Little Orphan Annie: 'You're Going on a Long Journey'

Harold Gray's *Little Orphan Annie* launched in 1924 and quickly became a newspaper staple, appearing in hundreds of dailies and Sunday pages. This strip introduces one of the strip's recurring plot devices: Annie's abduction. Gray's visual storytelling employs sequential panels with speech balloons to advance narrative across multiple frames—techniques that defined the emerging comic strip form. Annie's oval eyes and simplified features reflect 1920s cartooning conventions. The kidnapping plot, which would repeat throughout the strip's 44-year run, demonstrates how newspaper comics developed serialized drama to keep readers returning daily. Gray's work established the visual and narrative vocabulary that influenced subsequent comic book development.