Classic American Comic Strips

Question: Which long-running strip featured a pair of physically opposite friends who met at a mental hospital?

Answer: It began life as A. Mutt in 1907, but in early 1908 the tall man Augustus Mutt met the diminutive Jeff on a visit to the institution. (Jeff’s name derived from his belief that he was former heavyweight champ James J. Jeffries.) The title was soon revised to Mutt and Jeff.

Question: Winnie Winkle, which started in 1920, was one of the first strips about the adventures of a young single working girl. What was another?

Answer: Tillie was a secretary but also a part-time model. The strip’s creator saw to it that Tillie always wore the most up-to-date fashions.

Question: Which comic, first published in 1908, was set in a rural community and featured a ramshackle old trolley that twisted and turned through the landscape?

Answer: The Toonerville Trolley did not actually appear in the strip until 1916, but eventually it became one of the most recognizable parts of Toonerville.

Question: What were the names of the Katzenjammer Kids, who wreaked domestic havoc in the funny pages beginning in 1897?

Answer: The twin boys of a German American immigrant family were incorrigible practical jokers, making life miserable for their Mama and Der Captain.

Question: Which comic strip, which began running in the Chicago Tribune in 1919, featured a baby named Skeezix?

Answer: Lead character Walt Wallet adopted a foundling and called him Skeezix, a term used by cowboys for orphaned calves.

Question: Which comic strip did newspaper syndicate King Features start in 1929 in response to the popularity of rival Chicago Tribune Syndicate’s Little Orphan Annie?

Answer: In the cutthroat world of newspaper comics in the 1920s, it was only logical that the red-haired orphan adopted by Daddy Warbucks would soon have an imitator. Little Annie Rooney, also a feisty orphan, was looked after by relatives.

Question: What was the real title of the comic strip usually known as Maggie and Jiggs (or Jiggs and Maggie), which began running in 1913?

Answer: One of many comics centering on America’s immigrant population of the early 20th century, Bringing Up Father wrung comic plots from the life of a newly wealthy working-class Irish family—a former mason and his socially ambitious wife and daughter.

Question: Which comic strip began (1925) as a daily lesson on good manners?

Answer: Originally intended as instruction for teenagers in the ways of polite behavior, Etta Kett evolved into a strip about the life of its title character, a well-behaved teenage girl.

Question: In which comic strip did Popeye the Sailor first appear, 10 years after the strip’s 1919 debut?

Answer: Popeye was introduced in 1929 when Olive Oyl’s brother Castor hired him as crew for a planned sea voyage.

Question: George Herriman’s brilliant Krazy Kat took place in which real-life location starting in 1916?

Answer: The sweetly eccentric and all-too-trusting Krazy (Krazy’s sex was never clear: sometimes male, sometimes female), together with his/her “Li’l Dollink”—the brick-throwing mouse, Ignatz—and friends like the cop “Offissa” Pupp and Don Kiyote, inhabited a strange, rather surreal desert landscape in the American Southwest.