John Neville Wheeler (April 11, 1886 – October 13, 1973) was an American newspaperman, publishing executive, magazine editor, and writer. He was born in Yonkers, New York , graduated Columbia University (which holds a collection of his papers), was a veteran of World War I serving in France as a field artillery lieutenant, began his newspaper career at the New York Herald , and became managing editor of Liberty . He was married to Elizabeth T. Wheeler and had one daughter, the film editor Elizabeth Wheeler, who died in 1956. He is known primarily as the founder of several newspaper syndicates , of which the largest was the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), and through which he employed some of the most noted writing talents of his day.
28-651: In 1913, while still a sportswriter for the Herald , Wheeler formed the Wheeler Syndicate to specialize in distribution of sports features to newspapers in the United States and Canada. That same year his Wheeler Syndicate contracted with pioneering comic strip artist Bud Fisher and cartoonist Fontaine Fox to begin distributing their work. Fisher is reported to have received an annual guarantee of $ 52,000, an unprecedented amount at that time. Journalist Richard Harding Davis
56-465: A Feller Needs a Friend". Clare and Ruth Owen Briggs were together for 29 years and had three children. They divorced in February 1929. Briggs died ten months later, leaving his estate of $ 90,067 to Ruth Briggs. However, the will was challenged by his second wife, Marie C. Briggs, aka Maggie Touhey. Briggs was a popular lecturer, earning $ 100 for a single speech. He accepted a five-week contract for $ 500
84-621: A Man , Mr. and Mrs , Real Folks at Home , Someone's Always Taking the Joy Out of Life , There's at Least One in Every Office and When a Feller Needs a Friend . Mr. and Mrs. ran during the last years of his life and continued in syndication by the New York Herald Tribune Syndicate after his death under his name. (The names of Arthur Folwell and Ellison Hoover finally appeared on the strip in 1938; Frank Fogarty illustrated
112-508: A comic-strip format. As comics historian Don Markstein explained, Fisher's comic strip was very similar to A. Piker Clerk , which cartoonist Clare Briggs ... had done in the very same daily format for The Chicago American in 1903. But tho Fisher was born in Chicago, it's unknown whether or not he ever saw the Briggs strip, so let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say he had an idea. Despite
140-452: A single-panel format. Fisher innovated by telling a cartoon gag in a sequence, or strip, of panels, creating the first American comic strip to successfully pioneer that since-common format. The concept of a newspaper strip featuring recurring characters in multiple panels on a six-day-a-week schedule actually had been created by Clare Briggs with A. Piker Clerk four years earlier, but that short-lived effort did not inspire further comics in
168-684: A theorem, and while I was giving the problem a hard but losing battle, he remarked: 'Briggs, sit down, you don't know anything.' Right then and there, I decided to become a newspaper man." On July 18, 1900, he married Ruth Owen of Lincoln. He began his career as a newspaper sketch artist in St. Louis, Missouri with the Globe-Democrat , which sent him off to cover the Spanish–American War as an editorial cartoonist . Relocating in New York, his drawings for
196-476: A week to appear on the vaudeville circuit in 1914. In 1919, he produced four comedy film shorts for Paramount Pictures . The Mr. and Mrs. radio series, based on Briggs' strip, starred Jack Smart and Jane Houston as Jo and Vi. The series was broadcast on CBS from 1929 to 1931. National catchphrases caught on from the titles of some of his newspaper cartoon features: Ain't It a Grand and Glorious Feeling? , Danny Dreamer , The Days of Real Sport , Movie of
224-643: The New York Journal prompted William Randolph Hearst to send Briggs to the Chicago Herald and the Chicago's American , where he created A. Piker Clerk , often described as the first daily continuity comic strip . After 17 years in Chicago (living in the community of Riverside, Illinois ), Briggs returned to New York to spend the remaining 13 years of his life with the New York Tribune . He lived in to
252-498: The San Francisco Chronicle . The featured character had previously appeared in sports cartoons by Fisher, but was unnamed. Fisher had approached his editor, John P. Young , about doing a regular strip as early as 1905, but was turned down. According to Fisher, Young told him, "It would take up too much room, and readers are used to reading down the page, and not horizontally." During this time, newspaper cartoons appeared in
280-464: The University of Chicago . After a short-lived attempt at prizefighting , he began painting comic signs for window displays before becoming a layout person in the production department of the San Francisco Chronicle , where he soon became a cartoonist. He introduced A. Mutt , the comic strip that would be better known by its later title, Mutt and Jeff , on November 15, 1907, on the sports pages of
308-542: The Briggs primacy, A. Mutt is considered the first daily strip because it's the one that sparked a trend in that direction, which continues to this day. Mutt and Jeff gained such popularity that Fisher, who was able to claim copyright to the characters, received an offer to produce it for the San Francisco Examiner , owned by William Randolph Hearst . The move to the Hearst Corporation chain exposed
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#1732855606865336-533: The Neurological Institute of pneumonia on January 3, 1930. As he had requested, his ashes were scattered over New York Harbor. Briggs' death in 1930 prompted Franklin P. Adams to write: I feel acutely the loss of a cartoonist whose work I have enjoyed hugely for 30 years. I enjoyed it so much that I got him to leave Chicago so that his work could appear in the New York Tribune with mine. It helped
364-546: The Sunday strips from 1930 to 1946.) In 1947, the strip was taken over by Kin Platt , who continued it until 1963. His daughter, Clare Briggs, also was a comic strip artist and had an eponymous strip syndicated from 1939 through 1941. She used the name "Miss Clare Briggs" to distinguish her work from her father's. In September 1929, neuritis of the optic nerve led Briggs to Baltimore for treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital . He died at
