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Happy Annie-versary!
Continuity in strips was not unknown previous to 1924; and before the decade ended many fine-tuned categories developed. But a hundred years ago the narrative, sequential, day-to-day (even “cliff-hanger” mode) comic strip became a staple of daily newspapers. The actual centennial is worth noting, because daily strips – “story strips,” as designated by the National Cartoonists Society, and in the public’s perception – are virtually synonymous with the art form itself: “To Be Continued,” or in the French, “À suivre …”
We recognize the legendary comic strip Little Orphan Annie, whose significance of course extended beyond the comics page to broader popular culture, merchandise, movies, Broadway, songs, politics, and influentially, America’s cultural consciousness. No less we praise her remarkable creator Harold Gray.
Prior to 1924, the newspaper comic strip largely was a Sunday product. There had been comics in daily papers, but with some exceptions they generally consisted of random gags, revolving characters, and expanded panel-cartoon formats. Sunday pages almost obligated cartoonists to design episodes rather than continuities; daily strips begged for longer narratives, even if last-panel gags were payoffs. Daily strips also brought readers back to the funny pages every day, surely a commercial imperative. An unwritten role of the colored comic supplement had been to appeal to children, but the black-and-white inner pages of newspapers were instead the domain of adult readers. And it is interesting that only by 1924, humor – let us specify the slapstick humor of comics’ first 25 years – finally shared its spotlight with melodrama, family strips, working-women themes, sports, and other thematic preoccupations.
Heiress to all these developments in 1924 was Little Orphan Annie by Harold Gray. The “Who's that little chatterbox? The girl with the auburn locks” gathered, codified, and built upon these trends. She is significant, more than various precursors, before after Annie took America by storm, certain floodgates opened. For instance, only a year later cartoonist George Storm and writer Edwin Alger (whose name evoked Horatio Alger) drew from the well of boys’ weekly papers and dime novels and created Phil Hardy / Bobby Thatcher; other strips soon followed: pastiches of humor, pathos, adventure, mystery, and suspense (and essential appeals to younger readers, at least initially). Little Pathfinder Annie!
Cartoonist Harold Lincoln Gray married twice and never had any children… except for Annie. He was born on his parents’ farm in Kanakee IL in 1894; was graduated from Purdue University in Indiana and served as a bayonet instructor in the Great War; and secured a position with the Chicago Tribune, eventually as an assistant to Sidney Smith on The Gumps. This strip careened between humor and melodrama; it was a family strip with vaudeville gags when humor was the objective; otherwise, human-interest fare. Domestic crises were frequent and of such narrative interest (ghost-written by a Chicago jeweler named Sol Hess) that The Gumps became a sensation, first in the Midwest, then nationwide.
Harold Gray’s period on the strip was marked by artwork clumsier than Smith’s own, and bad lettering of the strip’s heavy dialog. Whether it was Gray’s creative urges, or his notice of Smith’s sudden, magnificent income, he became determined to produce his own strip. As legend has it, he drew samples of a strip based on a street gamin named Otto, and showed them to the Tribune’s publisher “Colonel” Robert McCormick (or his cousin, “Captain” Joseph Patterson of the New York Daily News) and was told about Otto, “He looks like a pansy. Put skirts on the kid.” Renamed to evoke James Whitcomb Riley’s poem about Little Orphant Annie, an American icon was born.
If there was a story-strip pioneer that staked a claim before Little Orphan Annie it was The Gumps itself. Historians have not noted the fact that Gray’s initial premise was a loose approximation of Sidney Smith’s strip. It was perhaps not a mistake that Little Orphan Annie loosely was a junior version of the strip on which Gray assisted: self-contained Sunday humor; a loose daily storyline (Annie found herself in the household of characters not meant to carry over to the next episode – a shrewish wife and a rich war profiteer named Warbucks); domestic disputes and resolutions; lectures and prolix monologues.
If this premise and setting doesn’t sound especially grabbing, many readers might have agreed, so adjustments were made. Annie embraced a doll named Emily Marie, to whom she confided – soon to be succeeded by the more attentive dog named Sandy. To the extent that Warbucks was henpecked in his own house, the billionaire and his ward bonded; and he became “Daddy.” Annie eventually ran away from that home, to a next adventure. But as we know, “Daddy” remained as a character and frequent (though never legal) guardian; Mrs Warbucks disappeared from the strip altogether; and month by month Annie began to be adopted, as it were, by the reading public.
Gray’s strip grew in popularity. Through the ‘20s the premises lurched from adventures (haunted houses) to locales (desert islands) to children’s domains (circus settings). Annie was both vulnerable – her inexplicable, and unexplained, lone status guaranteed that – but fiercely independent. She asserted doses of justice for bullied kids, with a strong right hook when needed, and with stern lectures for good measure. By the end of the 1920s there were Orphan Annie dolls, toys, games, reprint books, songs, and all sorts of clothes and merchandise.
