Wayback Whensday: Doonesbury, Fluffly Ruffles, and Krazy Kat
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The Fluffy Ruffles Story
The job-hunting, resourceful, and decidedly independent heroine became a national sensation shortly after her Feb. 3 premiere in the New York Herald. Fluffy was a pioneering woman in the workplace battling a reversal in fortune by making weekly tries as a journalist, florist, schoolteacher, dairy maid, waitress and more. The full page Sunday story was conceived and told in comic verse by a professional woman of note herself, the children’s and mystery writer Carolyn Wells. Herald illustrator Wallace Morgan dramatized the tale in vignettes that seemed to channel Charles Dana Gibson’s genteel magazine style. The series ran until early 1909 and quickly a multimedia juggernaut. The early episodes of her job-seeking stage were reprinted in book form before 1907 ended. Within six months of the launch The Herald started contests to find real-life Fluffy Ruffles that migrated to partner newspapers around the country. Paper dolls, chocolates, sheet music, branded hats and suits, even cigars, soon carried the Fluffy Ruffles brand. A 1908 Broadway musical production would travel the country until at least 1910, a year after the strip itself had ended.
Steve Smith at Panels and Prose says:
The absence of the Fluffy Ruffles craze of 1907-1908 in standard comics histories is a major miss and hard to fathom. Wells and Morgan’s serial is one of the clearest examples of the complex ways that newspaper strips shaped an emerging ecosystem of mass media, modern taste-making, merchandising and even pop sociology from early in newspaper comics history.
Steve Smith corrects that comics history slight with “The Forgotten Cartoon Feminist of 1907.”
Origins of Trudeau’s ‘Doonesbury’
“Doonesbury” — adapted from a comic strip that started out in the Yale Daily News — was launched in 26 newspapers across the country on Oct. 26, 1970 — 55 years ago today.
Charles Apple for The Spokane Spokesman-Review details the first decade of the Doonesbury comic strip in “The Doones From Yale.”
Fall 1966
Garry Trudeau, age 18, starts college at Yale University and begins drawing a comic strip…
November 1967
Trudeau draws two illustrations for the Yale Daily News to run with a story…
Sept. 30, 1968
Trudeau begins drawing a comic strip for the Yale Daily News based on the Yale football team and its captain, Brian Dowling. Trudeau calls the strip “Bull Tales” in honor of the school mascot, the Bulldogs…
Nov. 28, 1968
The Universal Press Syndicate sends Trudeau a letter telling him they’ve seen his “Bull Tales” strip and asks if he’d be interested in a syndication deal…
The First “Krazy Kat” Comic Strip – Not Available
John Freeman at downthetubes gives us a rundown of the early appearances of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat in “First Appearances” since the anniversary of the strip’s was October 28, 1913 (the characters of Krazy and Ignatz debuted on July 26, 1910).
“Krazy Kat” debuted as an independent strip on the daily comics page on 28th October 1913 – and the rest is comics history. It’s a strip noted for its poetic, dialect-heavy dialogue, fantastic, shifting backgrounds; and its bold, experimental page layouts. In the strip’s main motif, Ignatz Mouse pelted Krazy with bricks, which the naïve, androgynous Kat interpreted as symbols of love.
And here is that first “Krazy Kat” comic strip of October 28, 1913:
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Well, no it isn’t here. It doesn’t seem to be anywhere, at least on the internet.
Is it in some book? Can anyone send us an image of that October 28, 1913 strip?
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