From the endpapers of Little Orphan Annie: Volume One, Will Tomorrow Ever Come, 1924-1927. Photo by yours truly.
First, a little bit about this project. I've loved comics as a form since I can remember, whether it was the Archie comics I grew up eyeing at supermarket checkout stands and getting by mail, or the superhero comics my cousin taught me all about. When I interned at The Atlantic a while back, I talked Sage Stossel, herself a very witty cartoonist, into letting me write a retrospective of the magazine's coverage of the comics over the years. While I'd vaguely known the political history of the comics, mostly centering on Seduction of the Innocent and the Congressional outburst of indignation over comics content, I hadn't really understood the critical history of the form. I found myself particularly enjoying one of the pieces I reviewed "The Humor of the Colored Supplement" (a reference to ink, not race), whose author, Ralph Bergengren, tied himself in knots complaining about a form that was clearly winning him over even as he wrote. More recently, Jeet Heer, who has been writing introductions for the Little Orphan Annie series being published by IDW, was kind enough to have his publisher send me a huge pile of the Annie books and several other series. So a couple of nights a week, I'll be reporting in on 60 or so strips. I hope some of you will join me in reading!
Visually, far and away the most striking thing about the early Annie strips is how text-heavy they are. Harold Gray, Annie's creator, relies on small details of architecture and furniture to sketch in the scenes while leaving him plenty of space for the speech bubbles. Those details are beautifully detailed, whether it's a fuzzy dog dripping all over the floor after a forcible bath from Annie, or the print on a living-room table lamp. That dedication to speech lets Gray accomplish two things: first, to give Annie a unique voice through lots of crazy expression: "Sufferin' Scissorbills!" may be my favorite so far. And that text lets Gray lay out a marked philosophy of the comics on several key points.
First, it's amazing how quickly Gray established Little Orphan Annie as self-conscious fairytale. In the strip published on August 11, 1924, one of the orphanage trustees, the kindly Mr. Bingle, arrives to tell the girls the story of Cinderella. His choice provokes a stern rebuke afterwards from the orphanage proprietress, Miss Asthma, who tells Annie "Mr. Bingle is a very fine man, but foolish stories like that are not good for children in my opinion--now you march right up to bed and get that fairy stuff out of your head. It's all poppy-cock."
Second, it's clear that Annie herself thinks of her orphaned state sort of as an unalterable moral condition. Mrs. Warbucks, who takes her home on a "trial" basis frequently refers to her actions as "doing something for charity"--Annie's less a person than a project to be taken on. The discovery that Annie had parents at one point is shocking to her; it's not clear where Annie thinks she emerged from, but it's certainly by a different route than other little girls. But she hopes that she'll be given a chance to redeem herself. In her evening prayers at the end of the first four-panel strip, Annie asks God to "please make me a real good little girl so some nice people will adopt me." She's literally seeking a chance at transfiguration, but one that she's willing to work for--her first reaction to the Warbucks home is how many floors there are to scrub.
And Gray immediately establishes Annie's affinity with the man who will become Daddy Warbucks: "Annie doesn't need charity," he declares six panels after he first encounters his adopted daughter, carrying her off as his wife glares a literal dagger at Annie. "Just give her an even break and she'll do the rest--charity!!--BAH!"