After
World War I, cartoonist
Harold Gray joined the
Chicago Tribune which, at that time, was being reworked by owner
Joseph Medill Patterson into an important national journal. As part of his plan, Patterson wanted to publish comic strips that would lend themselves to nationwide
syndication and to film and radio adaptations. Gray's strips were consistently rejected by Patterson, but
Little Orphan Annie was finally accepted and debuted in a test run on August 5, 1924, in the New York
Daily News, a
Tribune-owned
tabloid. Reader response was positive, and
Annie began appearing as a
Sunday strip in the
Tribune on November 2 and as a
daily strip on November 10. It was soon offered for syndication and picked up by the
Toronto Star and
The Atlanta Constitution. Gray reported in 1952 that Annie's origin lay in a chance meeting he had with a ragamuffin while wandering the streets of Chicago looking for cartooning ideas. "I talked to this little kid and liked her right away", Gray said. "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." In designing the strip, Gray was influenced by his midwestern farm boyhood,
Victorian poetry and novels such as
Charles Dickens's
Great Expectations,
Sidney Smith's wildly popular comic strip
The Gumps, and the histrionics of the silent films and melodramas of the period. Initially, there was no continuity between the
dailies and the
Sunday strips, but by the early 1930s the two had become one.
1929 to World War II Gray was little affected by the
stock market crash of 1929. The strip was more popular than ever and brought him a good income, which was only enhanced when the strip became the basis for a radio program in 1930 and two films in 1932 and 1938. Unsurprisingly, Gray was mocked by some for his strip's lecturing to the poor on hard work, initiative, and motivation, while still enjoying his successful lifestyle. Starting January 4, 1931, Gray added a
topper strip to the
Little Orphan Annie Sunday page called
Private Life Of... The strip chose a common object each week like potatoes, hats and baseballs, and told their "stories". That idea ran for two years, ending on Christmas Day, 1932. A new three-panel gag strip about an elderly lady,
Maw Green, began on January 1, 1933, and ran along the bottom of the Sunday page until 1973. In 1935, Punjab, a gigantic, sword-wielding, beturbaned Indian, was introduced to the strip and became one of its iconic characters. Whereas Annie's adventures up to the point of Punjab's appearance were realistic and believable, her adventures following his introduction touched upon the supernatural, the cosmic, and the fantastic. In November 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president and proposed his New Deal. Many, including Gray, saw this and other programs as government interference in private enterprise. Gray railed against Roosevelt and his programs. (Gray even seemingly killed Daddy Warbucks off in 1944, but following FDR's death in 1945, Gray brought back Warbucks, who said to Annie, "Somehow I feel that the climate here has changed since I went away", suggesting that Warbucks could not coexist in the world with FDR.) Annie's life was complicated not only by thugs and gangsters but also by New Deal do-gooders and bureaucrats. Organized labor was feared by businessmen and Gray took the businessmen's side. Some writers and editors took issue with this strip's criticisms of FDR's New Deal and 1930s labor unionism.
The New Republic described
Annie as "
Hooverism in the Funnies", arguing that Gray's strip was defending utility company bosses then being investigated by the government. The
Herald Dispatch of
Huntington, West Virginia, stopped running
Little Orphan Annie, printing a front-page editorial rebuking Gray's politics. A subsequent
New Republic editorial praised the paper's move, and
The Nation likewise voiced its support. In the late 1920s, the strip had taken on a more adult and adventurous feel with Annie encountering killers, gangsters, spies, and saboteurs. It was about this time that Gray, whose politics seem to have been broadly
conservative and
libertarian with a decided
populist streak, introduced some of his more controversial storylines. He would look into the darker aspects of human nature, such as greed and treachery. The gap between rich and poor was an important theme. His hostility toward
labor unions was dramatized in the 1935 story "Eonite". Other targets were the
New Deal,
communism, and corrupt businessmen. Gray was especially critical of the justice system, which he saw as not doing enough to deal with criminals. Thus, some of his storylines featured people taking the law into their own hands. This happened as early as 1927 in an adventure named "The Haunted House". Annie is kidnapped by a gangster called Mister Mack. Warbucks rescues her and takes Mack and his gang into custody. He then contacts a local
Senator who owes him a favor. Warbucks persuades the politician to use his influence with the judge and make sure that the trial goes their way and that Mack and his men get their
just deserts. Annie questions the use of such methods but concludes it is necessary to counteract criminals manipulating the justice system in their own way. Warbucks became much more ruthless in later years. After catching yet another gang of Annie kidnappers, he announced that he "wouldn't think of troubling the police with you boys", implying that while he and Annie celebrated their reunion, the Asp and his men took the kidnappers away to be
lynched. In another Sunday strip, published during
World War II, a war-profiteer expresses the hope that the conflict would last another 20 years. An outraged member of the public physically assaults the man for his opinion, claiming revenge for his two sons who have already been killed in the fighting. When a passing policeman is about to intervene, Annie talks him out of it, suggesting, "It's better some times to let folks settle some questions by what you might call
democratic processes."
