by Harold Gray
REVIEW BY DAVID LASKY:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
[This review has been removed at the request of the author.]REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:
Check out The Complete Little Orphan Annie by Harold Gray. The blank-eyed orphan was far grittier and moving than the saccharine Annie you know from the damn musical. [It] started in 1924 in a world chillingly like ours: crawling with cake-eaters, greedy bankers and international con men who exploit the hardscrabble working stiffs Annie hangs with when her “Daddy” isn’t around to protect her. The cartoonist, a tightlipped Midwestern Dickens, pushes the virtues of honesty, pluck, and hard work in adventures that can melt the heart of even hard-boiled cynics like I pretend to be.
REVIEW BY CHESTER BROWN:
(from an interview at AV Club, 2011)
I remember talking about how much I’d been influenced by Harold Gray, the cartoonist who wrote and drew Little Orphan Annie. That influence has certainly continued, along with being influenced by other cartoonists of the early-to-mid-20th century. In those days, cartoonists tended to draw full characters in the frame and not rely so much on close-ups. Very early on, close-ups were unheard of. At the time of George Herriman, you just didn’t do close-ups. Even Harold Gray, he might do a shot from the waist up, but never a full face in a panel, y’know. For whatever reason, that’s what I respond to. It seems kind of emotionally excessive to really zoom in on a face or a pair of eyes, or things like that. And it probably has a lot to do with my psychological makeup, but I don’t examine that too closely. It’s just a matter of, “Yeah, this is what I respond to, so I want to create similar sorts of work."
FURTHER READING:
The Complex Origins of Little Orphan Annie by Jeet Heer (2020)
The Curious Pull of Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie by Frank Young (2019)
