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In the roaring '20s, the family comics came along. Such respectable folk as the Gumps neither played the stock market nor swilled bathtub gin; it was probably no accident that Andy Gump was chinless. Blondie began life as a sharp-tongued flapper, but she soon settled down to suburban housewifely routine and is still the most widely read strip.* Little Orphan Annie veered from the family pattern since she lacked parents. But Daddy Warbucks, a billionaire arms manufacturer, has more than made up for their absence. With his help, ageless Annie has plowed under no end of evildoers while issuing a steady stream of far-right propaganda attacking everything from the New Deal to modern psychiatry.
Thwarted Love. In the 1930s, the once funny comics grew ever more solemn. Dick Tracy introduced blood and bullets that had long been taboo, plus an assortment of grotesquely drawn but weirdly fascinating hoods: Prune Face, Fly Face, No Face. In Terry and the Pirates, Milton Caniff soon replaced the pirates with the Japanese—Terry was the first comic strip to go to war. Later Caniff gave up the youthful Terry for the more mature Steve Canyon, a seat-of-the-pants pilot who fights the battles of the Air Force so effectively that Caniff was once denounced by a Congressman as a highly paid military lobbyist.
Among others, Joe Palooka has survived 34 years as a world heavyweight boxing champion with nary a scar to show for it on his boyish face. Buck Rogers, the spaceman who confronted atom bombs as early as 1939, no longer plies the interplanetary routes. But Flash Gordon still zips through space at supersonic speed on the trail of highflying gangsters, while Prince Valiant moves at a snail's pace through meticulously drawn medieval sagas. And the whole idiom has been parodied by Li'I Abner, in which a collection of bulbous-nosed, ham-handed hillbillies makes monkeys out of assorted stuffed shirts-judges, politicians, business tycoons—who are unlucky enough to stumble upon the idyllic world of Dogpatch. The grandmummy of soap-opera strips, Mary Worth, who evolved from a seedy apple seller to today's genteel gadabout, has spawned innumerable imitators: Brenda Starr (girl reporter), Dondi (boy orphan), On Stage (actress), Apartment 3-G (career girls). Along with soap, Rex Morgan, M.D. dispenses medical advice on everything from leprosy to euthanasia.
During all the years of solemnity, one strip provided an antidote of sophisticated wit, and all the modern humor strips are in its debt. George Herriman's Krazy Kat, which ran from 1910 until its creator's death in 1944, rarely strayed from the established routine: Krazy, a thwarted idealist like Charlie Brown, loves the mouse Ignatz, but Ignatz is so incensed at this unnatural love from a cat that he hurls a brick at her; whereupon he is carted off to jail by the guardian of law and order, Offissa Pupp. Herriman injected so much poetry into his guileless strip that it was regarded by many as high art and even made into a ballet.