392-547: The United States and Canada which absorbed Bell, both continuing to operate individually under joint ownership. NANA continued to acquire other syndicates, including the McClure Syndicate . In 1947, Cape Wheeler in Antarctica was named after him. Wheeler's autobiography, I've Got News for You , was published in 1961. By the time he sold NANA in 1966 to the publishing and media company, Koster-Dana, he had employed many of
420-585: The age of 87, his obituary in the Ridgefield Press described him as one who "never quit newspapering, permanently, until his death." Bud Fisher Harry Conway " Bud " Fisher (April 3, 1885 – September 7, 1954) was an American cartoonist who created Mutt and Jeff , the first successful daily comic strip in the United States. Born in Chicago, Illinois , the son of a merchant, Fisher attended public high school and then studied for three years at
448-467: The age of nine. In 1884, his family moved to Dixon, Illinois , where he started his newspaper career at age ten, delivering the local paper to subscribers for 40 cents a week while wearing a red, white and blue cap with the name of the newspaper. Briggs had three brothers, who grew up to all have creative careers, one as a musician, one as a writer, and the third in advertising. After five years in Dixon, Briggs
476-598: The most influential writers of his time, including Grantland Rice , Joseph Alsop , Dorothy Thompson , Pauline Frederick , Sheilah Graham and F. Scott Fitzgerald . It was Wheeler who hired Ernest Hemingway to cover the Spanish Civil War , who inscribed for him a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls , "To Jack Wheeler, who gave me the chance to go to war." When he died on October 13, 1973, in Ridgefield, Connecticut , at
504-433: The plots were adaptations of popular stories and fairy tales, such as A Kick for Cinderella (1925). Mutt and Jeff was also published in comic book form. The income from multiple uses of his characters made Fisher a wealthy man. In 1932, he authorized Al Smith to produce the strip under his supervision. Smith drew Mutt and Jeff for 48 years. When Fisher died in 1954, Smith began signing his own name and continued to draw
532-681: The strip passed to Aedita de Beaumont, and on her death in 1985 to her son from her earlier marriage, Pierre de Beaumont (1915–2010). Fisher acquired a large stable of Thoroughbred racehorses . In 1924, his horse Nellie Morse became the fourth filly (out of only six total as of 2022) to win the Preakness Stakes . That same year, his colt Mr. Mutt finished second in the Belmont Stakes . Fisher died September 7, 1954, of cancer at age 69, at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City. He lived at
560-540: The strip to a multitude of new readers across the United States. In 1911, Nestor Studios of New Jersey acquired the right to make Mutt and Jeff short film comedies, after which Fisher decided he could make more money controlling film production himself. In 1913, he created the Bud Fisher Film Corporation and signed a deal with American Pathé . They made 36 Mutt and Jeff short comedies in 1913, but production ceased for two years when Fisher's copyright
588-403: The strip until 1980 when George Breisacher took over for its final two years. On April 20, 1912, Fisher eloped with Pauline Margaret Welch, a vaudeville actress from Baltimore . They were divorced in 1917. On October 25, 1925, Fisher married Aedita de Beaumont, former wife of Count François de Beaumont. The couple parted after four weeks but never divorced. After Fisher's death, ownership of
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#1732855606865616-508: The suburban community of New Rochelle , a well-known art colony and home to a majority of the top commercial illustrators of the day. During the 1920s, the New Rochelle Art Association commissioned its best known artists to create a series of signs on major roadways to mark the borders, including "New Rochelle The Place To Come When a Feller Needs a Friend", which was created by Briggs representing one of his major comics, "When
644-674: The time at 383 Park Avenue . and was buried in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City . Clare Briggs Clare A. Briggs (August 5, 1875 – January 3, 1930) was an early American comic strip artist who rose to fame in 1904 with his strip A. Piker Clerk . Briggs was best known for his later comic strips When a Feller Needs a Friend , Ain't It a Grand and Glorious Feeling? , The Days of Real Sport , and Mr. and Mrs. Born in Reedsburg, Wisconsin , Briggs lived there until
672-485: Was 14 when his family relocated to Lincoln, Nebraska , where he lived until 1896 when he was 21. Life in the Midwest gave Briggs the source material for the small town Americana that he later depicted in his cartoons. While attending the University of Nebraska for two years, he studied drawing and stenography. Employment as a stenographer brought him six dollars a week when the work was available. One of his art instructors
700-414: Was an editor with Western Penman , where his first published drawings appeared. His mathematics teacher was Lieutenant John J. Pershing . "If ever a fellow needed a friend, I did in mathematics," said Briggs. "It happened that Lieutenant Pershing was my instructor, and I believe he will testify that it was easier to conquer Germany than to teach me math. One day he ordered me to the blackboard to demonstrate
728-404: Was challenged. Once the courts upheld Fisher's copyright claim, the comic strip was syndicated nationwide, and between 1916 and 1926, his film production company created another 277 Mutt and Jeff film productions. On these film projects, Fisher is almost exclusively credited as the writer, animator and director, although the majority of animation was by Raoul Barré and Charles Bowers , and often
756-569: Was joined by cartoonists Fisher and Fox. James J. Montague also contributed his column "More Truth than Poetry" and other articles. In early 1924, Wheeler became executive editor of the new weekly magazine Liberty , and served in that capacity until early 1926 while continuing to run the Bell Syndicate. In 1930, he became general manager of the North American Newspaper Alliance , established in 1922 by 50 major newspapers in
784-553: Was sent to Belgium as war correspondent and reported on early battlefield actions, as the Wheeler Syndicate became a comprehensive news collection and distribution operation. In 1916, it was purchased by the McClure Syndicate , the oldest and largest U.S. news and feature syndicate. Immediately upon the sale of the Wheeler Syndicate to McClure, Wheeler founded another, the Bell Syndicate which soon attracted Ring Lardner , and
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