Little Joe was a 1933-1972 Western comic strip created by Ed Leffingwell and later continued by his brother Robert Leffingwell. Distributed by the Chicago Tribune Syndicate, this Sunday strip had a long run spanning four decades. It was never a daily strip. Ed Leffingwell began in comics as an assistant to his cousin, Harold Gray, the creator of Little Orphan Annie -- which may explain why the artwork and layouts on Little Joe were very similar to Annie's. Little Joe tended toward the highly dramatic, violent and sometimes even grisly. Its stories usually emphasized harsh frontier justice and basic virtues such as honesty, self reliance, and independence with an occasional touch of wry humor.
History
Little Joe began October 1, 1933, but Ed Leffingwell worked on the strip for only three years. When he died suddenly in December, 1936, Bob Leffingwell stepped in, continuing the strip until its conclusion in 1972. The resemblance to Little Orphan Annie in both style and content diminished in the early 1950s when the format changed from a dramatic adventure strip to a more simply rendered gag strip. It suffered greatly during its last few years routinely involving Joe and a Navajo boy named Dead Pan retelling a tired old joke. Bob Leffingwell continued to ink and letter Little Orphan Annie until Harold Gray's death in 1969 when the feature passed into other hands. Joe ran in an ever dwindling number of papers until it was caught up in a 1972 syndicate purge of formerly popular strips that included Terry and the Pirates and Smilin' Jack. Comics historianDon Markstein described the storyline: Starting May 16, 1943, Ze Gen'ral became a topper strip above Little Joe. The topper continued until at least the 1960s. Little Joe was reprinted in Dell Comics' Popular Comics, Super Comics and Dell's Four Color Comics series. The character of "Utah" appears on the box art of the 1930's Little Orphan Anne Shooting Game. A CD-ROM reprinting early Little Joe strips was released in 2002.
