Freckles and His Friends

In May 1915, 23-year-old Merrill Blosser began working for the Chicago syndicate Newspaper Enterprise Association, initially drawing cartoons based on news events. That summer he began drawing five comics features. One of these, titled Freckles, began as a one-column daily gag panel on August 16, 1915. that expanded into a full comic strip and was retitled Freckles and His Friends on September 20, 1915. The daily strip gained readers through the 1920s and into the 1930s when a Sunday strip was added on December 31, 1933. By 1939, according to Editor & Publisher, the Sunday strip was published in 130 newspapers, while the daily strip appeared in more than 500 papers. ==Characters and story==

When Blosser began the strip in 1915, he simply devised daily gags and problems for his child character Freckles to encounter while wandering around the fictional town of Shadyside. At the time, Freckles wore short pants and long stockings. As Freckles aged, the strip introduced more jokes in family situations, eventually expanding into a continuity storyline about the teenage Freckles' day-to-day life with his friends. The one-a-day gag strip evolved into adventure stories in the 1920s. In 1927, when readers were told to submit names for a horse, Blosser was overwhelmed with 24,000 responses. Freckles began wearing knickers in 1928. When Freckles and His Friends was dropped by a newspaper in 1929, the paper received thousands of phone calls, cards and letters, plus a petition from the employees of the newspaper, prompting a return of the strip to the comics page. By 1939, Freckles was 17 years old, a high school senior and the captain of Shadyside High's football team. Most of his time was spent hanging out with his girlfriend June and his pal Lard, who was often in the company of his girlfriend, Hilda. Freckles' younger brother, Tagalong, aka Tag, also made appearances. ==Shadyside==

Although Shadyside could have been located anywhere in the American heartland, it was obviously based on Blosser's hometown of Nappanee, Indiana, since Blosser often referenced real places in Nappanee, such as Johnson's Drug Store. Nappanee holds the distinction of having the longest city name in the United States containing each letter in its name twice, and six successful cartoonists lived in Nappanee as children, including Fred Neher (Life’s Like That) and Bill Holman (Smokey Stover). In the 1940s, Freckles and His Friends carried a topper strip, Hector. By 1945, the strip was carried in 580 daily and 158 Sunday newspapers. At its peak, Freckles and His Friends was syndicated to more than 700 papers. and then four issues published by Argo Comics in the mid-1950s. Blosser married shortly after he drew the earliest Freckles and His Friends strips. For years, the couple lived in Cleveland, where the NEA office was located, until they moved to Los Angeles and then to the Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia. After his first few decades of doing the strip, Blosser shared the work of producing the daily and Sunday strips with his assistant Henry Formhals, who took over the daily in 1938. When Blosser retired, Formhals produced it alone from 1966 to 1971. The strip was discontinued on August 28, 1971. ==Awards==

In September 1945, with the 30th anniversary of Freckles and His Friends, Blosser was the guest of honor in Los Angeles at a testimonial dinner attended by his personal friends, radio personalities, film stars and executives of the Los Angeles News. ==See also==