Flapper Fanny Says

Ethel Hays' Flapper Fanny Says original art (1926): "The shoe clerk is often successful because he starts at the foot."

Flapper Fanny Says from Newspaper Enterprise Association was a single-panel daily cartoon series starting in about 1924,[1] with a Sunday page following in 1928. Each episode featured a flapper illustration and a witticism.[2] It continued into the 1940s as Flapper Fanny.

At the start, the panel was drawn by notable illustrator Ethel Hays, who employed an Art Deco style. Flapper Fanny Says was part of a wave of popular culture that focused on the flapper look and lifestyle. Through many films and the works of illustrators such as Hays and Russell Patterson, as well as the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Anita Loos, flappers came to be seen as attractive, reckless and independent.

Because NEA often sold whole packages of features to individual newspapers, Flapper Fanny Says gained widespread distribution almost from the start, appearing daily in perhaps 500 papers within its first year.[3]

Spin-offs and influence

Despite this immediate success, Hays—finding the daily workload too heavy after the birth of her second child—turned Flapper Fanny Says over to promising newcomer Gladys Parker around 1931. Parker gave it a "more cartoony style",[4][5] and her flapper protagonists came to resemble the artist herself.[6] Parker began drawing her own creation Mopsy in 1939 (also in her own image),[7] but she seems to have relinquished Flapper Fanny Says to Sylvia Sneidman by 1937 or earlier.[8] That artist, who signed her work only "Sylvia", added a kid sister and continued the strip into the 1940s.[9] The title was eventually truncated to Flapper Fanny.

Flapper Fanny Says was imitated in the Jazz Age by Faith Burrows's similarly themed upstart Flapper Filosofy panel from the rival King Features Syndicate.[10]

Notes

  1. ↑ Children of the Yellow Kid: The Evolution of the American Comic Strip. Robert C. Harvey (Seattle: Frye Art Museum, University of Washington Press, 1998). ISBN 0-295-97778-7, p. 58)
  2. ↑ 100 Years of American Newspaper Comics: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, edited by Maurice Horn. New York: Gramercy Books, 1996. 413 p., ill. (some col.) -- Includes bibliographical references (p. 405-406). p. 116 ISBN 0-517-12447-5
  3. ↑ Holtz, Allan. "Ethel, Great Female Cartoonist," Hogan's Alley #13 ISSN 1074-7354, Atlanta, Georgia:Bull Moose Publishing Corp., Atlanta GA. "Ethel, Great Female Cartoonist" by Allan Holtz
  4. ↑ Lambiek
  5. ↑ Children of the Yellow Kid: the Evolution of the American Comic Strip / Robert C. Harvey (Seattle : Frye Art Museum, University of Washington Press, 1998). ISBN 0-295-97778-7, p. 58)
  6. ↑ Robbins, Trina. The Great Women Cartoonists. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 2001. p. 26.
  7. ↑ http://toonopedia.com/mopsy.htm
  8. ↑ Guide to the SFACA Collection : Newspaper Comic Strips Series I: Comic Features http://cartoons.osu.edu/finding_aids/sfaca/f.html
  9. ↑ Robbins, Trina. The Great Women Cartoonists. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 2001. p. 26.
  10. ↑ Guide to the SFACA Collection : Newspaper Comic Strips Series I: Comic Features http://cartoons.osu.edu/finding_aids/sfaca/f.html
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