Many thanks to the following individuals for commenting on earlier drafts of this essay: Jeremy Bonner, Mary Beth Fraser, Kathy Fuller-Seeley, Gary Gerstle, William Graebner, Steve Kane, Christopher Kauffman, Timothy Meagher, Roy Rosenzweig, Joan Shelley Rubin, Kathleen Trainor, and Mark I. West. Special thanks to Ian Lewis Gordon, whose work on cartoons and cogent advice significantly shaped my findings and understanding of cartoon history in general.

1. Little Orphan Annie, 09 15–23, 1945Google ScholarPubMed, in The Best of the Tribune Co. Featuring Little Orphan Annie (Toronto: Dragon Lady, 04 1986), 7–10Google Scholar.

2. Ibid., 7–10.

3. On the comic-book controversy of the 1940s, see Gordon, Ian, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 136–37Google Scholar; Wright, Bradford W., Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), ch. 4Google Scholar. On fears of juvenile delinquency in the 1940s, see Gilbert, James, A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), ch. 2Google Scholar; and Palladino, Grace, Teenagers: An American History (New York: Basic, 1996), ch. 6Google Scholar. On comic books and their critics from the 1930s to the present, see Nyberg, Amy Kiste, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998)Google Scholar.

4. Gordon, , Comic Strips, ch. 6Google Scholar. Statistics on youth comic-book reading are from Tuttle, William Jr, “Daddy's Gone to War”: The Second World War in the Lives of America's Children (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 158Google Scholar; Pustz, Matthew, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 26–27Google Scholar; and Wright, , Comic Book Nation, 57, 31Google Scholar.

5. Blum, John Morton, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1976), ch. 1, pp. 36–37Google Scholar; quote, 52. On the OWI, see also, Roeder, George, The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War Two (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

6. “Captain America” became Marvel Comics' best-selling title and most popular character, Wright notes. Not only did the title sell close to a million copies a month throughout the war, but Captain American had his own fan club, the “Sentinels of Liberty” (Wright, , Comic Book Nation, 35–36Google Scholar).

7. Ibid., 43.

8. Roeder, , Censored War, 4Google Scholar; and Gerstle, Gary, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 204–10Google Scholar.

9. Wright, , Comic Book Nation, 35Google Scholar.

10. Harold Gray to R. B. Chandler, August 8, 1942, Harold Gray Papers, box 32, folder 2, Special Collections, Boston University, Boston.

11. George Lipsitz organizes national transformations in behavior and collective memory into three main stages: “The first involved the establishment and codification of commercialized leisure from the invention of the telegraph to the 1890s. The second involved the transition from Victorian to consumer-hedonist values between 1890 and 1945. The third and most important stage, from World War II to the present, involved extraordinary expansion in both the distribution of consumer purchasing power and in the reach and scope of the electronic mass media.” Little Orphan Annie ran from 1924 until 1968, but the strip is best seen as representative of the second stage, wherein Americans shed Victorian behaviors such as thrift, denial, and sobriety in favor of consumerist behaviors such as material acquisitiveness and enjoyment of commercialized leisure. As Lipsitz notes, such a period of transition was heavy with contradiction, as Americans mourned the loss of past values, yet willingly embraced the new hedonism as well (see Lipsitz, , Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990], 11–12Google Scholar). Little Orphan Annie expresses these contradictions over and over again, both celebrating modern acquisitiveness and championing traditional values.

12. Gordon, , Comic Strips, 6Google Scholar.

13. McCloud, Scott, Understanding Comics, the Invisible Art (New York: Kitchen Sink, 1993), 141–50Google Scholar

14. Gordon finds that comic strips had consistently high readerships across the country, Between 1939 and 1959, in cities with populations under fifty thousand, between 53 percent and 94 percent of men, and between 50 percent and 92 percent of women, read comics. In cities of over five hundred thousand, between 60 percent and 91 percent of men, and 58 percent to 86 percent of women, read comic strips. Nowhere in the country did the median of comic-strip readership fall below 75 percent. In 1924, the percentage of comic-book readers between eight and sixteen years old never fell below 84 percent (see Gordon, , Comic Strips, 88–89, 86Google Scholar).

15. Duis, Perry R., “No Time for Privacy: World War II and Chicago's Families,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness During World War II, ed. Erenberg, Lewis A. and Hirsch, Susan E. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 17–45Google Scholar.

16. OWI official quote in Bird, William L. Jr and Rubenstein, Harry R., eds., Design for Victory: World War Two Posters on the American Home Front (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 11Google Scholar.

