Medium: Newspaper comics
Distributed by: Chicago Tribune Syndicate
First Appeared: 1920
Creator: Martin Branner
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"Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner" (the last two words were later dropped from the title) debuted on September 20, 1920. It wasn't the first newspaper strip with a 'working girl' theme - that would probably be "Somebody's Stenog", by A.E. Hayward, which started in 1906. But it's the first to attract a lot of attention, and within a year it had an imitator in Russ Westover's "Tillie the Toiler". Thus, it was Winnie who paved the way for all the strips about working women to come, from "Brenda Starr" to "Cathy". The "Winnie Winkle" strip outlasted not only its creator (who died in 1970), but most of its comics-page contemporaries, as well. When it finally ended, on July 28, 1996, it had become one of the half-dozen or so longest-running daily strips in America. |