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.”