Allen Saunders
Encyclopedia
Allen Saunders was an American writer, journalist and cartoonist who wrote the comic strip
s Steve Roper and Mike Nomad
, Mary Worth and Kerry Drake
. His full name, John Allen Saunders, sometimes led to confusion with his son John (John Phillip Saunders, 1924-2003), who later continued two of his father's strips.
Born in Lebanon, Indiana
, Saunders enjoyed newspaper comics as a youth, and he practiced drawing them. After graduating from Wabash College
in 1920, he taught French there for seven years while working in the summers on his M.A. at the University of Chicago
and taking night classes at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. He drew editorial cartoons and the single-panel Miserable Moments, wrote detective fiction for magazines, worked in Chautauqua
theater and wrote plays. These experiences converged in his later comics career.
In 1927, while on sabbatical from Wabash, he moved to Toledo, Ohio
as a reporter and drama critic for the News-Bee, and he stayed on with that newspaper. Eight years later, Elmer Woggon
(a friend at the rival Toledo Blade) proposed a comic strip for Publishers Syndicate (later Publishers-Hall Syndicate
), The Great Gusto, which he would draw if Saunders did the writing. They shook on it, but it wasn't accepted until they refocused on its Indian character. On November 23, 1936, it finally appeared in the newspapers as Big Chief Wahoo and scored a success—fortunately, as Saunders' regular job ended when the News-Bee folded in 1938. Gags gave way to adventure strips, so in 1940, he began to reshape the narrative into Steve Roper
, centered on the escapades of a racket-busting photojournalist.
website insists that these two Marys are unrelated, Saunders' autobiography and interviews explicitly document the transition. The Depression-era apple vendor's full name was Mary Worth, and Saunders explained his makeover of the character and how her deceased husband's stocks regained their value. The result was a new kind of continuity strip patterned on women's magazine stories of the time, as Mary met people with interesting lives and dispensed her advice when their problems reached a critical point. When his artist Dale Conner quit to do a strip of her own, Saunders persuaded Ken Ernst to take over the artwork in 1942, and the strip became simply Mary Worth.
In addition to these two strips, as comics editor for Publishers Syndicate, he finished up the police strip Dan Dunn
in 1942-43 and agreed to write the syndicate's proposed replacement, Kerry Drake. But the artist, Alfred Andriola
, stipulated receiving sole credit for it. So for three decades, Saunders intrigued newspaper and comic book readers with his well-written and researched Kerry Drake detective stories, but he was not credited, even when Andriola accepted the 1970 Reuben Award for "Kerry Drake by Alfred Andriola." Saunders quit the strip soon after that and was "not sorry" (autobiography ch. 9). It was only after Andriola's death in 1983 that the real author was revealed.
Even with the occasional assistance of his son John, a Toledo broadcaster, it was a challenge to keep three story strips going (as well as writing a 1950s advertising comic Duke Handy and helping with John's strip Dateline: Danger, 1968-74). But as he noted in his autobiography, "as long as there are people, there are plots." He approached his work as a "craft."
After getting feedback for a story idea from his artists, he isolated himself to map it out over 13 weeks of dailies and Sundays (1953 article), with the playwriting formula "First act, get your leading character up a tree; second act, throw rocks at him; third act, get him down". Then, in his work week, he allocated two days to each of the three strips to create a week's worth, using his own cartooning skills to sketch roughs of the characters and dialog in each panel for his artists and letterers to follow. Saunders also served as chair of the Newspaper Comics Council, was a longtime member of the National Cartoonists Society
who helped younger cartoonists get started (e.g., Fran Matera
, Pete Hoffman
, Nicholas P. Dallis
, Alex Kotzky
), and was a civic-minded leader in Toledo community affairs.
In 1957, Saunders wrote the line, "Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans," usually attributed to John Lennon
. It appeared in a 1957 issue of the Reader's Digest
.
in 1981, and wrote his Nemo autobiography, a rich resource on the history of American comic strip writing. He died on January 28, 1986, survived by his wife of 63 years, Lois, and their four children (John, David, Penny, Lois Ann), and donating an archive of material to the Browne Library for Popular Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University. Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, the enduring continuation of his first strip, finally came to an end on December 26, 2004, while Mary Worth still appears under Karen Moy and Joe Giella
. Kerry Drake ended with Andriola.
