Harold Gray, Original Creator of Little Orphan Annie Harold Gray, Original Creator of Little Orphan Annie May 30, 2010 Oval, blank eyes look back from the page at the reader, not giving any sense of the spunk that took Annie safely from one adventure to another. Harold Gray debuted Little Orphan Annie in 1924, a little girl that captured comics readers' hearts. After 85 years, Annie retired from print on June 13, 2010, but that girl is not finished with the limelight just yet... Born in Kankakee, Ilinois on January 20, 1894, Harold Lincoln Gray grew up apparently interested in science. In 1917, he earned a Bachelor of Science engineering degree from Perdue University. A Lafayette newspaper gave Gray his first job out of school, then the young man was detoured by a stint in the army as a bayonet instructor during World War One. After the war, Gray accepted a job with the Chicago Tribune's art department at $15 week salary. He moved up to an assistant post with "The Gumps" cartoonist, Sydney Smith.

Gray also began developing strip ideas of his own, submitting and receiving rejections for four years, said William Dunn in Ron Goulart's The Encyclopedia of American Comics, from 1897 to the Present (Promised Land Productions, New York 1990). Gray created an adventure strip with a sturdy, brave child hero called Little Orphan Otto, and submitted the comic strip to Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, then editor with the Chicago Tribune Syndicate. The cartoonist's strength was not in the art - his drawings were considered stiff, primitive and without grace - but he was a true master at telling a story. Captain Patterson told Gray to make the lead character a girl instead, and the strip was accepted into syndication. Debuting in newspapers on August 5, 1924, Little Orphan Annie featured a girl struggling in the classic rags-to-riches tale, with a big dose of the cartoonist's political views added. After offending several newspapers and having the strips removed, Gray learned to temper his "strongly conservative views", but said Dunn, "the strip was often controversial." After a few weeks in print, Gray added a character that would take on a life of his own.

"Oliver Daddy Warbucks" adopted Annie from the Orphanage. The good life for Annie would only last for a while, then she was in danger or on a grand adventure. Fending for herself in the big world with her dog, Sandy, Annie always kept a bright outlook until she got herself out of the mess and found her adoptive father again. The Little Orphan Annie comic strip was so popular with readers that on one occasion when the instalment was left out of the daily newspaper, the error "caused more rumpus on the Tribune switchboard than a world war, a big league baseball game or the bombing of the post office," said Phil Rosenthal in the Chicago Tribune, May 12, 2010. The success of Little Orphan Annie enabled Gray to syndicate another comic strip, "Maw Green". In it, Gray made statements on life and politics from an Irish point of view. "Maw Green" ran until Gray died in 1968.

(Gray was against gas rationing, welfare, income taxes and other policies of the day.) Knowing his artistic skills were unusual for a cartoonist, Gray siad, I know what I want and do the best I can." The blank eyes of characters in Little Orphan Annie almost became Gray's signature, leaving the reader to interpret the mood themselves. Working generally on his own, Gray employed his cousins Edwin and Robert Leffington as his assistants, only for lettering and background work. Edwin became a cartoonist in his own right in 1933 with his creation, "Little Joe". When Edwin died in 1936, his brother Robert took over "Little Joe" until it ended in the late 1950s. Gray described his Annie character as "tougher than hell, with a heart of gold and a fast left, who can take care of herself because she has to." The cartoonist became a multi-millionaire from his creation. Annie was transformed into a radio personality for 13 years beginning in the 1930s; she was on the movie screen for the first time in 1932 and again in 1938.

The Little Orphan Annie storylines were a good fit for comic books, and along with appearing in "Dell's Super Comics from 1939-49," said Don Markstein of " Don Markstein's Toonopedia ," Annie also appeared in her own comic books from 1937 to 1948. Little Orphan Annie became a star in the many musical versions of "Annie" on stage and in movie theatres, and has been very popular in a range of licenced merchandise. The Broadway musical "Annie" kept performers busy and audiences entertained for over 2,000 performances, running from 1977 to 1983. The United States Postal Service honoured Little Orphan Annie and many other comics with 32-cent postage in their 1995 "Classic Comic Strips" series. Published in newspapers for almost 86 years, the comic featuring the requisite Annie curls, red dress and white cuffs came to an end with the last Sunday feature on June 13th, 2010. Over the years, Little Orphan Annie dwindled down in newspapers, appearing in only about 20 publications.

This is not the end of Annie, though, but perhaps a beginning. Her stories will continue on in new media, theatre, graphic novels, book collections of the strip, and much more. Harold Gray died on May 9, 1968 in Lajolla, California. After a stint of five years trying to find suitable cartoonists and reprinting old issues of the strip, Little Orphan Annie carried proudly on in her true durable style, under the skilled hands of Leonard Starr for 20 years. Starr retired in 2000. Two fresh talents took on the drawing, writing, and updating of Annie's adventures, Andrew Pepoy and Jay Maeder. Well, Annie, we won't be seeing you in the funny pages when the sun comes out tomorrow, but we will be seeing you in a lot of other places. We'll be waiting for you. * Art and cartoonist's photo are the property of Tribune Media Services, stamp property of USPS. The Orphan’s Epic | The Comics Journal BY R.C.