By the end of the decade Gray’s art, too, evolved to a passable level of attraction. For a strip that skirted with realism, even hard reality, Little Orphan Annie spent years ensconced in a world of humor-strip architectonics. Details were few; Gray never learned to draw his characters running in realistic fashion, for instance; props and background elements were scarce. And one of his artistic cliches was baked-in from the start: characters with empty ovals instead of eyes. Perhaps Gray was inspired by comics’ other parvenu (like Warbucks) in Bringing Up Father by George McManus. Readers seldom remarked about the eyes of Jiggs, Maggie, and company. In Annie, it became a matter of chatter. Historian Coulton Waugh wondered whether Gray intentionally sublimated the emotion conveyed by eyes so that readers would supply their own feelings.
There was nobody in America who benefited more from the Great Depression that struck in October, 1929, than Harold Gray – or, let us say, Annie herself. With hard times came a transformation in Little Orphan Annie that far outpaced new sets of premises and dramatic opportunities. The vicissitudes of life during the Depression became a virtual character itself – a motif.
Suddenly the poor girl was plausibly poor indeed; and millions of readers identified ever more keenly with her vulnerability. Annie discovered, defended, and assisted the destitute and desperate. Harold Gray revealed himself as a champion of President Hoover’s Rugged Individualism. She preached, through marvelously crafted stories beyond mere perorations and dialog, the virtues of self-reliance and integrity. Annie took on schoolyard bullies, crooked businessmen, corrupt politicians, and odious union leaders. She lectured the lazy and encouraged the dispirited. In story after story she became an inspiration for millions who endured privation during those crushing hard times.
Reflecting (or encouraging) the editorials in her home papers, the Tribune and News, Annie spoke for the “ill-feed, ill-clothed, ill-housed” but resolutely rejected the new occupant of the White House who coined that phrase. Franklin Roosevelt had no bitterer opponents (and perhaps none more effective) than Gray and Annie… which bothered millions of her fans not at all. Little Orphan Annie became a cultural colossus during the Depression, with movie serials, a popular radio show (sponsored by Ovaltine and its iconic decoder-ring promotion) and an ever-expanding plethora of toys, games, books, and licensed items.
Gray’s art took a quantum leap during the 1930s too. It coincided with the addition of his cousin Ed Leffingwell (and later Ed’s brother Robert) as assistant. It might be assumed, because their biographical details are sparse, that Ed was responsible for a remarkable improvement in Annie’s graphic maturity, but a consideration of facts suggest otherwise, except perhaps for improving the strip’s lettering. The excellence in layouts, panel composition, shading, and visual details occurred in Annie before either Leffingwell’s employment; and lasted beyond them. And such qualities existed in Little Joe – a Western strip that remains a mystery in strip history. Well drawn and written, it differed (other than setting and characters) not at all from Little Orphan Annie. Premises, outlines, dialogue, character portrayals, politics, and artwork all surely were by the same hand that produced Annie’s adventures. However… signed “Leffingwell.” Strange, a major cartoonist ghosting a separate, minor, strip; but evidently part of his cousins’ compensation.
Matching the transformed artwork in Annie was a major advancement in character delineations and mature plots. In addition to his stock players of petite bourgeoisie and corrupt bureaucrats, Gray hearkened to the siren-calls of 1930s fantasy themes: “Daddy” Warbucks recruited a cast of allies with mysterious and sometimes supernatural powers. Punjab, a vaguely Sikh giant; the Asp, a deadly Asian; and Mr Am – plausibly a representation of Divinity, a white-bearded man “who had lived forever” and exercised amazing powers – were among little Annie’s new friends.
More than an interesting cast, Harold Gray invested extraordinary literary devices into his plot construction. He named many of his characters by the tool of “personification,” the method used by writers like John Bunyan in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Like Dickens also, when he named characters Warbucks, Fred Free, Mr Pinchpenny, and Mrs Bleating-Hart, he was being clear, not bankrupt. In a unique way we find parallels between Little Orphan Annie and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn – Huck’s river, as a nonliteral metaphor, found life in Annie’s omnipresent roads… to the inevitable next town.
Further – in one of comics’ most remarkable feats of creativity – Gray took upon himself, for years, the device of having every day’s strip represent a different day’s action. In Roy Crane’s Wash Tubbs / Captain Easy, sometimes a brawl extended over a whole week. When I was a syndicate comics editor, I frequently counseled against a writer have one phone conversation in a strip last more than three days of “action” in the daily paper. But Gray managed to have every day in Little Orphan Annie represent a separate day in the narrative. Not easy; try it!
Another technique Gray mastered was seldom attempted by contemporary masters of continuity strips Raymond, Foster, Gould, or Caniff, beyond their occasional use of the universal “Meanwhiles.” In Little Orphan Annie stories, Gray often showed an occurrence that became the crux of a sequence, a mystery to be solved, a secret to be revealed. Largely through soliloquies and exchanged dialogues, he offered readers the multiple viewpoints of multiple characters… not “versions” of the truth, but insights into characters’ motivations. Gray’s stories were layered, rich, complex.