World War II and Annie's Junior Commandos As war clouds gathered, both the Chicago
Tribune and the New York
Daily News advocated neutrality; "Daddy" Warbucks, however, was gleefully manufacturing tanks, planes, and munitions. Journalist James Edward Vlamos deplored the loss of fantasy, innocence, and humor in the "funnies", and took to task one of Gray's sequences about espionage, noting that the "fate of the nation" rested on "Annie's frail shoulders". Vlamos advised readers to "Stick to the saner world of war and horror on the front pages." Twenty thousand Junior Commandos were reportedly registered in Boston. Not all was rosy for Gray, however. His application for extra gas coupons was denied by the
Office of Price Administration, as cartoonists were not deemed essential to the war effort. Gray appealed, but the decision was upheld. Furious, Gray used the strip to criticize the government's decision as well as the clerk who made the original denial, whom he thinly caricatured in the strip. This storyline was controversial, with both sides garnering criticism in local papers. The clerk eventually threatened to sue for libel, and some papers cancelled the strip. Gray showed no remorse, but did discontinue the sequence. Following the success of the
Broadway musical Annie, the strip was resurrected on December 9, 1979, as
Annie, written and drawn by
Leonard Starr. At the time of the cancellation announcement, it was running in fewer than 20 newspapers, some of which, such as the New York
Daily News, had carried the strip for its entire life. The final cartoonist,
Ted Slampyak, said, "It's kind of painful. It's almost like mourning the loss of a friend." The last strip was the culmination of a story arc where Annie was kidnapped from her hotel by a wanted war criminal from eastern Europe who checked in under a phony name with a fake passport. Although Warbucks enlists the help of the FBI and Interpol to find her, by the end of the final strip he has begun to resign himself to the very strong possibility that Annie most likely will not be found alive. Unfortunately, Warbucks is unaware that Annie is still alive and has made her way to Guatemala with her captor, known simply as the "Butcher of the Balkans". Although Annie wants to be let go, the Butcher tells her that he neither will let her go nor kill her—for fear of being captured and because he will not kill a child despite his many political killings—and adds that she has a new life now with him. The final panel of the strip reads "And this is where we leave our Annie. For Now—". Since the cancellation, rerun strips have been running on the GoComics site.
Final resolution: Warbucks calls on Dick Tracy In 2013, the team behind
Dick Tracy began a story line that would permanently resolve the fate of Annie. The week of June 10, 2013, featured several
Annie characters in extended cameos complete with dialogue, including Warbucks, the Asp and Punjab. On June 16, Warbucks implies that Annie is still missing and that he might even enlist Tracy's help in finding her. Asp and Punjab appeared again on March 26, 2014. The caption says that these events will soon impact on the detective. The storyline resumed on June 8, 2014, with Warbucks asking for Tracy's assistance in finding Annie. In the course of the story, Tracy receives a letter from Annie and determines her location. Meanwhile, the name of the kidnapper is revealed as Henrik Wilemse, and he has been tracked to the city where he is found and made to disappear. Tracy and Warbucks rescued Annie, and the storyline wrapped up on October 12. Annie again visited Dick Tracy, visiting his granddaughter Honeymoon Tracy, starting June 6, 2015. This arc concluded September 26, 2015 with Dick Tracy sending the girls home from a crime scene to keep them out of the news. A third appearance of Annie and her supporting cast in Dick Tracy's strip began on May 16, 2019, and involves both B-B Eyes' murder and doubts about the fate of Trixie. The arc also establishes that Warbucks has
formally adopted Annie, as opposed to being just his ward. ==Adaptations==