FDR was certainly on the mind of Little Orphan Annie’s creator, cartoonist Harold Gray, during the 1924–68 run of the strip. He despised FDR and let his comic’s estimated thirty million daily readers know it. Liberals attacked Gray, not only for his views but also for expressing any serious opinion in the comics, a pivotal moment in moving “the funnies” onto more mature ground. In a nice bit of election-year timing, IDW debuts its multivolume Complete Little Orphan Annie, with Will Tomorrow Ever Come? ($40), which covers 1924 to 1927. (Volume 2, The Darkest Hour Is Just Before the Dawn, arrives in October.) This maiden volume gives us a chance to reappraise Gray, one of the most controversial cartoonists of his generation—and, via his career, American conservatism. For as modern conservatism struggles to define itself—if the Bush era’s big-spending, government-empowering, internationally crusading GOP can be called conservative—Gray’s strip about a little orphan girl in a cold, cruel world is the story of where that movement, and modern graphic literature, began.
Harold Lincoln Gray was born January 20, 1894, on his parents’ farm in Kankakee, Illinois, and grew up idolizing his namesake, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. He worked on the farm until he entered Purdue, and dug ditches to pay the bills. Graduating in 1917, he taught bayoneting in World War I and returned to Illinois to seek work in his chosen field, cartooning. In 1920, he landed a job assisting the Chicago Tribune’s star cartoonist, Sidney Smith. It put Gray on the front lines of a comics revolution. The funnies, at thirty years old, trafficked in comedy and fantasy, with talking animals, wisecracking goofs, and junior sociopaths like the Katzenjammer Kids. With Smith’s family comedy, The Gumps, the Tribune pioneered book-length story lines (serialized daily), cliffhangers, and realistic characterization. Like postwar movies, which were expanding from shorts to features, the medium’s novelty had worn off, and fans wanted something more.
Thus, in 1924, Gray offered Little Orphan Annie as a radical departure—a serious, often bleak drama. Annie suffers in Miss Asthma’s orphanage, beaten and hired out as labor. When the social-climbing Mrs. Warbucks adopts her, it’s to impress Society with her charitable nature. But seven weeks in, Daddy Warbucks appears and is smitten by Annie’s pluck. As his name indicates, he’s a war profiteer, dealing in arms, mercenaries (“my wrecking crew”), big-money political fixes, and wreaking vengeance on enemies with his own bare hands—a comic-strip complement to There Will Be Blood’s ruthless tycoon, Daniel Plainview.