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.