17. McCloud, , Understanding Comics, 30, 41–42Google Scholar. On the importance of audience reception in understand U.S. popular culture generally, see Lipsitz, , Time Passages, ch. 1Google Scholar.

18. On wartime posters, see Bird and Rubenstein, Design for Victory.

19. Gordon, , Comic Strips, ch. 3Google Scholar; and Nyberg, , Seal of Approval, 4Google Scholar.

20. Harvey, Robert C., with contributions by Brian Walker and Richard V. West, Children of the Yellow Kid: The Evolution of the American Comic Strip (Seattle: Frye Art Museum, 1998), 69, 70–112Google Scholar. On Patterson, see also Waugh, Coulton, The Comics (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1947), 81–83Google Scholar, passim; and Smith, Bruce, The History of Little Orphan Annie (New York: Ballantine, 1982), ch. 2Google Scholar.

21. In 1894–96, Joseph Pulitzer (New York World) and William Randolph Hearst (New York Journal) battled for readers by borrowing comics from the weekly humor magazines and selling them in full-color Sunday supplements. One of the more conspicuous battles between the two publishers took place over a cartoon that came to be known as The Yellow Kid because of main character Mickey Dugan's bright yellow nightshirt. When the cartoon became a popular feature of the New York World by 1896, Hearst lured its creator, Richard Felton Outcault, from the Pulitzer paper to do the cartoon for the Journal. Observers of the contest began calling the rival newspapers “the Yellow Kid journals” or “the yellow journals.” Soon, the yellow label would be broadly applied to the style of writing characterizing the two papers during the great Hearst-Pulitzer newspaper circulation wars (see Harvey, , Children of the Yellow Kid, 19–20Google Scholar).

22. Gordon, , Comic Strips, 14–15, 24, 35–36Google Scholar.

23. Harvey, , Children of the Yellow Kid, 69–78Google Scholar; and Gordon, , Comic Strips, 107Google Scholar.

24. Harvey, , Children of the Yellow Kid, 98Google Scholar. See Gordon for analysis of Gasoline Alley as a vehicle for the introduction of various commodities to Americans. Gordon notes that the success of these serious continuity strips facilitated the rise of comic strips as part of the everyday lives of Americans. As such, they became venues for introducing Americans to a wide range of commodities, from cars to kitchen mixers (Gordon, , Comic Strips, 108–18 and ch. 5Google Scholar.

25. Browning, Norma Lee, “America's Favorite Comic Kid,” Chicago Tribune, 10 20, 1946, Harold Gray Papers, box 32Google Scholar.

26. That Orphan Annie was open to multiple interpretations was crucial to its endurance as popular culture. As George Lipsitz observes in his work on American popular culture, “Consumers of popular culture move in and out of subject positions in a way that allows the same message to have widely varying meanings at the point of reception” (see Lipsitz, , Time Passages, 13Google Scholar).

27. Little Orphan Annie, 02 3, 1941Google ScholarPubMed, February 7, 1941, February 26, 1941, and March 12, 1941, in Gray, Harold, The Life and Hard Times of Little Orphan Annie, 1939–1945 (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1970)Google Scholar. Most of Gray's strip titles were either clichés or plays on clichés. Although the above examples are outright clichés, an example of a play on the cliché was “Memory Line,” the title of the February 24, 1941, strip.

28. Goulart, Ron, ed., The Encyclopedia of American Comics (New York: Facts on File, 1990), 156–57Google Scholar.

29. Smith, , History of Little Orphan Annie, on Gray, 7–9, 18Google Scholar; Robinson, Jerry, The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1974)Google Scholar; and Harvey, Robert C., The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994)Google Scholar.

30. Coulton Waugh alluded to the appeal of this “everywhere/nowhere” quality in 1947 when he wrote that Annie “has no home. That's just it. The fans provide a home for her in their hearts” (Waugh, , The Comics, 82–83Google Scholar). See also “5,000 Roller Skate Winners in My Island-naming Contest,” ca. 1930s, Warshaw Collection, no. 60, Cartoons box 1, folder 11, Smithsonian Museum of American History Archives, Washington, D.C.

31. Waugh, , The Comics, 83Google Scholar.

32. McCloud, , Understanding Comics, 31Google Scholar. Gordon's account of Richard Felton Outcault's late-19th-century Yellow Kid underscores the complexity of comic-strip stereotypes. The Yellow Kid, aka Mickey Dugan, was Irish, but was so often taken for Chinese that Outcault used the visit of a Chinese dignitary to New York City (the Yellow Kid's playground) to clarify that his character was not Chinese. Hence, “the Yellow kid's meaning and reception often slipped from his creator's control” (see Gordon, , Comic Strips, 29–31Google Scholar).

