Henry (comics)

Henry
Henry (July 28, 1935)
Author(s)Carl Thomas Anderson (1934–1948)
Illustrator(s)Carl Thomas Anderson (1934–1942)
(dailies) John Liney (1942–1979)
(Sundays) Don Trachte (1942–1995)
(dailies) Jack Tippit (1979–1983)
(dailies) Dick Hodgins, Jr. (1983–1990)
Current status/scheduleConcluded daily & Sunday strip; in reprints since 1995
Launch dateDecember 17, 1934 (December 17, 1934)
End dateOctober 28, 2018 (October 28, 2018)
Syndicate(s)King Features Syndicate
Genre(s)Gag-a-day, pantomime comics
Preceded byHerr Spiegelberger, the Amateur Cracksman

Henry is a comic strip created in 1932 by Carl Thomas Anderson. The title character is a young bald boy who is mostly mute in the comics (and sometimes drawn minus a mouth). Except in a few early episodes, when the comic strip character communicates, he does so largely but not entirely through pantomime. He also spoke in a comic book series of 1946–1961 and in at least one Betty Boop cartoon from 1935 in which Betty Boop has a pet shop and Henry speaks to a dog in the window.

The Saturday Evening Post was the first publication to feature Henry, a series which began when Anderson was 67 years old. The series of cartoons continued in that magazine for two years in various formats of one, two, or multiple panels. It then moved to newspaper syndication on December 17, 1934. Anderson stopped drawing due to arthritis in 1942, and the strip continued with other artists.[1]

The daily strip went into reruns in 1995, and the Sunday strip in 2005.[1] After 84 years of syndication, Henry was discontinued on October 28, 2018.[2]

  1. ^ a b Holtz, Allan (2012). American Newspaper Comics: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. pp. 187–188. ISBN 9780472117567.
  2. ^ "'Henry' to End Its Syndication Run". The Daily Cartoonist. September 7, 2018. Retrieved September 25, 2018.