Orphan Annie, Dick Tracy and the rise of newspaper comics

In 1924, a man named Harold Gray walked into the offices of Joseph Medill Patterson, the co-editor of the Chicago Tribune and the co-editor, publisher and founder of the New York Daily News. He carried with him a number of drawings, samples for his proposal for a comic strip he wanted to call “Little Orphan Otto.”

Patterson looked over the drawings and sat back in his chair. “He looks like a pansy,” he said, using derogatory language common at the time. “Put a skirt on the kid and call him Annie.” Thus was born one of the most enduring and distinctly American comic strip characters.

Near the end of the 19th century, many newspapers featured drawings and cartoons but these did not feature recurring characters. The first such American newspaper comic strip characters were born in 1895 when Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World published “Hogan’s Alley,” which featured a character named “The Yellow Kid,” a gap-toothed, jug-eared urchin dressed in a nightshirt.

He became an instant sensation, spawning a raft of products and stunning the industry. It had been Pulitzer’s intention to use the recently developed four-color printing press to bring fine art to the masses. But attempts to reproduce paintings resulted in murky images. Comics, on the other hand, proved terrific on newsprint.

William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the rival New York Journal, stole “The Yellow Kid’’ from the World and presented him as the star of a Sunday package touted later in 1896 as “Eight Pages of Iridescent Polychromous Effulgence That Make the Rainbow Look Like a Lead Pipe!”

The Tribune had been running four pages of Sunday comics since 1895 but not in color and with no continuing characters. In time the Tribune and Daily News got serious, with Patterson leading the way.

Patterson helped create and nourish, among many other strips, “The Gumps,” “Gasoline Alley,” “Moon Mullins” and “Terry and the Pirates.” He was energetically hands-on, offering advice, coaching artists and coming up with ideas to promote the strips. He would regularly assemble his cartoonists to discuss characters and storylines.

“The Gumps” helped to lay the foundation for the Chicago Tribune syndicate which, under various names, was a money-making endeavor that would spread comic strips and other editorial products to newspapers across the world.

As Stephen Becker wrote in his marvelous 1959 book “Comic Art in America,” “It is probably true that no other publisher in history … took as much interest in the comics he published as Patterson did … The Tribune and the News did not dominate the twenties; yet of the dozen enduring strips created in that decade, half are their products. (They were) essential in the transition from comics as an adjunct to journalism to comics as a profession in itself.”

Here’s another notable Tribune comic story.

When a man named Chester Gould arrived in Chicago in 1921, he found it “exhilarating” and decided to stay. He attended Northwestern University where he studied business and commerce. He married, started a family. He took classes at the Art Institute.

And he created comic strips for the city’s newspapers, focusing on the Tribune. He spent a decade unsuccessfully submitting ideas and drawings to its editors. And then he walked in with drawings of a detective he called “Plainclothes Tracy.” Patterson shortened that to “Dick” and the strip was launched on Oct. 4, 1931.

It was an immediate hit. Gould and his family settled onto a farm in Woodstock and he commuted six days a week to Tribune Tower and, rarely taking a vacation, created in both places for half a century a vast array of bizarre characters and plots and technological gizmos that fascinated the reading public.

Comics were born of a simple time, in an era when a trip to a flea circus or the nickelodeon were among but a few entertainment options for most people. The appeal is easy to figure out. Reading is work. Seeing is automatic. We meet the world primarily on a visual level, which explains primitive cave drawings, religious icons and images, movie posters. And comics.

The impact of an image is immediate and often more lyrical than a 1,000 words.

It may be difficult now to fathom the impact that comics once had. They were displayed in larger form and were intricately drawn. Characters became national symbols. Before television came along, comics were king for a brief window of time in which their substance and style, observations and satire, had a major cultural impact unimaginable today.

Newspaper buyers often referred to the paper not by its name but asked for “the Andy Gump paper.” And in 1923, when the death of one of that strip’s characters was foretold, as Lloyd Wendt detailed in his “Chicago Tribune” book, “hundreds of readers appeared in front of the Tribune building to protest, and thousands of calls jammed the switchboards, so that extra operators had to be brought in.”

Television put an end to most of the story strips that dominated the pages a few decades ago, replaced by gag-a-day strips. Most kids, awash in videos, are no longer drawn to the simplicity of ink on paper and so it is that fewer new strips are appearing, and surveys indicate that Sunday comics are losing readership.

Still, some comic characters seem assured of immortality, existing in films, TV, video, toys and the public consciousness. Think of that little orphan girl. Or those beguiling folks named Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy and the Red Baron of the “Peanuts” world.

As Rick Marschall, author of “America’s Great Comic Strip Artists,” has written, “The comic strip and jazz are the only two American art forms.”

Mort Walker, creator of “Beetle Bailey” and founder of the International Museum of Cartoon Art in Boca Raton, Florida, told me, “Comics will always be with us because we need a release from the tragedies on the earlier (news) pages. They have meaning for our lives.”

But let’s give Patterson the final word. He said this before his death in 1946: “(Comics need) youngsters for kid appeal, a handsome guy for muscle work and love interest, a succession of pretty girls, a mysterious locale or a totally familiar one.”

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