On Strips: Edwina Dumm

By | Friday, November 06, 2015 Leave a Comment
This image comes from Cartoons Magazine, Volume 11 Number 1 circa January 1917. The text reads...
She is a "regular" cartoonist and has her workshop in a real newspaper office amid the click of telegraph instruments and typewriters. She is Miss Edwina Dumm, of the Columbus Daily Monitor, and one of the few women cartoonists in the United States. She had always wanted to be a cartoonist, so she went to work to pay for an art education, thus showing a lot of spunk and independence. she is quite old, being in her early twenties, and is a daughter of a newspaper man. Below is one of her cartoons.
"Quite old" -- HA! Wonder what they would've said when she retired... FORTY-NINE YEARS LATER! Or when she finally died TWENTY-FOUR YEARS AFTER THAT at age 97!

Anyway, Edwina (as she signed all her strips) started doing political cartoons, often of a pro-suffrage nature, at the Columbus Daily Monitor a year before the above piece ran. She then started a regular strip called The Meanderings of Minnie, but she soon picked up a national sydicate. She moved to New York and changed the strip's lead to a boy, renaming it Cap Stubbs and Tippie. (The Sundays featured primarily Cap's dog and were simply called Tippie.) It ran until her retirement in 1966.

In the 1930s, she also began a weekly strip in Life called Sinbad and a second newspaper strip titled Alec the Great. All three of her strips took their names from the dog she would use as a lead character, and all of their designs were based on her own short-haired pups. In fact, her dog from that time was himself named Sinbad. But her practice made her quite adept at drawing dogs, that short-haired one in particular, and Trina Robbins called her "a dog artist par excellence, possibly the best in the 20th century."

You can find examples of her strips online pretty easily with a simple Google search, but I'll include here instead an ad promoting Cap Stubbs and Tippie just before it began...
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