Comic Strip History

Flapper Fanny, an unassuming little one-column panel feature when it debuted in 1925, launched the careers of not one but two amazing cartoonists (I see no reason to put in the qualifier female cartoonists, because that would unfairly minimize their brilliance). 

The first was Ethel Hays, whose jaw-droppingly elegant artwork was wasted on the tiny feature. Luckily NEA, the syndicate that distributed Flapper Fanny, recognized her genius and assigned a larger panel titled simply Ethel, and also had her regularly contributing colour covers for their Everyweek magazine section. 

Hays passed the Flapper Fanny panel onto its second standout artist in 1930. Gladys Parker had already been published by Graphic Syndicate and United Feature, but both of those outfits were barely above the fly-by-night level in the 1920s. Parker put her own inimitable stamp on Flapper Fanny, and eventually also started her own NEA fashion panel, called Femininities. Her work was evidently received with some enthusiasm, and in 1932 Flapper Fanny added a Sunday strip version. 

Parker worked on the Flapper Fanny daily and Sunday until December 1935 before calling it quits. Faced with bringing on a new artist, NEA decided to cut the Flapper Fanny Sunday. The third and final artist on the Flapper Fanny daily panel was Sylvia Sneidman, whose work was very fine, too, but was enough of a copy of Parker’s style that I can’t honestly offer her the same accolades as Hays and Parker. 

Sylvia apparently did some lobbying and the Flapper Fanny panel was promoted to a 2-column affair, giving her a little more room to show off her artistic chops. But by 1936 the term ‘flapper’ was so far out of date that Sneidman might as well have been drawing the panel in a cell, patiently waiting for the firing squad. Why it didn’t occur to NEA that a retitling of the series might be in order I cannot imagine. 

Flapper Fanny gamely continued four and a half years under Sneidman’s control, but finally the inevitable happened. With no fanfare, the last Flapper Fanny panel, seen above, ran on June 29 1940. 

 King Features threw a lot of new tabloid Sunday features up against the wall in 1935. Mostly they were needed to fill the new tabloid format Sunday section that Hearst had decided to experiment with, and hey, if they managed to sell the new stuff in syndication so much the better. King of the Royal Mounted definitely got its name in the “so much the better” column, as it took off quite nicely. Nicely enough, in fact, that a daily was added the next year. 

Above is the seldom seen first Sunday of King of the Royal Mounted, which appeared on February 17 1935. The art on this inaugural Sunday was unsigned but by Allen Dean. I love how the story just jumps right in there and rockets right off. No intro, no explanatory dialogue, just slam-bang action. 

As much as I should be well-versed in King of the Royal Mounted lore, being a Canuck and all, I must admit to having read very little of the strip. So I think I’ll just shut up and ask you to keep reading over at Don Markstein’s Toonopedia, where he gives you all the lowdown on this classic adventure strip. He’ll even tell you Sergeant King’s first name, and I bet there was a lotta reading went into finding that li’l factoid!

Gus Arriola wanted Americans to learn about and appreciate Mexican culture, and as we know, comic strips that seek to educate have a very steep hill to climb. By the time newspaper readers get to the funnies page they want to be entertained, not preached at. So Arriola had to become that most rare and precious of jewels, the cartoonist who is so good that readers want to enjoy their work even if it is *gasp* educational. Arriola’s art is utterly divine, highly stylized and decorative while retaining the unpretentious touch of bigfoot cartooning. The writing is similarly balanced, successfully navigating that high-wire between education and entertainment. Arriola was an entertainer first and foremost, but once he had you hooked he offered you a comfortable and fun learning experience about Mexican history, the Spanish language and Latino culture. 

With the strip about to be retired in 1985 after a 40+ year run, Arriola decided to give readers closure on confirmed bachelor Gordo’s love life. After toying with an involved idea in which Gordo is cloned (!), Arriola decided on a simpler continuity. Gordo was trapped into an imminent forced marriage with the Widow Gonzalez and he takes the one escape route he could by proposing to his beloved Tehuana Mama. Faced with getting her wish after all these years, she decides to overlook the circumstance that is forcing Gordo’s hand and accepts. The whole Gordo family rides off into the sunset. 

In the final strip Arriola offers a generally warm goodbye message to his readers, but betrays just a hint of anger at either the end of Gordo, or at Mexican-US relations. I’m really not sure which. 

Thanks to Mark Johnson, who supplied the syndicate proofs for Gordo’s final week.