Harvey May 20, 2013 On May 13, 2010, Tribune Media Services announced its intention to stop production and distribution of one of cartooning’s iconic creations, the newspaper comic strip Little Orphan Annie. The resilient redheaded teenager made her last appearance in the nation’s newspapers on Sunday, June 13, just two months shy of celebrating an 86-year run. But the longevity, while notable, is deceptive: the strip foundered badly after the death of its creator, Harold Gray, in 1968, and while one of Gray’s successors righted the craft for two decades, Annie never again achieved the circulation or cultural status it enjoyed in Gray’s hands, proving yet again that a comic strip, uniquely the product of individual inspiration, usually cannot survive the death of its creator. And Gray’s strip was more idiosyncratic than most. Born in 1894 in Kankakee, Illinois, Gray joined the staff of the Chicago Tribune soon after graduating from Purdue University in 1917.

He left for military service in World War I and then returned to the Trib; but he quit in 1920 to operate his own commercial art studio. One of his clients was Sidney Smith who hired him to assist on The Gumps, the Tribune strip that was so popular that the paper set up a syndicate to sell and distribute it to other newspapers. Gray soon aspired to doing a strip himself (Smith’s 1922 million-dollar contract may have helped inspire him), and he began sketching characters and imagining situations and talking to Smith about them. When Gray came up with a concept they both agreed was promising, Gray showed his idea to Captain Joe Patterson, storied head of the Tribune Syndicate. The Captain wasn’t interested. But Gray kept at it. The ensuing parade of ideas was followed by a parade of rejections. It went on for months. One day while going over some of his sketches with Smith, Gray pointed to a drawing of a small gamin and declared that the boy would be an orphan. “Not bad,” Smith said, intrigued by the simplicity of the idea of a strip about an orphan, who must start out without relatives or friends or other complications.

“But make the kid clean and cute and sweet to appeal to women readers.” Gray dutifully made the kid cute, gave him a head of curls, drew up a dozen sketches of the boy in various poses, and showed them to Patterson, calling his strip idea “Little Orphan Otto.” For once, Patterson was interested. Searching for crowd-pleasing pathos probably, the Captain decided to try the orphan strip. But he wanted Gray to alter Otto: “The kid looks like a pansy to me,” Patterson growled. “Put a skirt on him and we’ll call it ‘Little Orphan Annie.'” It may have been the head of curls that did it, conjuring in Patterson’s mind the image of Mary Pickford in her early films. In the first volume of the IDW reprint of Little Orphan Annie, comics historian Jeet Heer reports his discovery of an alternative origin story for Annie: “In this version, Gray struck up a conversation with a young street urchin he met while roaming the streets of Chicago looking for ideas. ‘I talked to this little kid, and liked her right away,’ Gray told Editor & Publisher in 1951. ‘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.’” Probably neither version is the unadulterated truth. The first smacks of legend; the second suffers from being a storyteller’s story, concocted long after the fact by which time Gray was an even better storyteller than he’d been on the outset. The legend is that Patterson worked with Gray to plot the first few strips, telling the cartoonist to aim for adult readers. “Kids don’t buy papers. Their parents do,” Patterson explained. They devised a Dickensian tear-jerker of an introductory sequence: little Annie (smaller and therefore cuter at first than in her heyday) was forced to labor for her keep at the orphanage, which was as grim and oppressive as any Oliver Twist ever endured. Her fate was presided over by Miss Asthma, whose rotten disposition ringed every childish hope for adoption with a nimbus of gloom.

The first strip appeared on August 5, 1924, and concluded with Annie’s bedtime prayer: “Please make me a real good little girl so nice people will adopt me. Then I can have a papa and mama to love. And if it’s not too much trouble, I’d like a dolly. Amen.” But Annie wasn’t just a cute, sweet little girl. Gray quickly added dimension to her character: in the next day’s strip, when a rude boy teases her, Annie wallops him in the kisser, establishing immediately that she has a certain independence of spirit in spite of her straitened circumstances. In a short time, Annie was a popular feature, and that spirit of independence that pervaded Gray’s work eventually enlisted a devoted readership. At the end of the second month of the strip’s run, Gray introduced the character that would shape the philosophy of independence into a political stance: Annie is adopted by Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks, a millionaire industrialist who made his fortune manufacturing munitions during World War I. Warbucks became Gray’s example of the self-made man, the self-reliant individualist who made himself what he is through purposeful enterprise.

The epitome of this culture hero, Warbucks is the larger-than-life version of what all the “little people” in the strip inevitably become if they follow Annie’s example of diligent labor and canny capitalism. But to be exemplary, Annie can scarcely be a rich man’s daughter. As soon as Gray had established bonds of affection between Annie and “Daddy,” he sent Warbucks off on a business trip, and Annie is returned to the orphanage by the spiteful Mrs. Warbucks (who soon disappears from the strip forever). Annie is adopted again, this time by a slave-driving couple who make her life miserable. She runs away, accompanied by her only friend, a large orange-colored dog named Sandy, whom she acquired in January 1925. The two eventually take refuge at a farm owned by the poor but kindly Mr. and Mrs. Silos. But Annie is no burden to them: through hard work and her own ingenuity, the eleven-year-old waif is able to contribute to the couple’s welfare and happiness. After a few months, though, “Daddy” Warbucks finally locates Annie and takes her and Sandy back to live in splendid comfort with him.

