 1921 to July 29, 1923—the Sunday strip was called Down on the Farm. The title swapped again—now called Mister Dough and Mister Dubb— from Aug 9, 1925 to January 9, 1927, and then reverted to Happy Hooligan for the rest of the run, until 1932.

Buster Brown

Happy Hoolgan introduced adventures and story lines into comic strips. Buster Brown added morals. Richard F. Outcault created the strip in 1902.

Buster was a young city-dwelling boy with wealthy parents. He was disturbingly pretty (contrast him to Outcault’s own The Yellow Kid, or Frederick Opper’s creations), but his actions belied his looks. He was a practical joker who might dress in a girl’s outfit and have her wear his clothes, break a window with his slingshot, or play a prank on a neighbor. The trick or transgression was discovered and he was punished, usually by being spanked by his mother, but it was unclear if he ever repented. Many strips end with Buster delivering a self-justifying moral which has little or nothing to do with his crime. For example, a strip from May 31, 1903, shows him giving Tige (his American Pit Bull Terrier) a soda from a drugstore soda fountain. The drink splashes, not only the front of his own clothes, but the skirts of a woman’s splendid dress. Horrified by his clumsy misadventure, Buster’s mother takes him home and flogs him with a stick. In the last panel the boy has written a message beginning, “Resolved! That druggists are legalized robbers; they sell you soda and candy to make you ill, then they sell you medicine to make you worse.”

Beginnings: Comic Strips, Part 3 The Katzenjammer Kids

Katzenjammer Kids

After the Yellow Kid came the Katzenjammer Kids created by Rudolph Dirks in 1897 and later drawn by Harold Knerr for 35 years (1914 to 1949). It debuted December 12, 1897, in the American Humorist, the Sunday supplement of William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. The comic strip was inspired by Max and Moritz, a children’s story of the 1860s by German author Wilhelm Busch.

Katzenjammer translates literally as the wailing of cats (i.e. “caterwaul”) but is used to mean contrition after a failed endeavor or hangover in German (and, in the latter sense, in English too). Whereas Max & Moritz were grotesquely but comically put to death after seven destructive pranks, the Katzenjammer Kids and the other characters still thrive.

The Katzenjammer Kids (three brothers in the first strip but soon reduced to two) featured Hans and Fritz, twins who rebelled against authority, particularly in the form of their mother, Mama; der Captain, a sailor who acted as a surrogate father; and der Inspector, a long-bearded school official. Other characters included John Silver, a pirate sea captain; the Herring Brothers, John Silver’s three-man crew; and King Bongo, a primitive-living but sophisticated-acting black jungle monarch who ruled a tropical island.

As originally created, Mama’s husband was Papa Katzenjammer, her brother was the bungling sailor Heinie, and der Captain–introduced in 1902—was Heinie’s boss. After a short while, Papa was dropped from the strip without explanation, with der Captain taking over his function. By the 1940s, der Captain and Mama were often presented as a de facto couple.

The immediate Katzenjammer family usually spoke stereotypical German-accented English. When first introduced, der Captain and der Inspector did not, but within months adopted the accent as well. During World Wars I and II, when the United States was at war with Germany, the Katzenjammer family were temporarily presented as Dutch.

The defining theme of the strip was Hans and Fritz pranking der Captain, der Inspector, Mama, or all three, for which the boys were often spanked, but sometimes shifted the blame to others. Other stories involved der Captain taking the Katzenjammers on treasure hunts or cargo voyages, sometimes aided by or competing with John Silver. Still other stories involved King Bongo enlisting the Katzenjammers to run errands or go on missions related to his kingdom; in both strips, by the mid-1930s, the family lived on Bongo’s island— usually called Squee-Jee—and were readily at hand.

Knerr’s version of The Katzenjammer Kids introduced several major new characters in the 1930s. Miss Twiddle, a pompous tutor, and her brainy niece Lena came to stay permanently with the Katzenjammers in early 1936. Later in the year Twiddle’s ex-pupil, “boy prodigy” Rollo Rhubarb joined them. The ever- smug Rollo is always trying to outwit Hans and Fritz, but his cunning plans often backfire.

Notable features of the later strips, at both syndicates, included a more constructive relationship between the Captain and the boys, who sometimes bickered like friendly rivals rather than pranking each other outright. The King and his people, also in both strips, were now Polynesian rather than African.

Beginnings: Comic Strips, Part 2 The Yellow Kid

The Journey Towards Comic Books

Comic strips were becoming well established in newspapers but it would take nearly another three decades for the form to mature and begin to feature heroic characters that became the mainstay of the media. Along the way, many classic comic strips were produced.

Yellow Kid

The Yellow Kid (Mickey Dugan) was an American comic strip character that appeared from 1895 to 1898 in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, and later William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. Created and drawn by Richard F. Outcault, it was one of the first Sunday supplement comic strips in an American newspaper, although its graphical layout had already been thoroughly established in political and other, purely-for- entertainment cartoons. Outcault’s use of word balloons in the Yellow Kid influenced the basic appearance and use of balloons in subsequent newspaper comic strips and comic books.

Although a cartoon, Outcault’s work aimed its humor and social commentary at Pulitzer’s adult readership. The strip has been described as “... a turn-of-the-century theater of the city, in which class and racial tensions of the new urban, consumerist environment were acted out by a mischievous group of New York City kids from the wrong side of the tracks.”

The Yellow Kid was a bald, snaggle-toothed barefoot boy who wore an oversized yellow nightshirt and hung around in a slum alley typical of certain areas of squalor that existed in late 19th-century New York City. Hogan’s Alley was filled with equally odd characters, mostly other children. With a goofy grin, the Kid habitually spoke in a ragged, peculiar slang, which was printed on his shirt, a device meant to lampoon advertising billboards.

The Yellow Kid’s head was drawn wholly shaved as if having been recently ridden of lice, a common sight among children in New York’s tenement ghettos at the time. His nightshirt, a hand-me-down from an older sister, was white or pale blue in the first color strips.