The pervasive mood in Little Orphan Annie was one of solitude if not loneliness. Annie was, essentially, a loner; and her world was filled with empty rooms, deserted streets, and lonely streets. Often at nighttime. Gray made readers aware of corners, dark shadows, and ceilings – almost metaphorically oppressive. Contextually, his figures, as Al Capp once described to me, had “all the vitality of Easter Island statues.” No mistake or shortcoming, however: Gray knew the world he constructed. Substituting narrative for action – there fewer fights in Little Orphan Annie than in almost any other story strip – readers were treated to soliloquies – “internal monologues,” in literary terminology. By this technique Gray identified with Hugo, Pirandello, and, especially when the personalities were sympathetic, Goethe.
The little orphan in the iconic red dress who began her career as a waif vaguely resembling Mary Pickford had become a monumental avatar, an American symbol. When the European war raged in 1939, Gray, like his editors and 80 per cent of Americans, opposed American intervention; and in their view, the despised Franklin Roosevelt was scheming to involve the United States. But when war was declared, Annie “enlisted.” Gray had her form the Junior Commandos, doing volunteer service and war work. He constructed a sequence where a Black kid suffered prejudice but – with Annie’s lecture on tolerance – he was welcomed into the club.
By that point, however, the liberal establishment in American press and politics had grown to despise Annie and her creator. Because the Junior Commandos wore JC armbands in their war-work, critics called Gray a crypto-Nazi. A popular magazine profiled Little Orphan Annie in an article called “Fascism in the Funnies.” The opprobrium of Gray as a right-winger became as common as jokes about her red dress or blank eyes.
Harold Gray and Annie powered on. The cartoonist’s politics, if anything, grew more strident in the post-War years, and when Communists were being exposed by Washington hearings and in the new medium of television. Annie’s “physical” world yet evolved – darker than ever it was: Gray substituted solid blacks for his trademark cross-hatch shading. Until self-conscious graphic-novel artists in our day, Harold Gray drew comics closer to film noire sensibilities than any artist of his time. Alex Raymond was a Romantic (in the glory years of Flash Gordon); Milton Caniff was an Impressionist in Terry; and Chester Gould was comics’ Expressionist in Dick Tracy. Harold Gray? In his last phase, the 1950s and ‘60s (he died on May 9, 1968) he produced comics noire. (I would add that Roy Crane, in his Wash Tubbs / Captain Easy, was master of the swashbuckling picaresque in comics. His strip’s centennial is also this year. We will give Roy Crane, Wash Tubbs, and Captain Easy their due in coming weeks in Yesterday's Papers.)
Little Orphan Annie was not created on an ivory tower. Harold Gray loved the people he depicted and defended. He and his wife Winifred drove round-trip every year between their homes in Westport CT and La Jolla CA. He talked to people and took notes (I curated an exhibition related to the debut of the Annie movie, for which I was obliged to research Gray’s archives in the Mugar Library at Boston University. The amazing Gray had retained virtually every original, and all notes, maybe even random receipts, from his long career).
It was rumored at when Harold Gray died, he intended that Little Orphan Annie die with him; perhaps Warbucks himself was meant to die. Despite the fact that the strip had slipped in circulation during the turbulent 1960s, it was a valuable property the syndicate would not allow to die. As syndicates often do, the Tribune-News Syndicate shamefully botched Annie’s afterlife. A succession of amateurs and miscast professional cartoonists abused her (even I auditioned at one point, trying my best to evoke Gray’s 1930s look, and revive his worldview; mercifully my work was declined). Evenetually and ironically I became Comics Editor of the syndicate, by which time they had accepted my advice, and re-ran sequences from the real 1930s.
All to no avail, commercially. When the “property” was licensed for a Broadway musical, an unconscious parody found favor with a 1970s public. Harold Gray might have spun in his grave into low-earth orbit, however. At that point the great Leonard Starr, whose On Stage had run its course, was hired to produce the Annie strip. Starring characters that resembled the originals (can I say “50 shades of Gray?), he produced a fine strip that was, however, Annie; not Little Orphan Annie. Despite the fact that they had lived only miles apart in Westport, my friend Leonard ironically had never met Harold Gray.
It is a shame that many Americans have not met Harold Gray, so to speak, or his iconic masterpiece Little Orphan Annie. I devoted an issue of my old NEMO Magazine to the strip, and I kicked off a reprint series for Fantagraphics. Arlington House and IDW are publishers that similarly assembled anthologies. The viewpoints of Harold Gray – personal and political – and the immense craft he brought to Little Orphan Annie, are irretrievably bonded. In this Centennial year, it is just that they properly find their places with the greatest of American creators and creations in any genre.
This essay, in somewhat different form, appeared in this year's digital-only Program Book of the San Diego Comic-Con International.
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