Thus did Gray inaugurate the cycle of separation and hardship, rescue and reunion that framed Annie’s adventures and the quest motif that animated them throughout the strip’s run. Separated from “Daddy,” Annie must find the means of survival; through her unflagging perseverance, she always does. Oddly enough perhaps, Little Orphan Annie reached the zenith of its popularity during the thirties. “Odd” because it was the decade of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the man who gave government a social conscience. FDR’s mission ran in directions diametrically opposed to Gray’s ideas of self-sufficiency. Under Roosevelt’s tutelage, the down-trodden and the poor, the halt and the lame were encouraged to look to government for help rather than exhorted to help themselves by toiling determinedly and exercising tenaciously the principles of free enterprise. Gray’s message was precisely the opposite—although it was as much an accident of his story as it was a matter of political conviction. The best way for a little orphan girl to make her way in the world without being simply a weepy milksop is for her to be self-reliant. As a good story-teller, Gray knew that.

Warbucks and the rest of Annie’s entourage were natural outgrowths of this central notion. As Gray’s exemplar, Warbucks could scarcely espouse self-reliance and free enterprise during the Roosevelt years without, at the same time, seeming to attack FDR’s policies. And so Little Orphan Annie became the first nationally syndicated comic strip to be unabashedly, unrelievedly, “political.” Annie was not the first political strip: Bud Fisher’s A. Mutt—the first daily strip—was the first to take political potshots in its panels. But Fisher’s strip was published only in San Francisco at the time: it could reflect the opinions of its host paper to a fare-thee-well and suffer no more consequences than the editorials in the same paper (that is, the paper would presumably not be purchased by those who disagreed with the views expressed). Gray’s strip, on the other hand, was distributed nationally, and by tradition, syndicated strips steered clear of politics for fear of offending client papers who might cancel their subscriptions in retaliation. Annie was the first to break with custom. But it did so because the very essence of its story demanded it.

Gray’s celebrated conservatism was hardly negligible in the development of the strip’s political thrust. But neither was the strip’s political content artificially superimposed upon an otherwise simple tale of a wandering orphan girl and her dog. The strip’s politics were organic—integral to its story and its heroine’s personality. Throughout the thirties, Annie drifted from place to place, into “Daddy’s” care and out of it, spending most of her time with the ordinary folk and reviving by precept and example their faith in the values of hard work and economy. Sometimes the villainy she faced would be too much to be overcome by such simple virtue, and then “Daddy” Warbucks would show up and rescue Annie and everyone else. In the thirties, Gray introduced another element into the harsh reality of his rendition of the Depression—the element of fantasy. Increasingly, Annie was encountering villains that were not merely greedy landlords or corrupt small-time politicians: some of them were criminals of the most unconscionable nastiness, unscrupulous schemers and plotters of the vilest sort, some with plans for world domination.

“Daddy” always arrived in time to save Annie, but not even he, powerful as he was, could punish these villains enough for their crimes. So Gray gave Warbucks aides adequate to the task. Gray had always been fascinated by the Orient (one of Warbucks’ earliest cohorts had been a Chinese mandarin named Wun Wey), and he now began to employ Oriental magic against his villains. On February 3, 1935, a giant, turbaned Indian, eight (perhaps nine) feet tall, showed up as Warbuck’s new right-hand man. Punjab was that paragon, a kindly man of enormous strength and vast intelligence. And he could also supply an appropriate punishment for the most unsavory villains, villains too unspeakable for ordinary legal disciplining: throwing a magic blanket over them, Punjab muttered an incomprehensible incantation and banished them from this world (presumably sending them to another, much more unpleasant, plane of existence). Two years later, on February 21, Gray gave Warbucks another memorable assistant, a black-garbed, hooded-eyed agent of vengeance much more single-minded in purpose than Punjab and entirely humorless.

His name, the Asp, evokes the poisonous viper Cleopatra deployed to achieve her suicide. The Asp’s homeland was (appropriately) in the Middle East where the term assassin originated. Gray’s fascination with the mysteries of the Orient culminated later in the same year with the introduction of the cryptic Mr. Am, a fatherly, bearded sort of sultan, who, Gray hinted broadly, had lived since the dawn of time and who could enter the fourth dimension and restore the dead to life. (And if readers wanted to think Mr. Am might be Gray’s version of God, the cartoonist might smile but he probably would not object.) Fanciful as Gray’s fantasy element was, it was not at all light-hearted. At first glance, his drawing ability seemed too crude for rendering either his reality or his fantasy convincingly, but upon longer acquaintance, his artwork cast a spell that enhanced his story. In maturity in the late thirties, Gray’s drawings were filled with solid blacks, heavy shadows, darkly shaded nooks and crannies. It was a comfortless world, vaguely sinister.

And in that world, Gray’s people stood around rigidly, posturing woodenly, as if inhibited, restrained, in their movements—perhaps because they were fearful. They seemed, in effect, nearly paralyzed with fear and apprehension. And the blank eyeballs for which Annie is famous were integral to the mood of this fearful climate. Although there was little action in many of Gray’s tales, most of them erupted in violence sooner or later. Consequently, Annie seemed perpetually immersed in a sinister night-time world that threatened to assault her at every street corner. And her blank eyeballs were marvelously appropriate to her situation. One walks through a threatening night gingerly, never looking behind or to the side for fear of seeing a sinister presence there. One keeps his eyes focused resolutely, rigidly, ahead of him, in a kind of unseeing stare—precisely the effect that Annie’s eyeballs have. In such an atmosphere, when violence breaks out, we are not surprised. It belongs there. We have been led to expect it—to fear it.

