Henry is a comic strip created in 1932 by Carl Anderson. The title character is a young bald boy who is mute (and sometimes drawn minus a mouth). With the exception of a few early episodes, the comic strip character communicates only through pantomime, a situation which changed when Henry moved into comic books.
The Saturday Evening Post was the first publication to feature Henry, a series which began March 19, 1932, when Anderson was 67 years old. The series of cartoons continued in that magazine for two years in various formats of single panel, multiple panels or two panels.
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After seeing a German publication of Henry, William Randolph Hearst signed Anderson to King Features Syndicate and began distributing the comic strip on December 17. 1934, with the half-page Sunday strip launched March 10, 1935. Henry was replaced in The Saturday Evening Post by Marjorie Henderson Buell's Little Lulu.
Anderson's assistant on the Sunday strip was Don Trachte. His assistant on the dailies was John Liney. In 1942, arthritis kept Anderson away from the drawing board, so Anderson turned the dailies over to Liney, and Trachte drew the Sunday strips. When Liney retired in 1979, the strip appeared on Sundays only until Trachte's death in 2005. During that period, Jack Tippit and Dick Hodgins, Jr. also contributed. About 75 newspapers still run classic Henry strips drawn by Trachte, and it is also available through King Features' DailyINK.
Cartoonist Art Baxter analyzed the appeal of the character and the strip:
Henry speaks in a Fleischer Studios animated cartoon alongside Betty Boop, titled Betty Boop with Henry, the Funniest Living American (1935).
Dell Comics published a color comic book, Carl Anderson's Henry, which ran 61 issues from 1946 to 1961. Henry spoke in the comic book, as did all the other characters.