Roper, like Saunders, was a journalist who was decent, knew French, smoked a pipe, had run his college newspaper (and almost flunked physics) and faced tough challenges. Through him, Saunders defended journalism while also enjoying the action sequences he wrote for him and Nomad. He was especially fond of the "indigenous gimmick" technique, solving a problem by using something that is ordinarily ignored in the setting (autobiography ch. 10). But he identified more with Mary Worth: "Mary and I have come, over the years, to think pretty much alike" (1971 interview). As opposed to the existing action/adventure genre popular with male readers, his Mary Worth established the soap strip with its appeal primarily to women. (In his 1971 interview, he said that 90% of his fan letters for Worth came from females, and 90% of those for Roper and Nomad were from males.) It in fact was singled out for praise by Eleanor Roosevelt
(1959). He inspired later soap strip writers such as Nick Dallis, who started Rex Morgan, M.D.
, Judge Parker
, and Apartment 3-G
(Mendez 2006). But he himself disliked the term "soap" because he saw an underlying unity in his own strips as "adventure strips" based on conflict—emotional conflict in Mary Worth, physical conflict in Steve Roper. One of his major contributions was to merge the two as Roper, Nomad, and Drake increasingly dealt with emotional conflicts in their personal lives and faced hard moral dilemmas.
Narrating conflicts in a range of social issues (drugs, the sexes, divorce, job loss, the youth scene and counterculture, prejudice, and of course crime, to name just a few), Saunders wrote tight, fast-moving stories with plot twists and dramatic tension lightened by droll predicaments. He was known for "sophisticated scripts with literate dialogue" (Browne Popular Library), with almost twice as much said (and happening) per daily strip as in the post-1979 versions, and under him, even Nomad (later treated as slow-witted and speaking in grawlixes) was a sharp, shrewd character who was articulate in three languages. Saunders explored personality and motivation in the long series of people passing through his strips, and they got to be "awfully real" to him (1949 interview). His scripts were interpreted and fleshed out by talented realist artists (Ernst in Mary Worth, Pete Hoffman
and then William Overgard
in Steve Roper, Andriola and his ghosts in Kerry Drake) who made the characters and settings both attractive and believable.
At the end of Saunders' autobiography (published in Nemo shortly after his death), Nemo editor Rick Marschall
called him a "dedicated craftsman and a flinty, memorable personality." That showed through clearly in his 42-year output of popular dramas for his "paper actors."
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
s Steve Roper and Mike Nomad
Steve Roper and Mike Nomad
Steve Roper and Mike Nomad was an American adventure comic strip that ran under various earlier titles from November 1936 to December 26, 2004...
, Mary Worth and Kerry Drake
Kerry Drake
Kerry Drake is the title of a comic strip created for Publishers Syndicate by Alfred Andriola as artist and Allen Saunders as uncredited writer...
. His full name, John Allen Saunders, sometimes led to confusion with his son John (John Phillip Saunders, 1924-2003), who later continued two of his father's strips.
Born in Lebanon, Indiana
Lebanon, Indiana
Lebanon is a city in and the county seat of Boone County, Indiana, United States. The population was 15,792 at the 2010 census. The city was named Lebanon because a stand of hickory trees on the site reminded one of the town's commissioners of the Biblical cedars of Lebanon...
, Saunders enjoyed newspaper comics as a youth, and he practiced drawing them. After graduating from Wabash College
Wabash College
Wabash College is a small, private, liberal arts college for men, located in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Along with Hampden-Sydney College and Morehouse College, Wabash is one of only three remaining traditional all-men's liberal arts colleges in the United States.-History:Wabash College was founded...
in 1920, he taught French there for seven years while working in the summers on his M.A. at the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
and taking night classes at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. He drew editorial cartoons and the single-panel Miserable Moments, wrote detective fiction for magazines, worked in Chautauqua
Chautauqua
Chautauqua was an adult education movement in the United States, highly popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Chautauqua assemblies expanded and spread throughout rural America until the mid-1920s. The Chautauqua brought entertainment and culture for the whole community, with...
theater and wrote plays. These experiences converged in his later comics career.