33. “5,000 Roller Skate Winners.”

34. Smith, , History of Little Orphan Annie, 23, 43–44Google Scholar, and photo section. Film reviewer quoted in Smith (44).

35. Recurring cartoon characters were forged in their creators' desire for profit, and the cast of Little Orphan Annie was no exception. The earliest recurring cartoon characters, like Richard Felton Outcault's Yellow Kid and, more successfully, Buster Brown, set a pattern that would be followed again and again in comic-strip history. From the late 19th century, entrepreneurs, as Gordon shows, quickly grasped the potential profits to be made from reproducing characters on everything from chewing-gum wrappers to clothing (see Gordon, , Comic Strips, chs. 1 and 2Google Scholar; and Smith, , History of Little Orphan Annie, 42Google Scholar).

36. “Radio Programs,” Baltimore Evening Sun, 1938Google Scholar; and Dunning, John, Little Orphan Annie, in Tune in Yesterday: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio, 1925–1976 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1976), 365–66Google Scholar.

37. Roland Marchand makes this observation in his study of the formative years of mass advertising in the United States: “In content and technique, American advertisements can be said to have become ‘modern’ precisely to the extent to which they transcended or denied their essential economic nature as mass communications and achieved subjective qualities and a ‘personal’ tone.” Ironically, advertisements of the 1930s and 1940s borrowed the comic-strip sequential narrative format in order to present their products in ways that projected this personal tone (see Marchand, , Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985], 9Google Scholar; see also pages 110–16 for a look at advertising and the comic-strip format in the 1930s).

38. Harvey, , Children of the Yellow Kid, 139Google Scholar.

39. Smith, , History of Little Orphan Annie, on Gray, 7–9Google Scholar, and, on the Bleating-Harts, 60–61. On Gray's politics, also see Goulart, , Encyclopedia of American Comics, 156–57Google Scholar; Robinson, The Comics; Harvey, Art of the Funnies; and Gray, Harold, Little Orphan Annie, in Best of the Tribune Co., September 3, 1945-February 2, 1946 (Toronto: Dragon Lady, 1986)Google Scholar. On “democratic” and “traditionalist” Americanisms, see Gerstle, Gary, Working-class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 9–11Google Scholar.

40. Smith, , History of Little Orphan Annie, 60Google Scholar.

41. Gray, , Life and Hard Times, 08 18, 1944Google Scholar.

42. Emphasis in the original (ibid., August 28, 1945, and August 30, 1945). Despite such attacks on the nation's leader, however, Gray's patriotism remained untarnished for many of his wartime readers. In 1941, for example, he was offered “Life Membership in the United States Flag Association.” The Flag Association celebrated Gray's support for “the educational work of spreading among our people a better understanding and deeper appreciation of the ideals and institutions of American Democracy, thereby stimulating patriotism and promoting national unity, thus helping to neutralize anti-American subversion and perpetuate this great Republic of ours” (Life Membership in the United States Flag Association certificate, March 28, 1941, Harold Gray Papers, publicity book, box 7).

43. Brinkley, Alan, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage, 1996)Google Scholar.

44. The Secret Guard coat of arms superimposed the organization's logo (a youth handshake flanked by the initials “SG”) on a U.S. flag (Gray, Harold, The Adventures of Little Orphan Annie Quaker Giveaway, 1941Google Scholar). On radio Annie's popularity and marketing, see also “5,000 Roller Skate Winners.”

45. On the transformation of home-front culture, see Blum, V Was for Victory; Erenberg and Hirsch, War in American Culture; Koppes, and Black, , Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War Two Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and Samuel, Lawrence, Pledging Allegiance: American Identity and the Bond Drive of World War II (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997)Google Scholar. On comics during the war years, see Gordon, , Comic Strips, ch. 6Google Scholar; and Wright, , Comic Book Nation, ch. 2Google Scholar. On youth and the war, see Tuttle, “Daddy's Gone to War”; Gilbert, Cycle of Outrage; and Palladino, , Teenagers, chs. 4–6Google Scholar.

46. As Gordon shows, it would be a mistake to see all merchandise inspired by a comic strip as secondary to the strip, as strips could spawn new products that gained a life a their own. See especially his discussion of Buster Brown in Comic Strips (ch. 2).

47. Little Orphan Annie, Baltimore Sunday Sun, comics section, 06 7, 1942Google ScholarPubMed. Creator Harold Gray, would seem a prophet when the United States sunk a real German U-boat off the United States Coast a few months later.

