 | LouieOriginal Medium: Newspaper comics Distributed by: Chicago Tribune Syndicate First Appeared: 1947 Creator: Harry Hanan image: © Tribune Media Services. |
Commentators have occasionally remarked on how much Cartoonist Harry Hanan, a short, ordinay-looking man with a deadpan expression masking a sly sense of humor, resembled his best-known creation, Louie. Tho Louie was, like his creator, occasionally tempted, as Hanan put it, to snip the the feathers off of ladies' hats, he wasn't likely to act very strongly on his impulses. In publicity material accompanying the March, 1947 launch of his newspaper comic strip, Hanan described his rather ineffectual character as "the anti-Superman".
Much like the later Ziggy, Louie was
frequently the victim of life's little frustrations — not to
the extent of Henry Tremblechin's or
Brutus P. Thornapple's victimhood, but
he didn't come out on top very often. But he was always soft-spoken
about it — even to the point of absolute silence! Like
Ferd'nand and The Little King, Louie was one of the more
successful pantomimes in the history of American comics.
But not entirely American. Hanan, a native of Liverpool, England, did his strip for The People, a London weekly, as well as both daily and Sunday for U.S. syndication. His first distributor was Post-Hall Syndicate (Dennis the Menace), but during most of the strip's tenure it was handled by The Chicago Tribune Syndicate, whose many famous comics include Gasoline Alley and Dick Tracy (and whose not-so-famous ones included Friday Foster and Texas Slim.).
With Hanan at the helm from beginning to end, Louie silently entertained his fans until 1976, when the cartoonist retired. He died in 1982.