(The blank eyeballs would have been inspired graphic touch had Gray invented the device expressly for the purpose just described; but he was merely following one of the conventions of early comic strip art: George McManus drew Jiggs’ and Maggie’s eyes in the same way in Bringing Up Father, where the effect produced was quite different. In Gray’s strip, though, the convention contributed substantially to the impression Gray clearly intended.) SOME READERS AND CRITICS—mostly avid supporters of Roosevelt’s New Deal—saw Annie as a political mouthpiece for Tribune publisher Robert McCormick’s conservative views masquerading as entertainment, a not-too-subtle indoctrination attempt by the Chicago Tribune. McCormick’s opposition to Roosevelt’s policies had a complex root system, partly philosophical and partly economic. We needn’t go into these matters at length here: for our purpose, it is perhaps enough to indicate what McCormick’s detractors may have thought. Reduced to the simplest terms, McCormick and others of his station who opposed FDR were seen as protecting their own self interest.

FDR’s effort to make society care for the destitute and the jobless of the Depression had to be financed, and since no one but the rich had money, it seemed logical to assume that the rich would finance social welfare through increased taxes. Thus, much of the conservative opposition to Roosevelt could be interpreted as originating in the narrowest kind of selfishness: the desire of the wealthy and powerful to preserve their wealth and power. McCormick was wealthy and powerful. Many of his class saw FDR’s programs as the cutting edge of an economic revolution that threatened their very existence. They believed that if society took up the burden Roosevelt urged upon it, the existing social order would be overturned in the process. McCormick may have shared these views to some extent, but since I have deliberately simplified (and therefore distorted) the issues here, we can give him the benefit of the doubt by viewing his war against Roosevelt from another angle. Consider the threat that the New Deal posed to McCormick’s vision of America. The New Deal, with its radical restructuring of political and social order, would alter forever the traditional American way of life that the Tribune had championed throughout McCormick’s stewardship. From Gasoline Alley to the U.S.

flag on the front page, the Tribune stood for the values of Horatio Alger—small town life with its promise of success in return for hard work and perseverance. Regardless of the point of view we adopt for assessing McCormick’s politics, it’s not surprising that many thought he dictated Annie’s storylines. But the situation was scarcely as simple as that. While the strip’s political diatribes during the thirties echoed McCormick’s on the editorial pages of the Tribune, they didn’t, for a long time, reflect Patterson’s views, and it was Patterson who ran the Tribune Syndicate and directed the efforts of the cartoonists. With his eye ever on the common working people, Patterson sensed that most of his readers were behind Roosevelt. Moreover, the Socialist instincts of his youth, never fully abandoned, made him sympathetic to the worker’s plight. In the early thirties, the Tribune’s sister paper that Patterson operated in New York, the screaming tabloid Daily News suddenly (and, remarkably, without any change in circulation or financial status) shifted its editorial ground. In a celebrated speech to his staff, Patterson announced, “We’re off on the wrong foot.

The people’s major interest is no longer in the playboy, Broadway and divorces, but in how they’re going to eat, and from this time forward, we’ll pay attention to the struggle for existence that’s just beginning.” Almost alone among major newspaper publishers, the Captain supported Roosevelt and the New Deal. And his support lasted through the thirties—until, in Roosevelt’s lend-lease formula for aid to Britain, Patterson thought he saw the President tipping his hand. Once Patterson, a passionate isolationist and advocate of neutrality, thought Roosevelt intended to get America into the European conflict, he broke with FDR and became as bitter a critic of his policies as McCormick, Patterson’s cousin and partner, had been for nearly a decade. And so was born the McCormick-Patterson Axis—the opposition to Roosevelt by the combined editorial voices of the two largest newspapers in the country’s two largest cities. But from March 1933 (the month Roosevelt was inaugurated for his first term) until December 1940 the cousins disagreed on Roosevelt, and Patterson defended him as passionately as McCormick attacked him viciously.

Meanwhile, Gray’s orphan heroine went somberly about her business—reflecting her creator’s opinions, born of both political conviction and narrative necessity. And they were opinions that found enthusiastic reception among the readers of the day. Even while attacking FDR, Little Orphan Annie addressed profound concerns among its readers. The events of the Great Depression unfolded gradually: the world did not collapse overnight. And as the economic institutions slowly crumbled, one after another, the dominant emotion among the population was fear—fear that an entire way of life, the American way, was falling apart. Gray’s strip addressed and assuaged that fear. Annie’s adventures proved again and again that the historic American ethic of hard work was not bankrupt and that capitalism could still work. Readers were reassured and comforted. Annie (and Gray) joined the homefront war effort during World War II. Annie blew up a German u-boat offshore and organized the Junior Commandos to collect tons of newspapers, scrap metal and other recyclable materials used in the manufacture of munitions and other implements of war. And then all of a sudden, Gray’s politics became more overt. What began as a storyteller’s stance morphed into a conservative’s protest.

When Roosevelt was nominated for a fourth term in the summer of 1944, Gray had endured enough: he symbolized his feeling that FDR’s policies would be the death of the country by having “Daddy” Warbucks die. On his deathbed, Warbucks complains and explains: “Some have called me a dirty capitalist, but I’ve merely used the imagination and common sense and energy that kind providence gave me. Now? Well, Annie, times have changed, and I’m old and tired. I guess it’s time to go.” Warbucks simply couldn’t survive in FDR’s welfare state. But after Roosevelt died the next spring, Gray brought Warbucks back to life. As Warbucks put it: “Somehow I feel that the climate here has changed since I went away. We’ll see….” GRAY’S POLITICS—or, perhaps more accurately, his cultural convictions—proved to be the spark that ignited his storytelling. And no one else would combine similar elements to successfully continue Annie.