In 1927, while on sabbatical from Wabash, he moved to Toledo, Ohio
Toledo, Ohio
Toledo is the fourth most populous city in the U.S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Lucas County. Toledo is in northwest Ohio, on the western end of Lake Erie, and borders the State of Michigan...
as a reporter and drama critic for the News-Bee, and he stayed on with that newspaper. Eight years later, Elmer Woggon
Elmer Woggon
Elmer Woggon , who signed his art Wog, was the creator of an early newspaper comic strip that eventually developed into the long-running Steve Roper and Mike Nomad....
(a friend at the rival Toledo Blade) proposed a comic strip for Publishers Syndicate (later Publishers-Hall Syndicate
Publishers-Hall Syndicate
Publishers-Hall Syndicate was a newspaper syndicate founded in 1944 by Robert M. Hall, the company's president and general manager.Hall had worked for The Providence Journal during high school, followed by three years at Northeastern Law School and four years at Brown University...
), The Great Gusto, which he would draw if Saunders did the writing. They shook on it, but it wasn't accepted until they refocused on its Indian character. On November 23, 1936, it finally appeared in the newspapers as Big Chief Wahoo and scored a success—fortunately, as Saunders' regular job ended when the News-Bee folded in 1938. Gags gave way to adventure strips, so in 1940, he began to reshape the narrative into Steve Roper
Steve Roper and Mike Nomad
Steve Roper and Mike Nomad was an American adventure comic strip that ran under various earlier titles from November 1936 to December 26, 2004...
, centered on the escapades of a racket-busting photojournalist.
Mary Worth
In 1939, he was asked to write Apple Mary when its creator (since 1932) Martha Orr left, and he developed it into Mary Worth's Family. While the King Features SyndicateKing Features Syndicate
King Features Syndicate, a print syndication company owned by The Hearst Corporation, distributes about 150 comic strips, newspaper columns, editorial cartoons, puzzles and games to nearly 5000 newspapers worldwide...
website insists that these two Marys are unrelated, Saunders' autobiography and interviews explicitly document the transition. The Depression-era apple vendor's full name was Mary Worth, and Saunders explained his makeover of the character and how her deceased husband's stocks regained their value. The result was a new kind of continuity strip patterned on women's magazine stories of the time, as Mary met people with interesting lives and dispensed her advice when their problems reached a critical point. When his artist Dale Conner quit to do a strip of her own, Saunders persuaded Ken Ernst to take over the artwork in 1942, and the strip became simply Mary Worth.
In addition to these two strips, as comics editor for Publishers Syndicate, he finished up the police strip Dan Dunn
Dan Dunn
Dan Dunn was the first fictional character to make his debut in an American comic magazine, making him the forerunner of many comic book heroes. Created by Norman Marsh, he first appeared in Detective Dan, Secret Operative No...
in 1942-43 and agreed to write the syndicate's proposed replacement, Kerry Drake. But the artist, Alfred Andriola
Alfred Andriola
Alfred James Andriola was an American cartoonist best known for the comic strip Kerry Drake, for which he won a Reuben Award in 1970. His work sometimes appeared under the pseudonym Alfred James....
, stipulated receiving sole credit for it. So for three decades, Saunders intrigued newspaper and comic book readers with his well-written and researched Kerry Drake detective stories, but he was not credited, even when Andriola accepted the 1970 Reuben Award for "Kerry Drake by Alfred Andriola." Saunders quit the strip soon after that and was "not sorry" (autobiography ch. 9). It was only after Andriola's death in 1983 that the real author was revealed.
Even with the occasional assistance of his son John, a Toledo broadcaster, it was a challenge to keep three story strips going (as well as writing a 1950s advertising comic Duke Handy and helping with John's strip Dateline: Danger, 1968-74). But as he noted in his autobiography, "as long as there are people, there are plots." He approached his work as a "craft."
