I have always maintained, and will always maintain, that comic strips of any era can be considered fine art. There's nothing that separates the art that you see in the newspaper and the art that you see in a museum apart from one being in a frame and one being in print. I feel this opinion of mine is bolstered by the fact there are those who are considered fine artists who also created newspaper comic strips.

Lyonel Feininger certainly deserves the label of fine artist. Born in New York, he was sent to Germany at 16 to study music, but ended up studying art instead. He studied at various art schools in Berlin and Paris. He was affiliated with several German Expressionist groups, including the famous Blue Four, which included himself, Paul Klee, Wassilly Kandinsky, and Alexej von Jawlensky. He helped found the Bauhaus school and was the only person to teach there from its inception all the way until it was forced to close. He worked in several different media, including oil, woodcut, charcoal, and ink, in an art career spanning several decades. One of his paintings, The Green Bridge, even sold at auction in 2001 for an amazing £2.42 million.

Knowing all this, his is obviously not a name anyone would expect to see on a newspaper comic strip. It's a bit of a shock, then, when one realizes that Feininger created two of them.

At the turn of the 20th century, American newspapers would often reprint cartoons and caricatures from European publications, mainly because it was cheap to do so. Erroneously believing that this was done because it was in high demand among the readership, The Chicago Tribune decided that, instead of reprinting, it ought to enlist some European artists and writers to create material for them. Several German magazine cartoonists and illustrators were hired to create both one-off gags as well as some continuing series. Feininger, in order to pay his bills, had been working as a caricaturist in Germany for many years, and was hired by the Tribune along with the other artists.

The two comic strips that he created were "The Kin-Der-Kids," which ran from April to November of 1906, and "Wee Willie Winkie's World," which ran from August of 1906 to January of 1907. "The Kin-Der-Kids" was an adventure story involving some kids, a mechanical boy, and their talking blue dog travelling the world in their bathtub. It's definitely as strange as it sounds, but not nearly as strange as "Wee Willie Winkie's World," which revolved around the titular Willie and the incredibly surreal world that he lived in. In it, everything was alive, and anything that could be given a face and a voice was. This meant that Willie often ended up being the least interesting thing in the strip. The art on both strips is as good as you'd expect, and certainly rivals the other great cartoonists of that time such as Winsor McCay and Richard Outcault.

Unfortunately, due to troubles with the syndicate, both features were cancelled after very short runs. The cancellation wasn't entirely bad for Feininger, however, who shortly afterward began his art career outside of comics. It is interesting to notice, however, how his work in comics influenced his later work, as well as how his previous art training influenced his comics.

For more information:

Lyonel Feininger at Toonopedia

Lyonel Feininger at Comiclopedia

Wee Willie Winkie's World at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum

Lyonel Feininger works at Wikiart

Lyonel Feininger at the Museum of Modern Art

Lyonel Feininger works at the Museum of Modern Art German Expressionism collection

This one might more appropriately be filed under "Unexpected comic strips," as it's a bit of a strange one. While nothing that David Lynch does is necessarily expected, a newspaper comic strip is not the first thing one would imagine a surrealist film and television director might do. Even then, if one tried to imagine of what kind of comic strip said surrealist film and television director might create, I don't think it's likely anything like The Angriest Dog in the World would come to mind.

David Lynch is best known for his movies such as "Eraserhead," "The Elephant Man," "Dune," "Blue Velvet," "Mulholland Drive," and others, as well as his television series "Twin Peaks." Before venturing into film, he originally wanted to be a painter. As such, his films were supposed to be paintings come to life, if such a thing is possible.

In 1983, he decided, for reasons known only to Lynch, to create a comic strip that featured a dog who, according to the caption which accompanied every strip, "...is so angry he cannot move. He cannot eat. He cannot sleep. He can just barely growl. Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis." Each strip then featured four panels, three of which were identical and showed the dog outside being silently angry during the daytime, and the last which was a similar scene showing the dog outside at night. The images were exactly the same in each strip, the only difference being the speech balloons which emanated from inside the house. The dialogue ranged from philosophical observations to bad puns to generally meaningless statements, though I think Lynch believed the idea of the strip was far more interesting than anything that was said in it. The dialogue of those in the house didn't matter as much as the fact that a terminally angry dog was sitting out in their yard being entirely ignored by them.