When Gray died in 1968, the strip was assigned first to his assistant, Tex Blaisdell, and then to David Lettick, who made a regrettable attempt to revive Gray’s earliest Annie, the younger, cuter one; but their Annie was an anemic shadow of Gray’s. The syndicate discontinued their effort in 1974 and went to reruns of Gray classics. But after the 1977 success of “Annie,” the Broadway musical based on the strip, the syndicate resurrected the feature in 1979, turning it over to veteran comic strip storyteller Leonard Starr, who, by then, had retired his own comic strip, Mary Perkins, On Stage—a beautifully, realistically illustrated and well-told adventure/human interest continuity. The revitalized strip was renamed Annie to foster associations with the musical, and Starr skillfully revamped the look of the strip, retaining the essential appearance of the characters and hints of the brooding atmosphere of Gray’s effort but producing visuals that were crisp and modern-looking. Starr’s Annie was a successful endeavor, but it wasn’t infused with Gray’s passion. It was thoroughly professional but emotionless.

When Starr retired in 2000, TMS (Tribune Media Services, the new incarnation of the old Tribune Syndicate) turned the writing of the strip over to a New York Daily News staffer with a penchant for comics history, Jay Maeder. The drawing was initially done by comic book veteran Andrew Pepoy, but it was a lot of drawing and very little money compared to what Pepoy could earn drawing comic books; he left after a year or so, and Alan Kupperberg took over until 2004, when Ted Slampyak assumed the drawingboard chores. He drew the last Annie strip for June 13 release. Commenting about the end of the strip to Larry McShane at the Daily News, Slampyak said: “It’s kind of painful—almost like mourning the loss of a friend.” Maeder’s stories veered away from Annie more often than not, featuring Oliver Warbucks as an adventuring entrepreneur and patriot—“a sort of buff, Clive Owen-type,” saith Steve Tippie, TMS vice president for licensing. Maeder introduced several new supporting cast members, some of whom would run away with the strip for weeks on end.

The most attractive of these was the woman pilot, Amelia Santiago, who, in action and name, was worthy of her own comic strip. I had the sense sometimes that Maeder’s stories never actually ended: they scrambled through one threatening menace after another but then turned a corner into a new series of threats and menaces before quite resolving the previous conjuration. It was a page-turner without end—a continuous cliff-hanger. Nothing wrong with that: daily continuity strips are, almost by definition, prolonged cliff-hangers. But most of them end stories; Maeder’s Annie never seemed to. Gray’s strip had inspired a radio show, the first late-afternoon serial for young listeners; it debuted in 1930 and continued until April 1942. Hollywood produced movie versions, and Annie merchandise flooded the marketplace from time-to-time. The 1977 musical, which is performed over and over again across America by community theaters that pay fees for the privilege, has been “an annuity” for the syndicate, according to Tippie, interviewed by Phil Rosenthal at the Chicago Tribune. And TMS isn’t likely to forget the orphan’s revenue-generating potential.

As the strip approached its discontinuation, it was being published in less than 20 newspapers; it could scarcely yield enough income to support its writer-artist team. Not even the Tribune was running the strip, once one of the paper’s biggest attractions. Strangely, with Tippie as our source, TMS doesn’t seem to know why the strip has slipped in popularity. Officials are blaming the generally straitened circumstances in the newspaper business: the last few years, Tippie said, the strip has targeted young readers (instead of adults who are the biggest segment of comic strip readers?), and young readers don’t buy or read newspapers. Tippie and his cohorts may be confused about who reads their features, but they are not confused about potential revenue sources. In the last panel of the last strip, we see Daddy Warbucks, who, for all practical purposes, has displaced Annie as the chief protagonist, brooding uncertainly about what happened to Annie in her latest run-in with the Butcher of the Balkans. “And, leapin’ lizards, what about her dog Sandy?” asks Rosenthal.

It’s a cliff-hanger, a Maeder specialty—“actually a show of faith that there’s still life in the old gal,” says Rosenthal. And then he quotes Tippie: “Annie is definitely not dying,” Tippie says. “She will definitely have a life beyond this newspaper incarnation. The daily newspaper strip will go away. Now, that doesn’t mean that Annie won’t come back—whether in comic books, graphic novels, in print or electronic media. It’s just too rich a vein not to mine,” he concluded. All that’s lacking is the prospector who discovered and developed the vein of gold 86 years before. By way of saying a fond farewell to the auburn-haired orphan, here are a couple glimpses of the less grim and brooding aspect of cartoonist Gray’s vision. In these visuals, we see that Gray had a sense of humor, a laudably perverse one, at least about such intimate matters as Annie’s eyeballs and her perpetually red dress.