After getting feedback for a story idea from his artists, he isolated himself to map it out over 13 weeks of dailies and Sundays (1953 article), with the playwriting formula "First act, get your leading character up a tree; second act, throw rocks at him; third act, get him down". Then, in his work week, he allocated two days to each of the three strips to create a week's worth, using his own cartooning skills to sketch roughs of the characters and dialog in each panel for his artists and letterers to follow. Saunders also served as chair of the Newspaper Comics Council, was a longtime member of the National Cartoonists Society
National Cartoonists Society
The National Cartoonists Society is an organization of professional cartoonists in the United States. It presents the National Cartoonists Society Awards. The Society was born in 1946 when groups of cartoonists got together to entertain the troops...
who helped younger cartoonists get started (e.g., Fran Matera
Fran Matera
Francis "Fran" Matera is an American comic strip artist best known for his King Features Syndicate adventure strip Steve Roper and Mike Nomad from 1984 to 2004. In addition to his extensive experience in newspaper strips, Matera also spent many years in the comic book industry, particularly for...
, Pete Hoffman
Pete Hoffman
Pete Hoffman is an American cartoonist. He is known for his work on the adventure strips Steve Roper and Jeff Cobb.-Early years:...
, Nicholas P. Dallis
Nicholas P. Dallis
Nicholas Peter Dallis , known as Nick Dallis, was an American psychiatrist turned comic strip writer, creator of the soap opera-style strips Rex Morgan, M.D., Judge Parker and Apartment 3-G...
, Alex Kotzky
Alex Kotzky
Alex Kotzky was a cartoonist best known for his three decades of work on the comic strip Apartment 3-G, distributed by Publishers-Hall Syndicate....
), and was a civic-minded leader in Toledo community affairs.
In 1957, Saunders wrote the line, "Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans," usually attributed to John Lennon
John Lennon
John Winston Lennon, MBE was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music...
. It appeared in a 1957 issue of the Reader's Digest
Reader's Digest
Reader's Digest is a general interest family magazine, published ten times annually. Formerly based in Chappaqua, New York, its headquarters is now in New York City. It was founded in 1922, by DeWitt Wallace and Lila Bell Wallace...
.
Archives
In 1979, Saunders retired and turned over the writing of Steve Roper and Mary Worth to son John. He remained professionally active as "Dean of American Continuity Strips" (a reputation that amused him), received an Inkpot AwardInkpot Award
The Inkpot Award, bestowed annually since 1974 by Comic-Con International, is given to some of the professionals in comic book, comic strip, animation, science fiction, and related pop-culture fields, who are guests of that organization's yearly multigenre fan convention, commonly known as...
in 1981, and wrote his Nemo autobiography, a rich resource on the history of American comic strip writing. He died on January 28, 1986, survived by his wife of 63 years, Lois, and their four children (John, David, Penny, Lois Ann), and donating an archive of material to the Browne Library for Popular Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University. Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, the enduring continuation of his first strip, finally came to an end on December 26, 2004, while Mary Worth still appears under Karen Moy and Joe Giella
Joe Giella
Joe Giella is an American comic book artist best known as a DC Comics inker during the late 1950s and 1960s period historians and fans call the Silver Age of comic books.-Early life and career:...
. Kerry Drake ended with Andriola.
Genre gamut
Allen Saunders covered the gamut of comics genres: editorial, commercial, gag, adventure and melodrama. Big Chief Wahoo was popular in its day, a witty romp with puns, slapstick and satire. But although it defended Native Americans and joked at "palefaces," it relied on exaggerated stereotypes for humor. Saunders (1971 interview) admitted that "if we were doing Chief Wahoo today, we'd have problems." It was his serious dramas or "open-ended novels" (ibid) Steve Roper, Mary Worth, and Kerry Drake that showed his mature talents and reflected himself and his views on the human condition.Roper, like Saunders, was a journalist who was decent, knew French, smoked a pipe, had run his college newspaper (and almost flunked physics) and faced tough challenges. Through him, Saunders defended journalism while also enjoying the action sequences he wrote for him and Nomad. He was especially fond of the "indigenous gimmick" technique, solving a problem by using something that is ordinarily ignored in the setting (autobiography ch. 10). But he identified more with Mary Worth: "Mary and I have come, over the years, to think pretty much alike" (1971 interview). As opposed to the existing action/adventure genre popular with male readers, his Mary Worth established the soap strip with its appeal primarily to women. (In his 1971 interview, he said that 90% of his fan letters for Worth came from females, and 90% of those for Roper and Nomad were from males.) It in fact was singled out for praise by Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was the First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945. She supported the New Deal policies of her husband, distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and became an advocate for civil rights. After her husband's death in 1945, Roosevelt continued to be an international...
