Little Orphan Annie’s Passing Noted

On what was a slow news day in terms of features, and because of the announcement that Little Orphan Annie was to be canceled after 86 years facilitated by the delay between production and publication in newspaper strips, several media sources noted the strip shuffling off the comic strip coil in abrupt fashion with Sunday's appropriate/necessary/couldn't-be-helped non-resolution strip. The BBC has the best straight-ahead short news story, in their usual fashion. A CBS Sunday Morning news magazine program's story actually used smart commentary from Jeet Heer. This looks like the original of the wire story that you're likely to see excerpts from in various papers; it talks about Annie's continuing future as a licensed property.

I'm not sure how to take the news of Annie's ending, but I know I don't see it as a sad story. It was in recent years a reasonably entertaining strip, particularly given the limitations on serial soap opera strips right now. I'm sad to see anyone lose a gig in a tough economy and a crowded comics marketplace, even what must have been a modest one. Still, the feature was down to less than 20 papers, and nothing that the modern strip people were doing was bound to add significant value to the creation over time: newspapers aren't places to keep anything vital anymore, and the character is already as deeply ingrained into the cultural consciousness as it will ever be. The wisdom behind legacy strips in general -- the idea of pale imitations clogging the newspapers, and collectively making the group of features out there feel more like an old folks home than if they were to more gracefully fade from view -- was even more of an issue with Annie, as Gray's strip found its way into the cultural zeitgeist very early on in Gray's own run, and spent decades with its creator in charge making interesting comics but not the exact kind of comics which hit with readers so hard.

I hope that the strip's legacy will focus more on the work as an interesting take on family-as-we-choose-it, as a compelling story strip distinguished by Gray's virtuoso feel for characters both despicable and kind and his ability in depicting a variety of interesting spaces in which everyone operated, and for Annie as representative of maybe the most humane fantasy presented to audiences in comic strip history. Long before the government was big enough or even a factor where Annie suggesting another path became a politicized notion, Annie was an expression of the idea that if you treated people decently and worked really, really hard, things would likely turn out better than worse for you. That it was embodied in this traditionally super-weak character, a young girl without firm family ties or most kinds of basic support at crucial times in her life, I have to imagine that this was a hopeful message for people who felt similarly disempowered. Of all the comic strips out there to read in their classic state, Annie is the one I have the hardest time putting down, even in volumes that rested on my lap make my legs fall asleep. I'm sad to hear about her passing in a sense, but she hasn't been the same for years.
 
posted 9:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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