The Kin-der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie's World were early newspaper comics by painter Lyonel Feininger and published by the Chicago Sunday Tribune in 1906-07.
Similar in form to Little Nemo and the later Sunday editions of Krazy Kat, most of Feininger's comics occupied a full-page and were rendered in color. The Kin-der-Kids began running in Tribune papers from on April 29, 1906. Feininger's second feature, Wee Willie Winkie's World, ran concurrently with The Kin-der-Kids from August 19, 1906 until The Kin-der-Kids's cancellation on November 18, 1906. Wee Willie Winkie's World ended three months later, on February 17, 1907. The series' short lives have been attributed to several causes, including a Feininger being unable to produce two strips of finely detailed artwork on a weekly schedule, and personal conflict between Feininger and his publishers.[1]
Much like The New York Herald's Little Nemo, Tribune publishers envisioned The Kin-der-kids as a highbrow alternative to the comical, and at times violent, antics of Happy Hooligan and The Katzenjammer Kids, strips published in Hearst and Pulitzer-owned papers.[2]
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The Kin-der-Kids followed an ongoing story about the three Kin-der brothers who, along with their dog and a mechanical boy, set sail in the family's antique bathtub to explore the world. The strips imply that the Kin-ders set sail for a specific reason: early on they receive a note - unseen to the reader - from Mysterious Pete which contains instructions for their trip. These instructions and the purpose of their trip remain indeterminate for the life of the comic.
The primary cast of The Kin-der-Kids were introduced to Tribune readers before the commencement of the strip's regular publication. On April 29, 1906 the Tribune published a special "All About the Tribune's New Comic Supplement" section. The cover featured a caricature of "Uncle" Feininger suspending the cast marionette-like on strings. The "New Comic Supplement" introduction also included a page of color portraits of the characters, and inside the supplement were prose biographies of the cast.
The cast introduced in this publication are:
Unlike The Kin-der-Kids, Wee Willie Winkie's World was not an episodic adventure. Each strip features the eponymous protagonist observing the surreal countryside around his grandfather's home. He interacts with the inanimate objects around him which have anthropomorphic qualities. Instead of speech balloons, the strip utilizes captions and prose passages that accompany the images.
When Wee Willie Winkie's World ceased publication in 1907, it proved to be the last comic-strip Feininger would create, although he would later use similar designs for his wooden landscape sculptures (photographs of which were released in a 1965 book City at the Edge of the World.) Despite the strips' short lives, they are highly praised by later comics enthusiasts. The Kin-der-Kids's "full-fledged, frankly suspenseful week-to-week continuity," writes cartooning historian Bill Blackbeard, was a "real innovation for the time" when even Winsor McCay's Little Nemo had not yet developed into ongoing stories.[3] The artwork is lauded as well, and has been called "exquisitely drawn" in Time.[4]
Art Spiegelman, editor of RAW and author of Maus, praises the Kin-der-Kids as Feininger's crowning achievement:
| “ | Feininger's visually poetic formal concerns collided comically with the fishwrap disposability of news print... The cartoonist, a New Yorker who had emigrated to Germany at sixteen and returned to safe harbor in America in 1937 became a celebrated second-generation cubist, one of the Bauhaus boys, but his handful of Sunday pages -- testing the uncharted waters between the high and low arts, between European and American graphic traditions--remains his greatest aesthetic triumph."[5] | ” |
In 1994, the entirety of Feininger's comics were collected in a single volume by Kitchen Sink Press: The Comic Strip Art of Lionel Feininger. In 1999, The Comics Journal included The Kin-der-Kids in its "Top 100 Comics list".