(I hand-colored one of these visual aids; alas, the only copy I had was a smeary black-and-white.) FILED UNDER: Harold Gray , Leonard Starr 9 Responses to The Orphan’s Epic Little Orphan Annie Home Page Reprinted with the Author's Permission From the collection of Richard Olson In 1924, a comic strip artist named Harold Gray created a new comic strip for Captain Patterson's New York Daily News. It was called Little Orphan Otto, and was one of the better ideas he had come up with. Patterson thought it looked like a good concept: the little orphan, not tied to any one location but free to roam from place to place and through various adventures without the hampering presence of a family. But, he counseled Gray: "He looks like a pansy. Put skirts on the kid." (Marschall 166) Gray complied, and changed the name from "Otto" to "Annie." Thus Little Orphan Annie was brought into the world on August 5, 1924 and continued successfully until Gray's death in 1968.

For 44 years, readers followed Annie through a myriad of adventures that could be as simple as staying at a farm to outwitting Nazi infiltrators. Annie stayed perpetually twelve years old, endowed with the wisdom of the ages and the innocence of eternal childhood. Harold Gray, Annie's creator, had very definite political views on society, government, and human nature. He was ultra-conservative, and had no compunction about airing his views and philosophies in Annie's adventures. He made quite a few enemies in doing so, but the enduring popularity of Annie indicates that there was an essential spark in the character of Annie that spoke to American society, whatever Gray's politics might have been. Annie was, and always shall be, one of the quintessential American heroes: a seemingly weak little girl, who had the ability to endure hardship and uncertainty with hope and hard work and strength of character. The fact that Little Orphan Annie was able to run successfully from 1924 until Gray's death in 1968, and then have a remarkably successful revival in reruns and in musical form is more proof that she is a part of American heroic mythology of the 20th century.

To understand better the importance of a character like Annie, it is a good idea to break down the format of her presentation to the bare bones: The comic strip is composed of certain irreducible elements: a succession of panels (in contrast to the single panel cartoon); a story that is told (not a vignette illustration); a written language enclosed in dialogue "balloons" and placed within the image frame, serving somehow a visual as well as narrative function; presentation through mass media; and a distinctive new vocabulary. (Marschall 9) This seems rather static, but when you consider how comic strip artists of the early 1900s transcended this definition and went beyond to create an intensely American cultural mythology that grew on a daily basis, out of an allowance of three to four small squares, then the development of the American comic strip becomes all the more wonderful and miraculous. Although comic strips were developed with children in mind, "funnies" were usually drawn for adults. (Marschall 13) As early as the American Revolution, the adult nature of cartoons can be seen.

Benjamin Franklin's cartoon of the severed snake with its motto, "Join or Die" is worth remembering when we consider the role that cartoons can play in a society that may be at war. Franklin was exhorting the colonies to hold together, and typically through the 19th century, cartoons were political and extremely partisan in nature. (Marschall 12) Even as comic strips changed and developed after the turn of the century, their power to comment on politics and even war remained strong, a power Gray was able to capitalize on. Little Orphan Annie came into the rapidly developing Comic Strip scene at an opportune moment. The audience was interested, the medium of the newspaper was willing, and Gray was able. However, his abilities as a storyteller and artist were not so readily apparent in the beginning. His style has been described as stilted, bland, and visually dull. But in retrospect, critics have described Gray as the comic expressionist-his art has a mood of "overall, and overwhelming, tension," with "deliberate figures and frozen backgrounds." (Marschall 173) One of the biggest points of conflict between critics and fans has been the oval, open eyes of Gray's characters.

Richard Marschall contends: ...Gray infused the circlets with subtle expression and made much of little...the famous eyes were symbols of the bleak space they observed and in which Gray placed his characters in a spirit of foredoom... (168) It is rather depressing to consider that Gray felt that Annie's world was so perilous and so very dark. Nevertheless, in reading Annie's adventures, where situations are grim and Annie's circumstances grimmer, there is a wonderfully encouraging sense that somehow she will get through it, through her own willpower, hard work, and the kindness of strangers. Indeed, the kindness of strangers is a constant element in Annie's adventures: she arrives in a small town/big city and is without resources/money/strength/ friends, and inevitably, some kind people take her in and make her a part of their home. August 31, 1932 This incessant charity in some measure overcomes the starkness of Gray's artistic style, and creates a comic strip with both tension and gentleness. Little Orphan Annie is essentially a melodrama.

As Annie developed, Gray's art cleaned up and his style coalesced, and "gone were the stories of the 1920s in which Annie befriended baby bears and miniature elephants and briefly became a movie star; in the 1930s she met smugglers, avaricious plutocrats, and venal labor agitators." (Marschall 168). Gray had become a story teller of the first order in comic strips. But his change in style was with America. The Great Depression had come, and he used Annie to air his views on life, responsibility, government, and human nature. Gray belonged to the old school of American philosophy, which included the Protestant work ethic and "mind-your-own-business." (Marschall 168) He believed that with a fair chance, anyone could pull himself up by his own bootstraps, and Annie was expected to do so on the average of 2-3 times a year. Why was Annie alone and forced to take care of herself so very often?

