Little Orphan Annie

Harold Gray's *Little Orphan Annie* emerged from the Sunday newspaper pages that birthed American comics. This strip exemplifies the visual vocabulary developing in the 1920s: sequential panels with speech balloons, recurring characters, and narrative continuity across multiple frames. The strip's humor derives from Annie's pluck and resourcefulness—scrubbing floors, managing household chaos, her expressive face conveying emotion through exaggerated features typical of the era's cartooning style. Gray's work demonstrates how newspaper comics established the medium's grammar: the close-up, the establishing shot, timing through panel placement. *Annie* became a phenomenon partly because it merged slapstick comedy with sentimentality, appealing across demographics. The strip's success validated comics as a viable daily feature, influencing publishers who would later compile newspaper strips into the earliest comic books.