It's our yearly Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar! This year, the theme is A Comic Strip Christmas! Each day will spotlight a notable comic strip, and at least three Christmas-themed comics from that strip. Today's comic is Little Orphan Annie.
Every day until Christmas Eve, you can click on the current day's Advent Calendar post and it will show the Advent Calendar with the door for that given day opened, and you can see what the "treat" for that day will be! You can click here to see the previous Advent Calendar entries.
The drawing for this year's Advent Calendar, of Santa Claus giving out presents to comic strip kids (although instead of a present for Charlie Brown, his dog, Snoopy, gets a present instead), is by Nick Perks.
Day 18 is now opened (once opened, the door will feature an image from the featured comic strip)...
WHAT WAS LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE?
"Little Orphant Annie" was a popular 1885 poem written by James Whitcomb Riley, who was an extremely popular poet known for his poetry for children. Harold Gray was inspired by the poem to come up with a comic strip about a young orphan. He initially titled the strip, Little Orphan Otto (to differentiate from the famous poem), but an editor told him that he really should go with Annie (just lean into the popular poem). The series began in 1924 in the New York Daily News and was soon syndicated throughout the country as one of the most popular strips around by the 1930s.
The initial setup for the strip was that Annie was, well, you know, an orphan, living in an orphanage, and her various misadventures with her trusted dog, Sandy. Very quickly, though, Mrs. and Mr. Warbucks were introduced to the series. They took Annie in as a ward, and here is where Gray began the classic setup that his strip would follow for a number of years. You see, Mrs. Warbucks only took Annie in to impress her society friends. Her husband, though, "Daddy" Warbucks, legitimately loved Annie. So Daddy Warbucks would leave on business, his wife would then return Annie to the orphanage, she would go on the loose and get caught up in some crazy misadventure, and then Daddy Warbucks would return at just the right moment to save the day (it's sort of the format of Gunsmoke, now that I think about it, with various things happening until Marshal Dillon shows up at the end of the episode to save the day).
In the 1930s, Daddy Warbucks lost his fortune, thus mixing things up by having him AND Annie be down and out. This eventually led to Daddy Warbucks being killed off in 1944 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected for a fourth term as President of the United States. Gray hated FDR, and he basically had Daddy Warbucks suggest that FDR's re-election CAUSED his death. Then, when Roosevelt himself passed away, Warbucks turned out to actually be alive, and just in a coma, but now he was okay! He outright notes in the strip that something has changed, and now he thinks everything will be great. It's so crazy harsh.
As noted, Gray's big issue is that the strip is "Little Orphan Annie," and not "Little Rich Girl Annie," and so he had to keep coming up with reasons why Annie and Warbucks would be separated. Annie suffered amnesia, and was on her own for a few years in the early 1950s. Eventually, Gray passed away in 1968. The strip was kept going by various creators until it basically petered out in 1974, replaced by Gray reruns for years. The success of the Annie Broadway musical, though, led to the Syndicate hiring the great Leonard Starr to revive the strip in 1979. He remained on the series until 2000, when he retired. The strip kept going for a while before shutting down for good in 2010. Dick Tracy later resolved the cliffhanger that the strip ended on, and Annie has become a recurring character in the Dick Tracy strip in recent years.
HOW DID LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE HANDLE CHRISTMAS?
In the early years of the strip, Gray definitely leaned a bit into weak melodrama as opposed to detailed stories, and as such, this early Christmas strip is just basically, "Wow, Christmas is awesome!"
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Gray was one of those guys who really seemed to think that he was the most moral guy around, and Annie strips would often have some HEAVY DUTY moralizing, but Gray was talented enough to make it work, like this early strip where Annie notes that while Christmas is good for her, there are other orphans that need Christmas more than her (Annie was a great little kid)...
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A year or so later, Gray was back to the moralizing for a bit about Annie arguing that Santa Claus exists...
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There was a nice bit where Annie then freaks out about how the chimney in the place she was staying with at the time wasn't big enough for Santa to get into, and hilarity ensued...
As noted, in the early 1950s, Annie went solo, as sort of like a wandering around the country, wandering into plots, like here, where she helped some dude falsely accused...
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There's a good bit in the following week about the importance of Annie's faith...
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A year or so later, Annie was now essentially homeless, but her optimistic spirit made her adapt to the most messed up situation at Christmastime...
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And Annie, of course, being Annie, kept running into people who were interested in helping her...
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Leonard Starr really didn't much Christmas stuff, just, like, a character might say during a story, "Oh, by the way, Merry Christmas!"
Like Chester Gould, Gray would use Annie and Sandy in his Christmas cards. Here's 1942...
1949...
1950...
196...1, I think....
Neat stuff.