The Complete Little Orphan Annie, Volume One: Will Tomorrow Ever Come? Daily Comics, 1924-1927
It’s the Fourth of July, so on this most American of holidays, it seems meet to discuss that most American of comic strips, Little Orphan Annie, the saga of the tiny, red-haired waif with “a heart of gold and a mean left hook.” Today’s audiences probably know of this famous character mostly from the musical Annie, but the titular heroine originates in Harold Gray’s massive, decades-spanning, immensely popular, and sometimes gritty comic strip in the Chicago Tribune, in which the resourceful orphan regularly tangled with gangsters and occasionally dispensed two-fisted vigilante justice in back-alley brawls.
What we are looking at today is the first volume in a massive anthology produced by the Library of American Comics (LoAC), which has been gathering, restoring, and compiling some of the most iconic comic strips from the twentieth century. At present, the complete anthology of Little Orphan Annie stands at fifteen volumes, and I don’t believe it’s finished even yet. The LoAC collections are published by IDW, a large company with multiple major licenses, including the entire suite of Hasbro comic book spin-offs. At present, IDW is one of the comic book publishers in the process of self-immolating with a combination bad business decisions and political virtue-signalling, but it will, we can hope, be able to continue producing the LoAC anthologies into future if it can get through the slump, or that someone else will pick up the project if IDW goes under.
But enough about that. Let’s talk about Annie. This first volume contains all of the daily strips from 1924 to 1927, many of which have not been published since their original newspaper runs. This volume is an impressive work of archival scholarship: a few of the strips have been digitally reconstructed from moldering newspaper prints, but most have been taken either from syndicate proofs or from the original artwork in the Harold Gray archival collection at Boston University. Aside from an occasional variation in line thickness from one strip to the next, which may (or may not) be due to the sources from which the strips were taken, the reader will not notice any problems with reproduction quality.
This volume is luxurious, but also, for that reason, decidedly unwieldy. The book measures nine inches high and eleven and a half inches wide, with over 300 pages. The copy I am using for this review does not appear to have seen much wear, but it is already separating from its binding. It is also quite difficult, because of its dimensions, to read casually. You would practically have to purchase a book cradle to peruse it in comfort. But so it goes; I wouldn’t change the book’s dimensions if I could, since they are ideal for the content (though I would certainly improve the binding).
In addition to the reproduced strips, the book contains three essays in the front matter and a brief index in the back. The first essay is an “editor’s note,” which briefly describes the restoration process and thanks the archivists and institutions who assisted with the project. Following that, editor Dean Mullaney in “The Era of Wonderful Nonsense” briefly frames the early Annie strips in their historical setting. Jeet Heer then presents a more extensive essay outlining Harold Gray’s life and times, as well as discussing some of the precedents in newspaper comics on which Little Orphan Annie built. These essays appear to me to be reasonably scholarly and even-handed, though designed to be accessible to the lay reader.
My biggest complaint about the book is that it does not reproduce more than a handful of the colorized Sunday strips. A few Sunday strips are used to illustrate Heer’s biography of Gray, and eight are presented because they advance the story told through the daily strips, but the rest of the Sunday strips from this period are excluded. Personally, I would have much preferred if the Sunday strips were interspersed with the dailies to keep the presentation chronological, though that would undoubtedly have greatly increased both the size and the price of this book. I am assuming (or hoping) that all of the missing Sundays are to be presented in a later volume.
As for the comic itself, a review seems almost superfluous; its influence and popularity are both established, and if you’re like me, you read a volume like this more for its importance than for pleasure. Nonetheless, we can say a few things.
It’s worth pointing out that the artwork and presentation might be alienating to a present-day audience, though Heer does a good job of contextualizing and explaining it. Gray was a member of what Heer calls the “Midwest School” of comics, which preferred a minimalist presentation light on action and heavy on text. Annie was immediately influenced by Gray’s mentor, John McCutcheon, and by Sidney Smith’s The Gumps. Although no longer a household name, The Gumps was the most popular strip in America in its day. The strips of the Midwest School tended to focus on more extensive storytelling and less on gags. Thus, it’s common for panels in Little Orphan Annie to contain a paragraph of dialogue, and most strips do not even have what could be called a punchline. In its melodramatic depictions of daily life, Little Orphan Annie also owes much to Charles Dickens.
Although Gray would eventually indulge in extensive and complex storytelling, the writing in the strips from 1924 to 1927 are more uneven and probably involved less pre-planning. Although punctuated by exciting narratives, the saga in these years tends to stagnate for long periods between Annie’s adventures.
The story opens with Annie, a young, curly-haired girl of uncertain age and no last name, trapped at an orphanage known simply as the “Home.” She knows nothing of her parents, and is constantly terrorized by the Home’s crotchety caretaker, Miss Asthma, who seems bent on demoralizing Annie by constantly reminding her of her lack of a pedigree and her consequent lack of prospects for adoption.
