Little Orphan Annie, Volume 13: Spies and Counter Spies, 1947-1948

Little Orphan Annie: The Complete Daily Comics #13

by Harold Gray

Will "The World's Greatest Cartoonist" get a chance to prove his worth? And if so, will the public take into their hearts an orphan character with the unlikely name of "Little Widget, the Waif"? That may be the least of Annie's worries as she finds herself caught between spies and counterspies in an adventure that reprises the quest for "Daddy" Warbucks' atomic bomb formula! And if that weren't enough, the inscrutable Joe Christmas enters the picture, the mysterious Mr. Am returns, and Annie comes face to face with the man she most likely fears more than any other--the deadly criminal named Axel! Volume Thirteen of The Complete Little Orphan Annie reprints all daily and Sunday strips from January 12, 1947 to August 18, 1948.

296 pages, Hardcover

Published November 15, 2016

About the author

Harold Lincoln Gray was an American newspaper artist and cartoonist.

Gray grew up on a farm near the small town of Chebanse, Illinois. He graduated from Purdue University with a degree in engineering, but as an artist, he was largely self-taught. A former letterer for Sidney Smith on The Gumps, he came up with a strip idea in 1924 for Little Orphan Otto. The title was quickly altered by Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill Patterson to Little Orphan Annie.
By the 1930s this strip had evolved from a crudely-drawn melodrama to a crisply rendered atmospheric story with novelistic plot threads. The dialogue consisted mainly of meditations on Gray's own deeply conservative political philosophy.
Gray sometimes ghosted Little Joe (1933-72), the strip by his assistant (and cousin) Ed Leffingwell which was continued by Ed's brother Robert. Maw Green, a spin-off of Annie was published as a topper to Little Orphan Annie. It mixed vaudeville timing with the same deeply conservative attitudes as Annie.
Harold Gray was a charter member of Lombard Masonic Lodge #1098, A.F. & A.M. in 1923.

Reviews

[Carl Waluconis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This post-WWII Annie volume has some interesting twists. The strips reprinted here provide an informative reflection of American culture; we see the spy paranoia of the Cold War in America at the time of the Soviet Union building. There are a lot more heavy shadows in the art and people, including Annie, lurking in those shadows. Several of the protagonists of the stories are unique. One, named Tik Tok (I'm not sure why), is obviously Harold Gray, the creator of the strip. He satirizes the publishing world of comic strips and even his life as an artist. The other unique character is a small town "Jesus Christ" kind of figure, Joe Christmas. The small-minded inhabitants of the small town, a regular Orphan Annie trope, are out for his blood as he works to build an honest community. Gray no doubt felt he was pushing against the kinds of small minds who wanted to censor his work. The startling cover of the book, a great Gray graphic, is a panel that offended many readers, but truly it is one of the only violent panels. The "evil evil Axel" returns to round out the stories, which forces us to notice that without Daddy Warbucks or "his men", such as Punjab to suddenly and secretly strike at a villain, Annie would probably be killed. This device at times makes the plots feel forced. One more oddity in this volume, the most shocking for me, is that between June, 1947, and December, 1947, Annie is drawn with dots or pupils in her otherwise empty-oval eyes. I have never read any commentary on this, and I have no idea why Gray did it, but it made me realize how much I was used to Gray's brilliantly stylized depictions. The people in his strip seem like they are people versions of animal crackers. I don't think the dots in the eyes worked, and I guess neither did Harold Gray. They were gone by 1948. It's great to have these slices of American culture and story-telling preserved completely and handsomely without having to search old newspapers for them.

[Dominick · Rating 4 out of 5]

More dandy, polemical comics from Harold Gray. In some ways the first story her,e of the cartoonist Tik Tok, is the most interesting, if the least adventurous--no spies or murder for weeks, though when the violence does start, it gets pretty impressive (some was in fact censored when initilaly published). Weeks of continuit,y though, focus on Tik Tok's burgeoning career as a cartoonist, which pretty clearly parallels Gray's own story in many respects, so the semi-autobiographical elements give the sequence a bit of an edge. As usual, Gray does not do well with endings (Tik Tok and new wife fly off on their honeymoon only to crash and--possibly--never be seen again; Punjab turns up out of nowhere to rescue Annie, then disappears; Mr Am turns up out of nowhere to rescue Joe Christmas, then disappears, etc). As usual, as well, his politics are (strange as it may seem) all too clear and all too muddled. On the one hand, his valorization of capitalism and hard work over anything even remotely smacking of socialism or (horrors!) communism--the biggest badies here are more commies--is as clear as ever. On the other, he really doesn't have a handle on how to reconcile his supposed belief in the American way of doing things and the rule of law with the essentially vigilantist actions of Warbucks and company. He condemns mob violence, but endorses vigilante justice, but he waffles on that by making Warbucks object to Punjab taking matters into his own hands but then having Punjab do so anyway. Whether Gray himself was not clear on how he felt about law and the justice system (skeptical at best, it would seem, given how rarely it works effectively in his world), or just wanted to get away with vigilantism by giving lip service to the rule of law is not clear. Regardless, Gray's comics are always master classes in mood and melodrama; few do it better.