Dumb Dora was on its third artist, or more like a hundred and third if you count ghosts and assistants, when her strip was retired in January 1936. Bil Dwyer was the final credited artist on the strip, taking over in late 1932 from Paul Fung, who in turn had taken over from Chic Young. 

Dwyer reportedly brought on a small army of helpers to get the Sunday and daily strip out on time, including Milton Caniff, who R.C. Harvey reports did much of the pencilling for the initial eighteen months of Dwyer’s tenure, plus inking some of the girl characters. By the time Dumb Dora ended Caniff was long gone, but we can still easily see vestiges of his style on the dailies above, the last two of the series. 

Dumb Dora had begun as a me-too flapper strip in 1924, but had the additional hook that Dora acts dumb but usually turns out to have a bean firing on all cylinders by the end of each gag. The concept is fine, but awfully repetitive. By the time Dwyer took over the conceit was well and truly played out, and flappers were long gone, so the strip had turned into a more generic “teen boys chasing the pretty girl” feature, which left it drowning in a sea of its betters — Tillie the Toiler, Harold Teen, Winnie Winkle, Etta Kett, etc. 

Mark Johnson supplied a scan of the last two rather rare dailies seen above, which offer no farewell or conclusion to the strip. So I went looking online to see if the Sunday, which ended the next day (January 5 1936), offered us some closure. Nope!

 William Donahey‘s very long-running Sunday page, The Teenie Weenies, would have been a half-century gold medalist except that it went on hiatus for two long spells, 1924-33 and 1935-41. But having debuted in 1914, when it ended on February 15 1970 the kiddies who read it from the start were now at retirement age. 

Donahey died on February 1 1970 at age 87, and the final Sunday page was run on February 15. According to his obituary in the New York Times, Donahey penned this final installment in November 1969, planning to retire. Sadly he offered no farewell in that Sunday’s episode, so it was a nice touch that the Chicago Tribune added the notice of his passing below the final episode. 

Fun Fact: The Teenie Weenies cut-out characters were a standard feature of the Sunday page in its final run, 1941 to 1970. If you had cut out the character each week you would have had quite a tableau to organize for display — there would have been 1496 little standing characters total. 

Thanks to Mark Johnson, here we have the last Small Society daily, which was published on February 27 1999. 

The Small Society debuted in 1966, a sort of lightly editorial gag cartoon that focused on an everyman character trying to deal with modern society, politics and relationships. The marketing for this strip must have been masterful because it started with a very healthy client list, and managed to keep a decent roll call of papers right through the 1960s, 70s and even 80s despite the lack of strong characters or audience-grabbing hooks. Perhaps its popularity had something to do with it being an early adopter of the panel-in-strip-format look, but that seems a stretch. . 

The strip was created by Morrie Brickman, who used a very pleasant minimalist style on this feature — a change from his earlier more detailed cartooning work. Bill Yates began getting credit as co-creator in 1985, and then got sole credit starting in 1989, but the art and writing style of the strip never faltered. 

In 1999 Yates was in poor health and decided to drop The Small Society. The final installment gave only an oblique nod to the end of the series. Thanks to Mark Johnson for supplying this final strip.

Gus Mager had quite the little cottage industry going with his ‘monk’ characters. He started drawing weekday strips for the New York Evening Journal starring human-monkey hybrids in 1904. At first they skewed toward apedom, but later the ‘monks’ became more and more human, until new readers would no doubt be wondering about the point of the title. No matter, because the strips were a real hoot, starring a cast of characters named for their dominant characteristic — you had Tightwaddo the cheapskate, Coldfeeto the timid guy, Boneheado the dummy, Braggo the … well you get the idea. 

In December 1910 a new pair of characters was added to the list, a brilliant detective named Sherlocko and his faithful companion, Dr. Watso. No internet points at all for being able to decode this not exactly sly take-off  on Mr. Conan Doyle’s famed creations. This wasn’t by any means the first appearance of a super-sleuth in newspaper comics, which is hardly surprising because Sherlock Holmes was all the rage in this era. What Mager brought to the party, oddly enough, was an obviously great respect and enthusiasm for Holmes. While there was plenty of funny stuff going on in the Sherlocko strips, the simian detective himself played things straight — his preternatural ability to find and interpret clues was handled with surprising fidelity to the original.

The new character was a hit, and became a fixture of Mager’s ‘monk’ strip. Things went along their merry way until early 1913, when Mager decided to leave the Hearst stable in favour of the rival Pulitzer organization. One of the carrots held out to Mager was that his star character would be given the red carpet treatment, moving to a full page Sunday strip. At Hearst, Mager had pretty much been frozen out of the prestigious Sunday paper, appearing with only a few fill-in strips back in the mid-1900s. 

