Vintage Chi-Trib Funnies (Comic Chronicles)
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The Chicago Tribune ran a piece by Rick Kogan over Memorial Day weekend
remembering the Chicago Tribune comics of the Medill/Patterson/McCormick era.
above: Chicago Tribune Sunday funnies 1898
Patterson helped create and nourish, among many other strips, “The Gumps,” “Gasoline Alley,” “Moon Mullins” and “Terry and the Pirates.” He was energetically hands-on, offering advice, coaching artists and coming up with ideas to promote the strips. He would regularly assemble his cartoonists to discuss characters and storylines.
“The Gumps” helped to lay the foundation for the Chicago Tribune syndicate which, under various names, was a money-making endeavor that would spread comic strips and other editorial products to newspapers across the world.
Related are anecdotes about The Gumps, Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, and others.
It is not an in-depth look at the Chicago Tribune’s comics.
Bypassed is the 1906 importation of German cartoonists:
While the Chicago Tribune comic strip narratives are faithful
I would caution against taking the introduction as authoritative.
Near the end of the 19th century, many newspapers featured drawings and cartoons but these did not feature recurring characters. The first such American newspaper comic strip characters were born in 1895 when Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World published “Hogan’s Alley,” which featured a character named “The Yellow Kid,” a gap-toothed, jug-eared urchin dressed in a nightshirt.
There were earlier cartoon characters in newspapers before Mickey Dugan. James Swinnerton’s Little Bears in San Francisco, and in Chicago itself the Inter-Ocean’s The Ting Ling Kids by Charles Saalburg appeared pre-Yellow Kid. Professor Simple and Professor Tigwissel, comic strips by Livingston Hopkins, appeared two decades before The Yellow Kid’s appearance.
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