According to Lynch, the idea came from a time in his life years earlier when he was attempting to work through a large amount of anger. He says that he had originally decided to see a therapist, but that the therapist informed him that therapy would seriously impede his creative process, so he decided against it. He instead discovered and began to rely on transcendental meditation, which he says helped him overcome that anger and allowed him to create his body of work. The strip, then, is a look back at that angry period of his life and the outlook on the world that he had during that time. In a way, it seems that it's supposed to be comedic, but as Lynch put it, "...the humor in the strip is based on the sickness of people's pitiful state of unhappiness and misery." Whether one finds that funny or not is up to personal taste.

The strip only ran in alternative weekly newspapers, most notably the L.A. Reader, for nearly 10 years. This is remarkable, especially given the negative response that most readers had to it. When it began to be published in the Dark Horse anthology Cheval Noir, a letter from an angry reader called it a "useless, idiotic, CON GAME of a strip." Far better strips have run for far less time, though it's possible that someone as popular as David Lynch can get anything published for however long he wants.

For more information:

The Angriest Dog in the World at Toonopedia

David Lynch at Comiclopedia

A selection of strips at The Universe of David Lynch

A further selection at LynchNet

David Lynch at Artsy, which showcases his artwork outside of film

To be fair, this one isn't quite as unexpected as the last three, but the newspaper comic strip he created is obscure enough that I thought it was important to cover.

Dr. Seuss is, of course, mainly known for his work in children's literature, but much like Johnny Gruelle he got his start in cartooning and illustration. He began as a magazine cartoonist, and his cartoons first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and in the humor publication Judge. He also did quite a few advertising illustrations for Standard Oil, NBC, General Electric, and others. His first book, "And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street," was published in 1937. He did quite a lot of political cartooning during World War II, and after the war he would begin his children's book career in earnest. However, in between all of this, for a period of less than a year, he wrote and illustrated a mostly forgotten newspaper comic strip called "Hejji."

Unfortunately, there isn't a lot written about Hejji anywhere, either on the internet or in books. Biographies I've read of Dr. Seuss don't even spend very much time discussing it. It's tragic, because Hejji is beautiful to look at and very fun to read.

The strip began in April 1935 as a Sunday feature, and only ran until June of that year. Hejji, the title character, seems to be some kind of Middle Eastern traveller who arrives in the mysterious land of Baako. While there, he meets the ruler of the land, The Mighty One, and goes on a few adventures with him. While more of an adventure strip than a comedy or gag strip, it does blur the line with its absurd situations, characters, and locations. It would also prove fertile ground for ideas and images that Seuss would use in his later work. It includes some very familiar looking elephants, some turtles stacked on top of each other, and eggs being hatched by those who do not normally do so. The art is in the wonderful style one would expect from Seuss, and his dialogue balloons and lettering add a bubbly flair to it all. It really is a joy to behold.

Beholding it, however, has become a bit difficult. It's never been collected and reprinted by itself, though it does exist in a collection called "The Golden Treasury of Klassic Krazy Kool Kids Komics," though that book is currently out of print. The editor, Craig Yoe, had posted some scans on his website, the blog of the International Team of Comics Historians (ITCH), but that website doesn't seem to exist any longer. Thankfully, you can still take a look using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, which is how I was finally able to do so. The title of the blog post says "Part One," though from what I gather the strips posted there are the entirety of the run. You'll notice that the strip appears to end right in the middle of the story, but it seems that's because King Features Syndicate cancelled the strip quite abruptly. I guess we'll never know what happened.

For more information:

Hejji at Toonopedia

Dr. Seuss at Comiclopedia

Chris Sims writes about Hejji at Comics Alliance

Read Hejji at the ITCH blog, courtesy of the Internet Archive

This one is a bit different from the previous two unexpected creators, because whereas those two were already famous for other things before becoming involved in comic strips, Johnny Gruelle became famous for something else after he had already been working in comic strips for quite a while.

Gruelle is most famous for creating the children's toys Raggedy Ann and Andy, as well as writing and illustrating storybooks to go along with them. He also wrote and illustrated quite a few other children's books that were not related to Raggedy Ann, including a couple collections of fairy tales. Raggedy Ann was created and patented as a doll in 1915, and she first appeared in Gruelle's books and illustrations in 1918. Andy didn't come along until 1920. Previous to this, however, Gruelle had quite the career as a newspaper cartoonist.