Annie’s dire situation looks likely to change with the arrival of the obscenely wealthy Mrs. Warbucks, a social climber who likes to perform public acts of charity for the prestige it can bring her. She takes Annie “on trial,” apparently for the purpose of getting praise from her friends for caring for orphans, but with the intent of returning Annie to the Home after she’s finished parading her around.
Mrs. Warbucks’s plan is derailed by the return from overseas of her husband, the bald-domed curmudgeon Oliver Warbucks. Warbucks made his first fortune by gouging the federal government in munitions sales during the Great War, and is now a billionaire with international holdings in multiple industries.
Having started as a humble machinist, and somewhat tormented by the unscrupulous way he made his start as a businessman, Warbucks is gruff but noble and generous, having never forgotten his roots. He is still a man of plebian tastes, feeding on enormous meals of sauerkraut and pigs’ feet, using coarse language, and walking around in his suspenders with a pipe dangling from his mouth. Disgusted with his wife’s dishonest use of Annie, he decides to take the girl on permanently and insists that she call him “Daddy.” He quickly finds in her a kindred spirit, and she becomes his (sometimes literal) partner in crime.
According to Jeet Heer, Gray had arguments with Captain Joseph Patterson, who ran the Tribune, over what Annie’s fate was to be. Patterson wanted Annie to stay with Daddy Warbucks, but Gray considered Annie’s orphan-hood to be an indispensable part of her character—and Gray’s storytelling instincts seem to have been right in this, as it’s when Daddy Warbucks is around that the story tends to flag.
Although it would seem that Annie should be on easy street once a powerful billionaire has become her patron, Gray always finds ways to take Daddy out of the picture and put Annie in fresh trouble. Daddy leaves on a business trip, which gives Mrs. Warbucks opportunity to return Annie to the Home, where Miss Asthma unscrupulously rents her out for slave labor. Daddy gets her back, but Annie runs away in the hopes of ending the Warbucks’ marital strife. Daddy goes oversees and gives Annie to a guardian who is supposed to enroll her in private school, but who instead squanders Warbucks’s money on personal luxuries. Annie wanders homeless and ends up staying with struggling farmers and later with a struggling Scottish banker. She adopts a wolflike dog and joins the circus. Wherever Annie goes, eternally a young orphan, she helps good people and punches the lights out of bad people. She leads the police to bank robbers, uncovers gangster plots, springs a wrongfully accused immigrant from prison, survives shoot-outs, and narrowly dodges several attempts at murder or kidnapping.
As she moves from place to place and has adventure after adventure, Daddy Warbucks becomes Annie’s patron saint or deus ex machina, often appearing suddenly to free her from trouble when she’s backed into a corner, but disappearing again soon afterward.
Both Warbucks and Annie seems almost superhuman. Warbucks’s bottomless wealth can move mountains and command miracles. On top of that, he is a man of limitless energy and immense strength, often letting his fists do the talking and at one point punching out a circus strongman and breaking his jaw in three places. Annie is similarly gifted as a pugilist; although she rarely tangles with full-grown adults, she regularly brawls with boys much bigger than she is, and wins handily. Gray was himself a boxer, which might explain the comic’s fixation on fisticuffs.
Although heavy on text by today’s standards, these early Little Orphan Annie strips are engaging, often exciting and sometimes very funny, though the story often sags for long periods between arcs.
Built into the story and sometimes preached in a heavy-handed fashion is a distinctive brand of American idealism, which probably helped to secure the comic’s popularity throughout the country. Whereas Daddy Warbucks is a generous man who cares only about people’s character, the villains in the story are often Old-World Europeans, either literally or spiritually, who care only about family name and give Annie a hard time because she has no known pedigree. Harold Gray was clearly a believer in the American ideal of the “melting pot”: Annie, Daddy, and their kindred spirits repeatedly express American patriotism and the opinion that color and creed count for nothing. Annie helps a family of Italian immigrants out of legal trouble, insists that there is no essential difference between white and black, and even endorses theological universalism (with a touch of anti-clericalism).
Although Jeet Heer, in his biography, describes Gray’s ideals as unusual for his day and age, I think it would be more accurate to say that Gray expresses certain widespread and very American sentiments that were popular even if not universal or consistently practiced. He taps into and distills a particular vision of what America is, the land of opportunity where anyone can get ahead through goodness and hard work regardless of his origins. Thus, Annie’s family name counts for nothing, and Warbucks is the quintessential self-made man. Although, on account of the musical, Annie is today probably best-known for fictitiously inspiring the largest welfare program in American history, these early strips are a celebration of hard work, personal virtue, and pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps.
If Gray’s notions were unique, as Heer claims, his comic would probably not have enjoyed the popularity it did.