"Daddy" Warbucks, her semi-adoptive parent (I say semi, because he never did adopt her - she would no longer be a "Little Orphan" if he had), although a caring and concerned guardian, had business dealings and various battles to fight all over the world. To his credit, he usually tried to leave her in the care of a good school or personal friends, but inevitably, Annie fell into danger and had to go out on the road. July 2, 1937 It was her very vulnerability in these situations that made her efforts to make a place for herself in some community all the more interesting and heroic. Take for example, one of her adventures in the early 1930s. On route to a boarding school while "Daddy" is away, Annie finds that the school is really a reformatory, (unbeknownst to "Daddy") and escapes from the woman in charge of her. She and her dog Sandy journey for a few weeks, hiding in woods and sleeping under trees until she feels safe from capture. She picks as her new home a small town called Cosmic City, and after going from house to house looking for work or board, is invited in by Mr.

and Mrs. Futile, the poorest family in town. She sets in to work with a cheerful will, helping do housework, going to school and catching up on missed lessons, getting a job as a newspaper delivery girl, and starting a small newspaper and novelty store (which she turns over to Mr. Futile, who cannot find work). November 16, 1932 She essentially manages to improve the financial situation of the Futiles, restore their self-respect, rescue a small boy from drowning, and thwart the evil intents of the town rich man, Phineas Pinchpenny. Annie was to follow this model of building up herself and those close to her for many more adventures; a pattern that never palls. As World War II approached, Little Orphan Annie began to enter a more international stage. In 1938 and 39, Annie began to deal with smugglers and spies and other threatening characters whose vague plans for world domination were uneasily similar to those of Hitler. Gray was not alone in his preparation for war - other cartoonists began taking definite stands as well.

As the war began in 1941, cartoonists began to make their own contributions to the war effort, by bolstering G. I. confidence and strengthening morale on the home front. (Couperie 83) Series like Terry and the Pirates, Dick Tracy, and Joe Palooka all entered the war - Terry stopped fighting Far Eastern villains and started flying fighter planes, Joe Palooka also went to war, and Dick Tracy rooted out spy rings in the U. S. In Little Orphan Annie, "Daddy", Punjab, and the Asp return in May of 1942 from some remote locale where they have been fighting for the Allies. "Daddy" has become a 3-star lieutenant general, although as Annie notices, he is not in an U. S. uniform.

"Daddy" explains: "Oh--well, you see, Annie, I got in a little ahead of schedule--after all, we're all out to lick the same gang.": May 4, 1942 We never are told exactly where he has been, or who he has been fighting with, but in his typical style, "Daddy", with the voice of Gray, has used his power for good-as far as he is concerned, "If he uses his power only for good, why look too closely into the matter?" (Little Orphan Annie March 8, 1941) This strain of enlightened despotism flows throughout all of Little Orphan Annie, and is one of the disquieting aspects of the comic strip. Punjab and the Asp have to be frequently reprimanded (but not too harshly) for removing Warbucks' enemies from the scene. They are totally devoted to Warbucks and Annie, and are very good at ferreting out villains, but their lack of reliance on the justice system and the police adds to the tension of the strip. Having established this aspect of Warbucks' character, it is easy to see why he would enter the war before America!

Less than two weeks later Warbucks sets off again to "do his part" - his own way," and Annie stays behind in the household of Dr. Zee. But Gray had no intention of leaving her idle as the war surrounded them: "Don't they re'lize we can't win this thing till we all get in there an' pitch? Even we kids!" May 16, 1942 Her first mission is dramatic enough for any child on the home front longing for a real adventure. She and her friend Panda find a hidden U-boat in a nearby cove, and manage to drag a floating mine to dash against the hull and blow it up. But perhaps realizing that U-boats did not usually lie in coves around the U. S. coastline, Gray launched Annie into the Junior Commandos, her greatest endeavor for the war effort. Some of the children around town wonder why Annie and her friend Loretta never take time to play with them anymore, assuming that they are just odd. But Annie responds to their teasing: Loretta an' I have somethin' lots more important than playin', we're doin' war work.

It's our war, just as much-or maybe more-than anybody else's. We're givin' all we can to help those who are givin' ever'thing for us! (Smith 48-49) June 15, 1942 And the Junior Commandos were launched: their purpose, to aid the war effort. "Scrap collection--carin' for war workers' kids--savin' fats--anti-noise patrols--sellin' war stamps an' bonds--runnin' errands--doin' odd jobs--all to raise money to buy more bonds..." (Little Orphan Annie January 6, 1943) Nothing was too big to tackle, no task too menial or exhausting. Gray intended for JCs to be very serious and "starched"-"`Colonel' Annie as she came to call herself-kept a ledger with the name of every person in town written in it," (Smith 49) and by each name a mark was made.

If they gave metal, they got a blue star; if they hired a JC, a red star; and if they did not even try to do anything, they were doomed to a yellow star. June 23, 1942 Then fiction became reality, and the JCs were put into practice in real life-within a month of its comic strip introduction in June of 1942, the Junior Commandos were "one of the most successful domestic operations of the war." (Smith 49) By the fall of that year, there were "close to 20,000 JCs enrolled and filed under localities throughout Metropolitan Boston" alone! (Smith 50) The idea for the JCs had gone into practice in the real world, but back on the comics page, Annie's work was not done. Unable to stay long in any place, Annie is invited to a huge Spanish castle in a town called Riverside by a friend of Warbucks, so that she might see her "Daddy" again when he got leave. What she does not know is that the castle has been taken over by Nazi spies who are using the huge underwater cave under the castle to hide U-boats!