Starting in 1903, he worked at the Indianapolis Star doing political cartoons and caricatures. Around this time he also began work at a couple of newspaper syndicates, the World Color Printing Company and the Newspaper Enterprise Association, doing various comic strips. In 1908 and 1909 he worked on the George Herriman strip "Bud Smith" as well as on his own strip "Handy Andy," but those didn't last long. He didn't get his first big break until 1911, when he began working for the New York Herald.

The story goes that the Herald was looking for new talent, and sponsored a contest in order to find it. Reportedly, around 1,500 people entered, and Gruelle won the chance to be the paper's newest cartoonist, as well as a $2,000 cash prize. It's not clear whether this story is entirely true, or was concocted by the newspaper to cover the fact that Gruelle was hired to replace the paper's star cartoonist, Winsor McCay, creator of "Little Nemo in Slumberland." McCay had been hired on by William Randolph Hearst, and was set to leave in April of 1911. It was probably a bit of an embarrassment on the part of the Herald to lose such a great talent, so they needed a suitable replacement. Gruelle began at the paper in late January of that year. There isn't a lot of documented evidence to back up the contest story, but there isn't much at all about how Gruelle originally came to be hired by the Herald, so we can't be sure. The New York Herald was certainly quite a step up from the Indianapolis Star, so those kind of unique circumstances could have helped him get the job by making him more visible to the editors at the Herald. On the other hand, Gruelle had worked enough that he wouldn't necessarily have needed to enter a contest in order to get a job there.

However it happened, the feature that he created for them was called "Mr. Twee Deedle," about a fanciful, sprite-like creature who was friends with two children, Dolly and Dickie. The stories are what you'd expect from a children's tale, and the kind of thing Gruelle would go on to be famous for a few years later. They generally involved fun romps in forested locations, with Twee Deedle always using their adventures to teach the kids something about virtue and good manners. On the whole, there wasn't a whole lot that was interesting about what was going on, but that didn't matter, because the artwork was good enough to hide that fact. It was certainly something meant for children, and most likely ones that couldn't read. If they didn't know what the words meant, they could certainly appreciate the wonderful pictures. Unfortunately, "Mr. Twee Deedle" only lasted from 1911 to about 1914. In 1913, under the pseudonym John Barton, he also did a strip for William Randolph Hearst called The Troubles of the Titmouse Twins, which, strangely, was not about titmouses, but about mice. It only ran for about 5 months in 1913.

It was after this that Gruelle created Raggedy Ann and began mainly writing and drawing children's books. He did later return to newspaper comics in 1929 with a strip simply called "Brutus," which was quite the departure from his previous work. It featured a normal suburban family, who, like most other Americans that year, fell on hard times and dealt with their poverty in hilarious ways. It was very adult, and wasn't what most had come to expect from Gruelle, though it was the kind of thing he had started out doing years ago in Indianapolis. It did end up being his longest running strip, going all the way to 1938 when he died.

For more information:

Johnny Gruelle at Comiclopedia

Mr. Twee Deedle at Toonopedia

Brutus at Toonopedia

A selection of his newspaper strips at Yesterday's Papers

Indianapolitans "as we see 'em" at The Internet Archive, which includes caricatures by Gruelle and others

The story of our next unexpected comic strip creator will probably sound similar in many ways to the one I wrote about Dashiell Hammett. In fact, this post would more appropriately be called "Unexpected Comic Strip Bylines", because although Zane Grey was involved in the production of a comic strip for a short while, his name was used to promote it, as well as other products, for quite a long time after he left.

Zane Grey was best known for writing western novels which generally depicted a romanticized version of the Old West, with larger than life cowboy heroes and noble but savage Native Americans. His books were extremely popular, influenced many writers after him, and were adapted into all different types of media, including radio, film, television, and a comic strip. The comic strip began in 1932, and began as an adaptation of his most popular novel, "Riders of the Purple Sage." Seven of his novels were adapted over the course of its two year run, and while Grey himself did not write any of the words that appear therein, his name always appeared in the byline. The strip itself was never extremely popular, probably because its target audience had either read the books already or would enjoy the books more, or both. By the time the strip ended, there were only a handful of newspapers still running it, and that seemed to be the end of Grey's comic strip career.

That is, until Stephen Slesinger stepped in.

