The Complete Little Orphan Annie: Volume 7, 1936-38:
The Omnipotent Mr. Am!
By Harold Gray
Edited by Dean Mullaney
296 8.5x11-inch landscape pages
b/w dailies and color Sundays
IDW hardcover
$49.99
Reprinting from October 1, 1936 to June 8, 1938, this volume of IDW’s massive Library of American Comics includes the most fantastical Annie adventure of all — her visit, squired by her fabulously wealthy stepfather Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks, to the jungle hideout of Mr. Am, an other-worldly being with a Santa Claus beard who seems to have lived forever (and may, in fact, be God Himself). But the other historic event in these pages is the arrival of Warbucks’ second trouble-shooter, the Asp (dubbed “the Grim Reaper”), who on February 21, 1937, joins Punjab as the most trusted of Warbucks’ bodyguards. Punjab “disappears” Warbucks’ most unsavory enemies by throwing a magic rug over them; the Asp just uses old-fashioned firearms.
Jeet Heer’s introductory essay offers a short history of another comic strip with which Annie’s Harold Gray has long be associated: Little Joe, set in the modern American West, started October 1, 1933, as one of several new strips in the expanded Chicago Tribune Sunday funnies. Although signed by Edwin Leffingwell, Gray’s assistant, the strip, Heer maintains, was Gray’s concoction entirely: starring a teenage cowboy, Little Joe revived an early strip idea Gray’d toyed with before Annie began. The 1933 revival was due, Heer argues persuasively, to Gray’s desire to frustrate two people with whom he and Dick Tracy’s Chester Gould had a bone to pick. The first of these personages was Norman Marsh, once a friend of Gould’s, who earlier that year had launched a rank copy-cat detective strip, Dan Dunn. The other offender was Arthur Crawford, the ostensible head of the Tribune Syndicate (distributor of both Annie and Tracy), who was sponsoring a western-themed strip submitted by Marsh for the new expanded Sunday Trib. When Little Joe was selected, both Marsh and Crawford were deflated — which was Gray’s objective.
Ed Leffingwell died in 1936, and his brother’s name then appeared on Little Joe. But Heer thinks Robert Leffingwell probably didn’t draw it; probably Gray did. And Little Joe, from the beginning, was rendered in Gray’s distinctive manner. Be that as it may (and I believe Heer, who interviewed Leffingwell’s nephew and supplies pencil sketches from Gray’s notebook), this volume of the IDW Annie project is a treasure and a continuing testament to the comic strip genius of Harold Gray.
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