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