Google honored pioneering cartoonist Jackie Ormes with a Google Doodle that tells the story of her career in the style of her newspaper comic strips.
Ormes, who was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Industry Hall of Fame in 2018, was one of the first Black women cartoonists in the United States and the first to be nationally syndicated.
The Google Doodle, drawn by Liz Montague, appears on the anniversary of the Sept. 1, 1945 debut of Patty-Jo 'n' Ginger. The single-panel strip ran until 1956 in the Pittsburgh Courier, a nationally distributed Black newspaper. Patty-Jo 'n' Ginger presented the always-fashionable teen Ginger silently observing the antics of 6-year-old sister Patty-Jo, who made wry observations about society and racism that still resonate in the Black Lives Matter era. Ormes also licensed a fashion doll of Patty-Jo that had an extensive wardrobe.
Ormes, a Pittsburgh native, was a self-taught artist. She began at the Courier as a proofreader, freelance reporter and editor. Her first adventure strip, Torchy Brown in Dixie to Harlem, followed the titular character as she left her Mississippi home to seek fortune in New York as a dancer in the Cotton Club. It ran from 1937 to 1938 and was revived in 1950 as the full-color Torchy in Heartbeats. This version came with a paper doll topper, Torchy Togs.
Ormes' strips all featured strong, independent Black women and girls and dealt with themes of self-reliance, gender inequality, racism, environmental justice and class. Ormes retired in 1956 and died on Dec. 26, 1985.