The first Sherlocko the Monk Sunday appeared in Pulitzer’s Funny Side Sunday section on February 23 1913, as seen above. But you’ll notice one big difference — our heroes are no longer Sherlocko and Watso; they are now Hawkshaw and the Colonel.Also note that the name changes were obviously made at the last minute — the new names are shoehorned into the word balloons, obviously replacing the original ones.

In Bill Blackbeard’s introduction to the Hyperion Press book Sherlocko the Monk 1910-1912 he posits that the Conan Doyle estate might have served Pulitzer with a cease and desist order just before the new Sunday feature debuted. I disagree — it seems to me that if the Conan Doyle estate was going to object to the obvious copy of their characters they would not have waited over two years to do so. My guess, rather, is that in the legal tradition already established by Buster Brown, it was assumed (or ordered) that Mager could take his characters with him to a new syndicate, but the name was not allowed to go with it. The last minute nature of the change makes me think that a cease and desist letter was probably received from the Hearst organization just shy of press time, and therefore the awkward looking change.

Why ‘Hawkshaw’ though? Although anyone could be forgiven for thinking that Mager might have actually coined the term for a detective, he actually appropriated it from a detective in the 1863 stage play The Ticket-of-Leave Man. Apparently though the play was critically panned it was an audience favorite and was constantly revived during the Victorian era, and the name Hawkshaw became synonym with detectives. 

The newly minted Hawkshaw the Detective had a long run in the Pulitzer Sunday section, ending its first run in 1922. The strip was then revived in 1931 to become the topper to the Pulitzer strip The Captain and the Kids, which ironically enough, was also a feature stolen from Hearst and renamed due to legal wrangling.Thus it continued until 1947, making a tremendous nearly half-century run and Gus Mager’s contribution to the history books. 

One of the best strips (in my humble opionion) to debut in the latter quarter of the 2000s was Ernie. Above find the first week of the strip, published the week of February 1 1988. The strip never got the sort of tremendous fan following it deserved, but it lasted for thirty years so it obviously kept readers happy in the places it did run. 

A strip about a bunch of losers and cads living in a dark world of stupidity, callousness, ennui and casual violence may not seem like a great launchpad for daily fun, but creator Bud Grace takes such naked glee in putting his characters through this hellish world that unless your disposition is so incurably sunny that you consider Hallmark Cards a harsh dose of reality, you’re going to laugh along with him. 

If you missed out on Ernie (later renamed The Piranha Club) during its initial run, the good news is that Grace has recently self-published the entire run as a series of downright cheap books. Check them out here on Grace’s website.

Above is the final week of Mrs. Fitz’s Flats, a strip that never really made a great impact on comics pages, but nevertheless ran for fifteen years, not a run to be sneezed at (gesundheit). 

To look at the strip, you’d be forgiven if you assumed it was by Mort Walker. And you’d be partly right. Frank Roberge, the superintendent of Mrs. Fitz’s Flats, was an assistant to Walker in the 1950s. Walker came up with the idea of an apartment building full of weirdos, presided over by a widow lady landlord. He got approval from King Features to run with the concept and he handed the reins over to Roberge, already well-proven to be able to draw in the Walker style. The daily-only strip debuted on January 7 1957. It was long assumed that the Walker shop wrote the strip from beginning to end, but Mort Walker says that he handed off the writing to Roberge after a relatively short time*.

The strip was attractive and the gags, spread out among a host of regulars, were strong enough if a little staid. So why didn’t the strip catch on? Author Maurice Horn believes it is because the cast was too big and readers never felt intimate with the characters, while King Features archivist Mark Johnson feels that the setting, which is almost boarding house-like, was too old fashioned. I think they’re both right.

Roberge tried to revive the strip by having Mrs. Fitz marry the superintendant and move to a retirement community in Florida. After a few years of that with no better subscription numbers, back went Mrs. Fitz to the apartment building. Near the end of the strip’s life, Roberge even modified his art style to try to differentiate it from the other omnipresent Walker strips. That didn’t help either, and the strip came to an abrupt end on October 28 1972. As you can see above, the final week offers no hint that the strip was ending. 

According to Mark Johnson, this is because Roberge died unexpectedly while golfing, and so the strip was cancelled after his last submission was run. However, Lambiek Comiclopedia disagrees with that, saying that Roberge died in 1976. As Wimpy would say, “let’s you and him fight.”

Thanks to Mark Johnson, who supplied the syndicate proof shown above.

* Source: “Mort Walker: Conversations”.