Annie settles in happily, waiting for her "Daddy" to arrive, but begins to notice that all is not as it should be in the castle. But as she keeps her ears and eyes open, and her mouth shut (one of Gray's favorite virtues), she revitalizes the JC group that had grown lax in Riverside. She becomes their "Colonel" and drills them back into shape. January 28, 1943 This proved to be a great help, for in snooping around the castle, Annie finds hidden passageways and discovers that the real owner of the castle and his staff are imprisoned in the long-forgotten torture chambers. She and her JC companions formulate a plan to release the prisoners and overthrow the Nazi spies. With great cunning and ingenuity, she and her friends capture most of the spies and release Malcolm Mitt, the owner of the castle and the bearer of the most amazing set of whiskers ever seen on a comics page. The JCs fade into the background, and the adults go to work, luring the hidden U-boats into the caverns, removing their crews, and sending the boats out again to explode in open water.

This particular adventure went on for 7 months, from January 4 to July 31, 1943. In later adventures and new locales, even in the midst of danger, Annie kept in touch with her JCs. She was famous as their founder, and would step in at a moment's notice and whip them into shape. They were to be ready for anything. Within a week of their initial inception, Annie had commandeered a woodshed for a headquarters and taken to organizing and giving orders quite naturally, a talent she learned from her "Daddy". A qualified leader and a tireless worker, Annie made the greatest sacrifices of anyone in her troop for the war effort. In the town of Gooneyville, Annie starts a JC group, but when she realizes that each JC is doing the work of three people, goes out to actively recruit the children who live on the other side of the tracks in Limbo Lake. Their scorn is daunting, but when she knocks down a bully, they instantly respect her and get into the war effort full time.

September 4, 1943 But eventually Annie left the thriving JCs behind and went on to new tasks - it is during this time that Gray's own political ideology became even more evident, and he lost a great deal of the popularity he gained in the formation of the JCs. Taking potshots at what he perceived as government corruption, (Smith 51) Gray had a run-in with his local ration board, which would not allow him the gas coupons he required to go out driving around to look for new material for Annie. He took this as a slight, and in Annie's adventures in Gooneyville he created a Local Ration Board headed up by "Fred Flask" who had a double standard, driving his three cars around town. August 16, 1943 Public outrage at this whining on Gray's part was almost immediate, and Gray dropped the sequence. But other aspects of American government that Gray did not like, such as FDR, were alluded to more subtly. In 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was reelected to his 4th term, and Gray could hardly bear it.

In desperation, he decided that his alter ego, "Daddy" Warbucks, could not live in this poisonous Rooseveltean era. Warbucks returns from another one of his mysterious missions, but it is evident that all is not well with him, and Annie begins to worry. But Warbucks is not afraid of dying - he speaks confidently about going into death: "No one is ever in a hurry to make the final journey. But I'm as ready as I'll ever be...I've lived my life according to my time and my generation... probably it's time for me to go!" August 17, 1944 This veiled reference to his discontent with the present administration is stretched over several weeks - Mrs. Hold, who cares for him at the end admits to Annie: "Ahem...yes, that fever can be pretty bad stuff, you know..." (see Little Orphan Annie August 4, 1944) and "Some kinds of weather are worse than others for his fever..." (see Little Orphan Annie August 12, 1944). Warbucks died on August 20, 1944.

But then FDR died, and Gray set to literally dancing on his grave by resurrecting Warbucks with malicious comments on how the climate had changed. (Smith, 63) August 28, 1945 Eventually the war came to an end, and Annie and "Daddy" went on to other adventures, although after outwitting Nazi spies and working for the war effort, Annie's later adventures seem to lack some of the vitality and excitement of the war years. Annie continued on her way, making a difference in the lives of the people around her, thwarting evil intent, and helping the underdog. However Annie was not, as has been so incorrectly portrayed in the musical Annie, a boundless optimist. She knew what she could expect from people, both good and bad. Educated by her experiences and her "Daddy," Annie was too wise to ever rest on her laurels. She continued working to improve wherever she went.

In March of 1943, Coronet magazine pronounced Annie "more of a heroine than Joan of Arc, more tragic and appealing than Helen of Troy, and far more real than the current glamour girl to 50,000 people of assorted sizes and shapes and of all ages." (Smith 50) Coronet declared that Little Orphan Annie had gone from being a "comic strip" to a "cosmic strip". (Smith 51) It was her vulnerability, combined with her practical/hopeful philosophy that made her as appealing as she was to the American public. She was the model American: resourceful, clever, generous, self-sufficient and ambitious. She had a shield of invulnerability, partially due to the medium in which she was presented (Gray would hardly kill her off) but also due to her unfailing energy and basic belief in her own abilities and talents to take care of herself that made her stronger than most adults. Annie was a child, yet it was believable that she could develop and organize an enormous organization of children to aid in the war effort on the home front. She was only twelve years old, but it was conceivable that she could uncover a nest of Nazi spies and outwit them.

She was a little girl with no parents, no last name, and no protection from the cruel world, yet she had the ability to bring out the best in the people around her, cross class barriers, and create lasting friendships within every society she passed through. Like Odysseus or Aeneas, she was sentenced to wander eternally, (Marschall 177) but we are made the richer for it. Bibliography Couperie, Pierre et al. A History of the Comic Strip. New York: Crown Publishers, 1968. Gray, Harold. Arf! The Life and Hard Times of Little Orphan Annie, 1935-1945. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1970. Marschall, Richard. America's Great Comic Strip Artists. New York: Abbeville Press, 1989. Smith, Bruce. The History of Little Orphan Annie. New York: Ballantine Books, 1982.

Question: What was the original name of the orphan created in 1924 by cartoonist Harold Gray in the comic strip we know as Little Orphan Annie?
Answer: Otto