Harold Gray

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Harold Gray (January 20, 1894- September 6, 1968) was an American newspaper artist and cartoonist.

He was born in Kankakee, Illinois, and grew up on a farm near the small town of Chebanse, Illinois.

He graduated from Purdue University with a degree in Engineering but as an artist was largely self-taught. A former letterer for Sidney Smith on the Gumps, he came up with a strip idea in 1924 for Little Orphan Otto, the title quickly altered by the Chicago Tribune's editor to Little Orphan Annie. By the thirties this strip had evolved from a crudely-drawn melodrama to a crisply rendered atmospheric spectacle whose dialogue consisted mainly of meditations on Gray's own deeply conservative philosophy, which was similar to Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand.

Little Joe, the strip his assistant Ed Leffingwell worked upon, was something he was heavily involved in too, and he sometimes ghosted the strip. Maw Green was published as a "top strip", something newspapers used to commission so they could devote entire pages to single cartoonists in the old days. It mixed vaudeville timing with the same deeply conservative attitudes as Annie.

References

Becker, Stephen H. Comic Art in America Simon and Schuster (New York, 1959)

Couperie, Pierre, Horn, Maurice et. al. A History of the Comic Strip Crown Publishers, Inc. (New York, 1968) (Translation of a 1967 book published in conjunction with an exhibit of comic strip art at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs / Palais du Louvre