48. Little Orphan Annie, Baltimore Sunday Sun, 06 14, 1942Google ScholarPubMed; emphasis in the original.

49. Smith, quoted from an article in Editor & Publisher in History of Little Orphan Annie (50)Google Scholar.

50. Little Orphan Annie, Baltimore Sun, 10 11, 1942Google ScholarPubMed.

51. Sabra Holbrook to Harold Gray, August 3, 1942, and other letters praising Gray for the Junior Commandos: Harold Gray Papers, box 32, folder 2; and Little Orphan Annie, 12 27, 1942Google ScholarPubMed.

52. Tuttle, , Daddy's Gone to War, 123Google Scholar.

53. Tom Grourock, “Why I Am a Commando,” and Victor Schlotterback, “Why I Am a Commando,” Harold Gray Papers, box 32, folder 2.

54. Press release from Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, August 6, 1942; and letter from M. Slott to Harold Gray, August 7, 1942,” Harold Gray Papers, box 32, folder 2.

55. Little Orphan Annie, Baltimore Sunday Sun, 01 18, 1942Google ScholarPubMed, July 26, 1942, June 28, 1942, June 21, 1942, and Tuesday, August 4, 1942. See also Harold Gray to R. B. Chandler, August 8, 1942, Harold Gray Papers, box 32, folder 2.

56. Little Orphan Annie, Baltimore Sunday Sun, 09 6, 1942Google ScholarPubMed, November 22, 1942, and August 2, 1942.

57. On the deliberate attempts to include European Americans and African Americans in wartime drives, see Samuel, Pledging Allegiance. See also Gerstle, , American Crucible, ch. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58. Little Orphan Annie, in Sunday Sun, 08 2, 1942Google ScholarPubMed.

59. Holbrook to Gray, August 3, 1942; Private Robert Mitchell to Harold Gray, August 2, 1942; Benzell Graham to Harold Gray, August 5, 1942; Arthur Wright to Harold Gray, September 10, 1942; and Elsie Winslow to Harold Gray, August 4, 1942, Harold Gray Papers, Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, folder 2.

60. Chandler to Gray, August 13, 1942, Gray Papers, box 32, folder 2. Indeed, the radicalism of including George in the strip is suggested by the racism blatantly exhibited in the contemporary classified section of the Baltimore Sun, one paper in which it appeared. The same newspaper in which “Sergeant George” integrated the Junior Commandos explicitly specified preference for “white” or “colored” applicants in its employment listings (see Sun, August 1942).

61. Gray to Chandler, August 8, 1942; and Chandler to Gray August 13, 1942, Gray Papers, box 32, folder 2.

62. See panels for August 3, 1942, Gray Papers, panels, 1942.

63. Henry Crawford to Harold Gray, October 28, 1942, Gray Papers, box 32, folder 2.

64. Circulation figures in Baltimore Evening Sun, 12 17, 1942, 33Google Scholar. Williams, Harold A., The Baltimore Sun, 1837–1987 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 253Google Scholar. After November 1942, government paper regulations forced the paper to limit both national advertising and circulation. By 1944, advertising outside the Baltimore retail market disappeared altogether, and driving restrictions forced route owners to distribute the paper by bicycle or foot, limiting circulation and making the paper more local.

65. Inge, M. Thomas, ed., Handbook of American Popular Culture, vol. 1: Comic Art, by M. Thomas Inge (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1978), 77–102, 80–81Google Scholar.

66. Bess Naviasky interviewed by Maria Mazzenga, May 8, 1995.

67. Carolyn O'Donnell Fleiner interviewed by Maria Mazzenga, March 24, 1995 and March 4, 1998. See also Ed Kane interviewed by Maria Mazzenga, January 15, 1995, and March 4, 1998.

68. “Leapin' Lizards! Baltimore Has Own Junior Commandos,” Baltimore Sun, 10 15, 1942Google Scholar.

69. Little Orphan Annie, Baltimore Sunday Sun, 06 21, 1942Google ScholarPubMed; and “Leapin' Lizards.” The city neighborhood in which Bill's Junior Commandos performed contained an almost entirely Jewish population, partly because covenants restricted Jews from living in other parts of the city.

70. “Leapin'Lizards!”

71. Quote from Smith, , History of Little Orphan Annie, 42Google Scholar.

72. Kane interviews.

73. O'Donnell Fleiner interviews and Kane interviews.

74. Kane interviews.

75. Kane interviews.

76. Kane interviews.

77. On postwar criticisms that Little Orphan Annie was too violent, see Smith, , History of Little Orphan Annie, 68Google Scholar.

78. Nyberg, , Seal of Approval, 18Google Scholar.

79. Wright, , Comic Book Nation, 93Google Scholar.

80. Gilbert, , Cycle of Outrage, ch. 2Google Scholar.