He drew sports cartoons for two years at the
Pittsburgh Post, succeeding
Billy DeBeck, and became that newspaper's political cartoonist in 1910, relocating to the
Harrisburg Patriot in 1914 and the
Newark Star-Eagle in 1917. In 1923, he began his kid strip
Tubby for
United Feature Syndicate, as chronicled by comic strip historian
Allan Holtz: :Doc Winner had a very long career in newspaper comics, the bulk of it spent picking up the pieces on strips that had lost their original creators... The strip was offered by United Feature Syndicate back in the days when they were a tiny outfit with just a few offerings. Later on, of course, United Features would take over all the Pulitzer and Metropolitan strips and become a major name in the syndication business.
Tubby ran from March 19, 1923, to June 5, 1926, according to my best information, and the stock of dailies was then sold to reprint syndicates, so you'll find the strip popping up later as well. Winner's next job, starting just a few months later, was to take over
Just Boy from A. C. Fera, and Winner pretty quickly turned that strip into a continuation of
Tubby. Elmer, the main character of
Just Boy, became all but indistinguishable from the title character of this strip. Following the strip size of the period,
Tubby was drawn five inches high and 19 inches wide. Winner's strip
Elmer, which ran from 1926 to 1956, was based on the friends of his youth, as he recalled, "A great many of the stunts they do are ones we either did or tried to do when we were kids." In the late 1930s, Winner had his own
Sunday page with
Elmer positioned beneath Winner's
Alexander Smart, Esq. and his
Daffy Doodles (subtitled
Dizzy Dramas from Our Readers)
topper. ==King Features==