(1959). He inspired later soap strip writers such as Nick Dallis, who started Rex Morgan, M.D.
Rex Morgan, M.D.
Rex Morgan, M.D. is an American soap-opera comic strip, created in 1948 by psychiatrist Dr. Nicholas P. Dallis under the pseudonym Dal Curtis. It maintained a readership well over a half-century, and in 2006 it was published in more than 300 U.S. newspapers and 14 foreign countries, according to...
, Judge Parker
Judge Parker
Judge Parker is a soap opera-style comic strip created by Nicholas P. Dallis that first appeared on November 24, 1952. The strip's look and content were influenced by the work of Allen Saunders and Ken Ernst on Mary Worth.-Characters and story:...
, and Apartment 3-G
Apartment 3-G
Apartment 3-G is an American newspaper comic strip about a trio of career women who share Apartment 3-G in Manhattan. Created by Nicholas P...
(Mendez 2006). But he himself disliked the term "soap" because he saw an underlying unity in his own strips as "adventure strips" based on conflict—emotional conflict in Mary Worth, physical conflict in Steve Roper. One of his major contributions was to merge the two as Roper, Nomad, and Drake increasingly dealt with emotional conflicts in their personal lives and faced hard moral dilemmas.
Narrating conflicts in a range of social issues (drugs, the sexes, divorce, job loss, the youth scene and counterculture, prejudice, and of course crime, to name just a few), Saunders wrote tight, fast-moving stories with plot twists and dramatic tension lightened by droll predicaments. He was known for "sophisticated scripts with literate dialogue" (Browne Popular Library), with almost twice as much said (and happening) per daily strip as in the post-1979 versions, and under him, even Nomad (later treated as slow-witted and speaking in grawlixes) was a sharp, shrewd character who was articulate in three languages. Saunders explored personality and motivation in the long series of people passing through his strips, and they got to be "awfully real" to him (1949 interview). His scripts were interpreted and fleshed out by talented realist artists (Ernst in Mary Worth, Pete Hoffman
Pete Hoffman
Pete Hoffman is an American cartoonist. He is known for his work on the adventure strips Steve Roper and Jeff Cobb.-Early years:...
and then William Overgard
William Overgard
William Overgard , was an American cartoonist and writer with a diverse opus, including novels, screenplays, animation, and the comic strips Steve Roper and Mike Nomad and Rudy. For a picture, see his biography card at ....
in Steve Roper, Andriola and his ghosts in Kerry Drake) who made the characters and settings both attractive and believable.
At the end of Saunders' autobiography (published in Nemo shortly after his death), Nemo editor Rick Marschall
Rick Marschall
Rick Marschall is a writer/editor and comic strip historian, described by Bostonia magazine as "America's foremost authority on pop culture." Marschall has served as an editor for both Marvel and Disney comics, plus several syndicates.Marschall has written and edited more than 62 books on cultural...
called him a "dedicated craftsman and a flinty, memorable personality." That showed through clearly in his 42-year output of popular dramas for his "paper actors."
Sources
- Brown Popular Culture Library news. 2007. Allen and John Saunders Collection, March 17, 2007.
- Mendez, E. 2006. Remembering the Girls Next Door: Alex Kotzky and Apartment 3-G,l Part 2.
- Ridgeway, Ann N. (interviewer) 1971. Allen Saunders. The Journal of Popular Culture 5 (2), 385-420.
- Roosevelt, Eleanor. 1959. My Day. June 12, 1959.
- Toledo Blade.1953. "Evolution of a Comic Strip" by Seymour Rothman, Pictorial, Aug. 9 1953, p. 5-6, reprinted in Steve Roper and Wahoo, Blackthorne Publishing (Book 2).