Slesinger was a comic strip producer, and was known for creating comic characters who he would hire others to draw and write. In 1938, he produced another western character, the famous Red Ryder (who I've written about before) with Fred Harman. Before that, though, he created a bit of a different character, Corporal Dave King, who was a Canadian Mountie. Similarly to how King Features Syndicate hired Dashiell Hammett to write Secret Agent X-9 mainly for the name recognition, Slesinger sought out various famous western writers to write his strip, and finally settled on Zane Grey. He called it "King of the Royal Mounted," and it debuted in 1935.

It's not clear that Grey wrote any of the actual captions or dialogue for the strips, but he was certainly involved, at least for the first year or so of publication. Grey's son, Romer Zane Grey, who was a western writer himself as well as an animator, wrote the strips based on story outlines from his father. Grey's involvement ended in 1936, though Slesinger and his son continued collaborating on it for some time after that. Grey died in 1939, and it was soon passed on to other writers and artists, and lasted as a comic strip until 1955. All the while, it carried the name "Zane Grey's King of the Royal Mounted," despite Grey's departure long before. After the strip ended, it even carried that name for years in the Dell comic book series, as well as the various other marketing tie-ins. It was popular in its time, and certainly more popular than the earlier comic strip adaptation of his novels, but it's hard to say whether that's due to the quality of the strip or the name attached to it.

For more information:

The Zane Grey Comic Strip at The Stripper's Guide

King of the Royal Mounted at Toonopedia

Comics Based on Zane Grey Works at Zane Grey's West Society

Vintage King of the Royal Mounted strips at Comics Kingdom

For the most part, comic strips are created by people who are mainly known for creating comic strips. The lay person who is not well-versed in comic strip history may not even know the names of the creators of most of the comic strips they read, and if they do know them they don't know them for anything else. There are, however, some comic strips that were created by people who were famous for other, entirely unrelated things. Sometimes this is because they had a personal interest in creating a comic strip and in doing something different from what they had been doing. Other times it's because a newspaper syndicate wanted a big name in order to promote their new feature.

Such is the case with Dashiell Hammett.

Hammett is mainly known for his novels about hard-boiled detectives (a term supposedly coined by Tad Dorgan) such as The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. If you haven't read him, you certainly know the Humphrey Bogart version of his character Sam Spade from the movies. This was popular stuff in the 20s and 30s, and just like sci-fi adventures, it was beginning to leak over from the pages of pulp magazines onto the newspaper comics page. In 1931, Dick Tracy had begun in The Chicago Tribune, and was the biggest detective adventure comic at the time. After it had run for a few years and its popularity was apparent, King Features Syndicate wanted to have a feature to compete with it, much like they would do soon afterwards when they commissioned Flash Gordon to be created to compete with the Buck Rogers strip. In both cases, they hired Alex Raymond to do the artwork, though he was too obscure a name at the time. They needed a name on the feature that readers would recognize immediately, and thus immediately recognize the strip as a quality feature. They offered the job to Hammett, who, as luck would have it, was looking for new places to publish his work and readily accepted the offer.

The problem, however, was that it seemed King Features also wanted a writer they could control, and that was something Hammett was certainly not. He was used to writing stories about private detectives, which is why they hired him. For some reason, though, King Features really wanted a strip about a secret agent, not a private detective, and in order to reflect this there were substantial rewrites by the syndicate each time Hammett turned in his scripts. Because of this, it was very difficult to tell what exactly Secret Agent X-9 really was. He was a secret agent, but the agency he worked for was never revealed. He was also a private detective, but he only worked as one as a cover for his secret agent job. He acts like a detective and solves murders, yet the police don't seem to know who he is. It all ended up being quite the mess, and Hammett left the strip after less than a year. Raymond left a year after that, though he continued on several other King Features projects, including Flash Gordon, Jungle Jim, and his own comic strip about an actual private detective, Rip Kirby.

Interestingly, Secret Agent X-9 still continued under several other writers and artists for 60 more years, ending in 1996. After Hammett left, X-9 became a full-fledged secret agent. Later on, his name was revealed to be Phil Corrigan, and the name of the strip was even changed to "Secret Agent Corrigan". It was never extremely popular, but it is amazing that even after an incredibly shaky start it had quite a long run.

For more info:

Secret Agent X-9 at Toonopedia

Secret Agent X-9 at Thrilling Detective