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By Root 549 0

Kid was a huge hit, so much so that William Randolph Hearst, after buying the New York Journal, made certain, when raiding Pulitzer’s staff, that he managed to secure the Hogan’s Alley strip and the services of its creator, Richard Felton Outcault. A lot of screaming, finger-pointing, and litigation followed, with Pulitzer even going so far as to publish his own Yellow Kid feature, written and drawn by another cartoonist. But by this point there were enough dopey kids, foggy-minded immigrants, stump-jumping hillbillies, stereotyped African-Americans, and confused souls to go around. Such comic strips as Happy Hooligan, Katzenjammer Kids, Hairbreadth Harry, Skippy, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, Bringing Up Father, Mutt & Jeff, and a host of others captured the fancies of New York readers and, with the development of the newspaper syndicates, the rest of the country. Soon, Little Orphan Annie, Krazy Kat, and Thimble Theatre, all heavy influences on Will Eisner, elevated the comic strip to a higher artistic level. Newspapers ran as many of these black-and-white comic strips as they could squeeze in on weekdays, but the comics’ strongest appeal fell on Sundays, when color versions of these same strips ran in separate sections of the newspapers. The humorous content of most of these comics sections led people to label them “the funny papers,” later shortened to “the funnies.”

But it wasn’t all jokes, slapstick, and lowbrow humor. Beginning with Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland in 1905, comics combined classic storytelling with realistic—even surrealistic—artwork, and with stories continuing from day to day, these comic strips played a significant role in their newspapers’ circulations. These strips were filled with action, adventure, danger, romance, flights of imagination, and, in the cases of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, speculation on the future. The popularity of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan novels led to a comic strip adaptation. Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy introduced crime and detective stories, later to become a comic book staple, to the newspaper strip. Young Bill Eisner followed these and other strips and saw the potential for making comics creative outlets for serious stories. He drew a connection between the prose he read in pulp magazines and sequential art, rendered in the supreme draftsmanship of such artists as Milton Caniff and Alex Raymond.

The comic book as we know it today didn’t exist in America until 1929, when George Delacorte issued the Funnies, a weekly tabloid publishing comic strips that hadn’t made the grade with the newspapers. It featured all original material but failed to catch on with readers. Prior to that, comic books were strictly reprint vehicles, packaging previously published newspaper strips such as Little Nemo in Slumberland, Mutt & Jeff, or Buster Brown into cheaply produced magazines meant to compete with pulp magazines on newsstands. Retailers found uses for comic books as well, reprinting newspaper strips into small booklets and handing them out as promotional giveaways. Publishers of pulp and girlie magazines, clawing away at one another for every dime they could wrestle from consumers, couldn’t help but notice the upswing in these books’ popularity at a time when their publications were in a downturn.

Enter Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, a character so colorful that he might have sprung from the pulps themselves—or, to go further back in time, the dimestore novels. A master of self-promotion and tall tales, Wheeler-Nicholson was in his mid-forties by the time he made his presence known on the comics scene in 1934—and with his Panama hats, cigarette holder, fashionable suits, and cane, he was quite the presence. According to the legend—and one could never be certain what was fact and what was fiction with the Major—Wheeler-Nicholson had fought Pancho Villa in Mexico before earning his rank while serving in the cavalry during World War I. He’d gone on to fight the Bolsheviks in Russia, married a Swedish countess, and survived an assassination attempt, during which he